 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE and I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Here with a wrap up for day one here on the exposition floor. Happy to have back on the program the guy that helped us at the top of the shower was Jim McHugh, who's the VP of UCS, Product Solution Marketing. Jim, welcome back. Thanks for having me. This is great. Well thank you for having us. Cisco, great booth here, right, I mean in the front of the show floor, great energy at this show. I mean, the booth's been going nonstop. I don't know what you guys are giving away, but it seems everybody's lining up for the hats and some of the other pieces. Hats, the secret to hats. Hats. What people won't do for hats. You know, I wonder, you've got a strong partnership with the Red Hat, you know, you guys have got to figure some cross promotion on the hat, because I feel, I mean, everybody loves the Red Hat hat, but I think I got this that same hat back in 2002. Yes. I mean, but you can't wear the Red Hat hat really out in public too much. Our hat you can. Excellent. All right, so I got a chance to walk the show floor, been talking to some people. We've had some great interviews here on the queue and you know, it's real clear that kind of the top topic of the week is cloud and especially, you know, Oracle came out with some really strong messages. So what's your opinion so far, what you've heard from Oracle and how does that jibe with kind of your view of the world? Well, there's some differences. The idea that there's only going to be two clouds in 10 years is probably not something that a lot of our partners are signing up for as they run some cloud activities. You know, and I personally believe there are going to be many different clouds that I'm subscribed to that because I think as we start maturing, there's going to be specialized clouds and the specialized clouds are going to be able to do things better than some of the generic clouds. So I don't know who the second cloud Larry was referring to but you know, is it Microsoft or Amazon in his opinion? That's TBD. But I wouldn't bet against some of the other things that are coming along. Yeah, you know, two clouds is tough for me to swallow too. I feel like I went to the show AWS re-invent. It felt pretty real. I saw Satya Nadella last week talking with Dell and you know, Microsoft, we ran the numbers on it. According to Wikibon's numbers, I mean, Oracle, they're a player. I mean, they're a top 10 cloud company but they're, you know, some people throw out, you know, what percentage of the cloud do they have? It's like, ah, 2% is Oracle. So it's pretty bold for you to come out when you're, you know, kind of 2% and say like, well, it's kind of moving out. It's their show, it's their time to be bold. That's the way I read it. Yeah. What's Cisco's position on the cloud? You know, Intercloud is, you know, truly there's a partnership to this ecosystem. There's some stuff you own. You know, how does Cisco position that in that ecosystem? So Cisco has actually been focusing on developing cloud services. But some of those will run. Some of those are partners will run. I mean, there's some really great cloud services. I mean, I don't know if we talked about it before but I was talking about it with some of your colleagues about dimension data as cloud and what they're doing, you know, and it's really cool solutions like around the Tour de France. Very particular, right? I mean, that's a specific solution that they can then build up from there. Major league baseball. They're service providers that are cloud. I don't know, but they sure offer to other people, right, NHL, Masters, March Madness, political campaigns. That's a service, right? Along the lines of Salesforce.com. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I try not to get hung up too much on the definitional piece. It's like, wait, you know, it's some service that's available globally usually and we'll be, might have some licensing issues for some people accessing it. But it's about, you know, enabling the business to do things that they couldn't do. It's agility, it's flexibility. It's, you know, the changes that we can make. But it's fundamentally different from the way I used to kind of, you know, consume and report the business on how we do things. If you have a generic based cloud or a cloud that's really great at running Oracle, that's not going to be the same cloud you're going to go to if you actually want to do real-time analytics. Where I actually want to be able to point an analytics engine at some data and be able to use it at a cloud base. It's a different cloud. It just is. And I actually think that that type of cloud is really going to take off. That I just want to actually do complete, you know, data science, but I don't actually want to run everything. And that's going to be a different sort of solution. Yeah, one of the things that's been kind of crystallizing in my mind is if you look at hybrid cloud, so much of it was like, I don't know if it's hybrid because people have lots of pieces of cloud. They've got SaaS application, they've got their different environment. Oracle's the definition of what the enterprise cloud is. It's pretty clear. Here's the