 Okay, we're back live here at Oracle OpenWorld Day 3. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events where the action is. Extract the signal from the noise. And the action this week is at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, California. They're shutting the streets down. 50,000 people. Oracle making big moves in the cloud and big data. Again, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joining with my co-host. Hi, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. And we're here with Sam Lucido, who's the owner of the Oracle OpenWorld Day 3. And we're here with Sam Lucido, who's the Oracle Global Functional Leader at EMC. And we're going to talk to Sam about virtualization, a topic that he knows a lot about. And virtualization in Oracle is a topic that we've written a lot about on Wikibon. We've covered on SiliconANGLE. It's a very important topic for Oracle users. So, Sam, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thank you very much. I appreciate you guys having me back. Yes, so you're hearing a lot about cloud this week. You're not hearing a lot about virtualization specifically. Oracle doesn't really push publicly its OVM. We've written a lot that it's an inferior product. VMware, we think, is the gold standard there. Microsoft has made some good moves in Hyper-V to close the gap with Windows Server 12. But clearly, VMware has the top spot in the mantle. Oracle has decided to compete in a different way. Cloud, public cloud, putting everything into the Oracle RedStack. Give us an update on virtualization within the Oracle environment. What you guys are seeing, what you're hearing from customers, and what you're recommending. Sure, absolutely. You know, these days, I would have to say that the hypervisor wars are over. Interestingly enough, I think VMware has won that war. So, when I talk to customers about OVM or VMware at the hypervisor layer, we move the discussion on very quickly away from the hypervisor into the feature functionality that comes with VMware, the new capabilities, like v-fabric data director, for example, where it's the capability to provision Oracle databases from a gold copy automatically, gets you a little bit closer to that database as a service goal that a lot of companies do have. So, what I'm really seeing in terms of virtualization, as it relates to VMware, is the trend of building up the application stacks in terms of functionality that really adds a lot of value to what customers are trying to do. So, what's the latest on Oracle's posture? I'd love to get your take on it. I'd love to share with you our opinion. We went out, as you know, some time ago and did a study looking at Oracle and looking at customers virtualizing, and there was clear indication that Oracle was, you know, fighting it, you know, specifically when it was VMware. It was OVM, that's fine, but nobody was doing OVM. So, there was some friction, but virtually all the customers that we talked to that had chosen to virtualize the Oracle applications had good experience with them, but there was still concerns about, you know, that last mile, if you will. So, what are you seeing? That's interesting you mentioned that, because you know what, the number one concern is no longer technical, okay? When I talk to most of my customers, it's all about the licensing and support and certification issues, right? So, you know, that's how we advance our discussions into features and functionality, but every customer has to accomplish that goal of getting over the licensing and support issues as it relates to Oracle. Now, we have a lot of great partnerships with VMware. We've also been working quite closely with another company called Iquate, and Iquate has a product out there called IQ Sonar, which is able to do agentless reach out to Oracle databases to figure out what a customer's Oracle licensing footprint is, and then they can compare their entitlements versus their deployments. That erases the entire issue around licensing because a customer has a single pane of glass now where they can say, if I re-architect from my physical world to my virtual world, and I do it intelligently, then I have no licensing impact, and I'll be supported. What's the latest on vCenter and vFabric relative to Oracle in the VM world? Because that's a hot area. People talk about that a lot in configuring that. Any updates there? You know, I'd really like to see vCenter get a little bit more Oracle-related functionality myself. I think we took a great step forward with the vFabric data director. The fact that it can actually modify those Oracle configuration files in the database and bring up the database automatically is a huge step forward. I have been talking with VMware about the possibility of embedding some of that native functionality with vFabric data director into the base product, like vSphere, so that any customer who's using vSphere will have some Oracle-related functionality at their fingertips, essentially. So I do see that trend building up into the stack, particularly the Oracle stack, but I think there's a lot more opportunity out there for it. We're by no way, you know, or stretch the imagination close to where we could be. So talk about virtualization relatives. We've been talking a lot about relative to BI. We've talked a lot about business intelligence. How does this impact there? And obviously Oracle's showing a lot of demos in that area. Can you comment on just what's going on in that neck of the woods? Yeah, it relates to business intelligence and virtualization, right? Yeah. Yeah, you know, business intelligence, very large databases. You know, that's one of the last lines of virtualization that people go through. Generally speaking, the smaller production databases are a low-hanging fruit. It's now those big BI databases that people are somewhat still hesitant on. But, you know, we do find a lot of customers actually moving forward to that. I was at a great session at VMworld where they were talking about the new storage methodology that's going to probably come out in a year or two as it relates to VMware. Instead of using traditional lungs, virtual volumes are going to replace that. And then that's the capability for VMware to create pools of cash to assist business intelligence systems in doing that data analytics very, very quickly. So I think VMware, interestingly enough, is really going to grow more and more into the storage stack and enable those very large systems to perform very well. Is virtualizing Oracle on VMware and EMC a product issue or more awareness issue? Is it more education? You know, I think it's more of an awareness issue, more of an educational issue. Listen, as I said, the hypervisor is well established. There's no problems with it. It's all about talking to the customers and getting them over to some of that FUD that's out there to be honest with you. What kind of FUD are you talking about? Well, you know, a lot of customers think that they're going to have to pay a lot of money if they virtualize an Oracle database, whether it's a BI production database. But, hey, have you? Oracle's done a good job with that. Yeah, Oracle's done a very good job of that, right? FUD, putting FUD, I mean. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I agree 100%. You know, I saw a slide from Oracle that showed one virtual machine in a pool of virtual machines, and they had some huge amount of millions of dollars attached to licensing just that one machine. It couldn't be farther from this. So basically, it's an awareness issue. It's just got to get out of that noise and create some signal around it. That's basically what you're saying. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, and you know, I think we all know the stories that Oracle sort of the posturing and when they found out you're going to bring in VMware or some other virtualization solution, we had a customer on from ATD yesterday. And he said, look, all we did is we sat down with Oracle. It wasn't contentious. It wasn't antagonistic. He said, look, that's what we want to do. We want your help. Here's why we want your help. We want to succeed. And he said, hey, Oracle's been fabulous. We also know we found that when we talked to some people in the pharmaceutical industry that Oracle will actually certify in certain industries. Now, you've got to pay for it. That's right. It's clear that technology works. There's no question about that. Absolutely agree. You know, Oracle's on-demand business, 6,000 servers plus out there, all of its virtualized. Now, yes, it is using OVM, but OVM is a beer metal hypervisor just like VMware. So it's definitely Oracle's embraced virtualization. I've been at those customers too, and we've worked very well with Oracle and getting customers on VMware as well. And I think Oracle's, I love your take on this. I think Oracle's strategy is very smart there. I think essentially you're right. They realize, hey, we lost the hypervisor war, so we got to try to change the game that we can play that in the cloud. We can bury it. Nobody needs to know. It's a service. This is the SLA. Boom. And basically VMware doesn't participate in that. So that's smart by Oracle, and they're going to get their fair share. But so many other customers want to be managing their own infrastructure. Right. Yeah. You know, that's absolutely right. And that's why I think products like Vfabric Data Director give the DVAs a little bit more ownership in the virtualization arena in infrastructure. Also, with products like EMC Prosphere, which allows you to manage the storage from both a virtual and physical level and see into the database at the same time. Very important in giving the DVAs the ownership that they want. So talk about, I want to get your perspective here because it's an area that's growing very fast and just your personal perspective as an industry participant in virtualization, software defined networking, network virtualization. Obviously, that's a path towards the software defined data center. But what's your take on network virtualization? You know, it's kind of interesting. And I'm not a person who homes in a lot on networking, but I do see VMware doing a lot in terms of networking. In particular, I talk about networking as it relates to those layer two and layer three considerations in terms of virtualization. So for example, if you're doing like a extended Oracle RAC configuration over our data centers using EMC Bplex, you can apply virtualization to that and you could definitely use VMware virtualization and networking to accomplish some of those goals. What's your take on CEDIS and the big data play within virtualization? VMware made an acquisition recently of CEDIS. People think that it's related to the big data play, basically big data as a service on top of the infrastructure. What do you see there? And what are customers demanding? You know, a lot of my customers are demanding the fact that they want to virtualize everything and it's those very large databases and acquisitions like that that make it possible. You know, if we were talking two years ago, I would say it's been a challenge to get people to