Oracle stack. Here's what you can have in-house and here's what you can have in their enterprise. Public cloud, Microsoft has their hybrid view of things. AWS, very heavy in the public. You know, Cisco obviously from a networking standpoint plays kind of everywhere from a UCS standpoint. You know, where do you see kind of the rest of the data center portfolio fitting into the kind of that cloud landscape? So again, so we'll be looking at multiple ways of doing the cloud. We're heavy in the private cloud. We actually think, you know, whether you look at an example like Zynga or any company that does really well, they're going to want to bring it back and manage it locally. It just seems so. So I think there's going to be some, quite some time where that's actually going to keep playing out. So we talk about what's going to move to the cloud, quote unquote. And I think where some of the statistics we're hearing from Mark Herd and Larry yesterday were more focused on public cloud, a cloud run by someone else. And you know, I think that could be, but I will say it's yet to be proven. Any predictions that are 10 years out are always open to interpretation and you get to reinvent what you really meant five years from now. Yeah, Jim, when Cisco first got into the UCS business, everybody said, you know, they're crazy. The margins on servers are so thin and you know, UCS gets pretty good margins. Yeah. You look at the discussion in the marketplace today, I think people overhype a little bit some of the white box pieces. We see, you know, the server manufacturers, sure there's pressure from the ODMs, but many of them are holding strong. How does Cisco kind of maintain margins, you know, add value to customers and you know, not get squeezed down by some of the other competitors out there? Again, if you have a really strong customer focus, you realize that the cost of the data center is not the hardware. It's the software and it's the people time to manage. And if you can actually help companies manage that better, it's going to be so much more. Whether it's like saving the poor guys that used to have to get under the boards and run cables all the time, because our cabling is so much better to allowing you to spin up servers and make that much so much better. But I actually think it's a contrarian. I do not believe that we're going commodity. I actually think computes go in the other way. I think some of the things we're going to start seeing with the value of compute is going to go increase. You know, this whole throw it away, you know, it's the anti-Tesla model. Why would you actually want to throw out, you know, build a whole data center and let it fail and just throw all the stuff parts away? No, people are not going down that route. They want quality and they want to actually keep adding more compute capacity where they need it. Well, Jim, I think it might be counter-cultural what you're talking about, but, you know, the research that we've been doing kind of proves you right. When we dig into what Amazon's doing, it's not that they just put the same thing out there. They hyper-optimize for their applications and their environment. You know, when you look at, you know, Oracle, of course, with their cloud, they're going to really optimize what they're doing here. So, there is specialization. There is value in there. Heck, even, you know, Docker, I mean, virtualization was supposed to make servers, you know, not matter that much and people were like, well, Docker and containers are going to do that and more. DockerCon this year, what was the discussion? Oh, it was the networking and storage, you know, integrations that need to make sure that underneath it works because at the end of the day, it's not just that stuff doesn't just, you know, show up and work and I buy the cheapest stuff up there. It needs to, you know, that integration is super important, putting together that solution is super important. And there's a set of goals I have to give a shout out to the Solaris guys in the back because they were doing containers a lot longer than most people. I mean, I know it's the next generation of containers, but that's how our industry works, right? We keep cycling around, we keep doing it better the next time and we keep making advances. All right, so Jim, give me the final word on day one here at Oracle Open World, you know, what do you think we're going to be walking away from this show as kind of the talking points? Well, I think at all the cocktail parties tonight, everybody's going to be talking about cloud and the various different interpretations of cloud. A lot of customers are asking what's the right thing for them and I think there's going to be some good discussions on that, so that's what I'm looking for as we hit some of the dinners later tonight. What is the right cloud for you? What is the right solution for you and really walking with that with our customers? All right, well, Jim, thank you for coming back. I look forward to catching up with you more later this week. Lots more coverage here from the CUBE team. Go to SiliconANGLE.tv to catch all the videos. We have two more days of programming coming from here on the exhibition floor. Thanks for watching and we will see you next time.