virtualize, but now the discussion has definitely turned. Some of those acquisitions that VMware is making have been very good acquisitions. I think that gets us over those milestones of people virtualizing very large databases. Sam, I wonder if I can ask you to go back to the cloud for a second. So it's very clear that EMC and VMware's strategy and its partners, take a partner approach, take the ecosystem approach. One of the things that people often mention, Joe Tucci has mentioned this as well, is the advantage Amazon has in Google and others is that their cloud is homogeneous. That's right. They got the same everything. It's the stack that's their internally defined stack to their standards and it just works. So it makes sense that VMware and its partners would say, okay, let's take our private cloud environment and try to replicate that in the public cloud environment so we can move data, move apps, bring the edicts of policy and privacy and governance from internal to external. Oracle is now taking a similar approach, all Oracle all the time, but it's really not partner friendly in that regard. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Maybe some of the advantages and disadvantages of your approach. You know, absolutely. I see a big trend out there and the trend is this, being able to manage multiple cloud types with one interface. So let's talk about that. For example, if you purchase VMware and you standardize on VMware, but you have some Hyper-V in there, right? Do you really want to separate an interface to manage some of that Hyper-V or what you put in the public cloud? So I see a really trend in companies trying to be all-encompassing and managing all the virtualization that they have both in the private cloud and the public cloud. Now, do I think they're anywhere close to being at that point? I think we've made some great strides, but I think we have a lot farther to go in terms of that. But I think interestingly enough, VMware and some of the discussions I had, they're really trending towards that direction of being able to manage multiple enterprise engines, virtual engines, I should say, under one framework and that's being VMware. What are you seeing with regard to the hybrid cloud that I'll define as the federated applications, not just having some public cloud and some private cloud, but really federated applications? Are you seeing uptake there? Yeah, I actually am. A lot of customers are considering I'm putting some of those smaller servers out there in the public cloud and offloading some of that from their data center, and the public cloud makes a perfect opportunity for customers to do that. So it's all about architecting that solution and walking through how customers might do it, but there's definitely an interest in the public cloud right now. I want to ask you about backup. So virtualization obviously stresses the whole backup process. We talk about that a lot with VMware customers. How is virtualization changing how Oracle customers are thinking about backup and data protection? Well, you know, I think backup's still a very big concern of Oracle customers, but you know, I think the biggest trend that I'm seeing right now is that active, active capability that's come out with EMC Vplex. The resiliency with the Vplex Metro design of being able to do simultaneous access of a database across two data centers. I'm really seeing a lot of interest in that. Now you still need backup, so don't get me wrong. For example, recover point to a third site in terms of backup or using data domain to a third site in terms of backup, but a lot of customers, you know, have independent auditors coming in and for a 24-hour period of unplanned outage that can represent millions of dollars these days to a lot of our big accounts, right? So now it's the conversation around not how we back it up, it's how we keep it up, right? And it's that EMC Vplex, that resiliency across data centers that really has a lot of the customer interest. I wonder if I could follow up on that. As you virtualize servers in Oracle environments, you've now got less physical resources to use to complete your backup jobs. And backup, as we know, is a compute-intensive application. That's right. Are you seeing that people, as a result of virtualizing, are risk missing their backup windows and have to re-architect their backup processes? And what do you see there? What are you recommending there? So that's a good point. I mean, you're absolutely right. What I see there is companies trying to address that particular challenge. Okay, so let me give you a very good example. With data domain, you have DD Boost, right? And with DD Boost, you could run that directly on the Oracle production server. It dedupes on the server so that you're not sending nearly as much over the network to the data domain device, right? So the idea of being able to build into the backup, that type of functionality, where you'll offload a lot of the work so that you're not stressing the infrastructure, is one of the ways that I'm really seeing backup companies address that particular challenge. Excellent. All right, Sam Lucido. Really appreciate you coming by the Cube and sharing with your thoughts on this deep dive and virtualization. Guys, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me back again. Okay, all right. We'll be right back here at Oracle Open World Live Coverage. We've got Pauline Nist coming on the Cube in a few moments, a few hours. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv. We'll be right back with our next guest in a short break.