 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante of wikibond.org and this is Silicon Angles coverage of NetApp's customer event. We were here last month at VMworld 2012 and NetApp is bust in customers from Oracle Open World. So it's a repeat of a month ago and we're here with theCUBE to cover it and we're here with Brendan Howe, who's an executive at NetApp, he's the vice president of products and solutions marketing at NetApp. Brendan, welcome. Thanks, it's great to be here Dave, I appreciate it. Yes, so we're here a month ago, it was such a great success. You guys had, I think about 1200 customers, I think you're expecting 400 or 500 today. VMworld and Oracle Open World, a little different vibe, aren't they? Yeah, they are. You know, I think there's a lot of things that play into that. I think some of the type of skills that are here are different and I think also just the different stages of thinking are different in terms of traditional type of approaches, new type of approaches, it's hard to generalize, but I think they're two very different shows. Well, and you guys bet the farm on virtualization generally and VMware specifically and of course it's a little different. Oracle Open World, you almost have to be here, I mean there's so many customers running their business on Oracle and so what's your relationship with Oracle? It's good. It's as good as it can be and we're trying to make it better every day. Our mission in life is to be best in class integration partners with the ecosystems that we sell into and as you pointed out, Oracle is such a tremendous force in the industry around enterprise applications and enterprise computing, you have to be part of that ecosystem. So we collaborate more closely with them, interoperability, support matrix type activities, integration opportunities, custom development projects, we've done all of that type of work. And I think it sort of ebbs and flows and where it goes from there depending on the business opportunity. It can sometimes go up through full go to market initiatives, but it need not have to and we opportunistically look at them as they do and manage them as they come. Well Larry doesn't call you out in his keynotes, I guess that's a good thing. So are you doing any specific integrations that are new with Oracle? Yeah, in fact we announced one just before the show here where we have our first ever integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager. It's our version 1.0 storage plugin and I think it's consistent with the type of approach that we've tried to do with VMware and Microsoft and a lot of others where customers that are using those types of platforms can take advantage of NetApp capability without having to have NetApp specific management tools. So our goal is to try to streamline that process and deeply integrate into those platforms to give customers a better experience with our product. So I like to juxtapose open world with VMworld only because they're both big tech shows. A lot of money is being spent in both of these environments. Now I want to talk about FlexPod because FlexPod plays so well in a VMware environment. You guys have had tremendous success here. What are you seeing with FlexPod in Oracle shops? Yeah, well I think FlexPod the concept is on everyone's top of mind. I always think of FlexPod as a methodology and a go-to-market approach as opposed to a product line or a part number and it's hard to argue with the initiatives around trying to put together more complete solutions. Everyone is asking for it, everyone's talking about it and FlexPod is in the middle of how NetApp is actually doing that. Our mission is to continue to drive solutions that are developed with best and breed components. That's what FlexPod is all about as a program, as a set of products throughout the company and our partners. If you think about Oracle's presence in the market, it goes without saying that they're a leader in best and breed type of product supplier in that market. It's a must-do with us. It's a question of how you actually assemble those solutions and then what you do on the go-to-market side like I mentioned earlier. How does it work with Oracle because they're obviously not embracing VMware. They want you to run on Oracle's VM, but a lot of customers don't want to virtualize on Oracle VM. How does that work from a positioning and go-to-market standpoint? I think, as I mentioned, it's about the technical enablement and the actual methodology in building solutions that's at the forefront of what FlexPod is trying to do. If you think about that aspect, you have Oracle apps that are running in VMware, hypervisors, you have Oracle apps that are running in RAC, you have Oracle products that are running in OVM, and we have opportunities to build solutions around all of them. We're doing that. I think where FlexPod itself goes beyond just the solution development is in go-to-market partner programs like we're doing with Cisco, for example, with FlexPod. I don't think we can take every one of these modules and solutions that far. We have to pick and choose what the business opportunities are and, frankly, what the partnering opportunities are. I think of the Oracle components of FlexPod as technical enablement, best-in-breed product integration, deep integration that ultimately accelerates customers rather than the vendor versus vendor comparisons. That's not really what it's all about. At the same time, the Cisco partnership works very well. Why is that and why is Cisco such a tight partner? I think it's about common goals and common initiatives and skill sets. We are of common mind around taking best-in-breed, complementary products and getting more out of putting them together. I just think there's good natural alignment with Cisco's server and networking capabilities and brand, frankly, to what NetApp brings to the table on the back end. As we've worked closer and tried to drive more activity with FlexPod, we've realized that there are a lot more go-to-market synergies than we first realized that we're able to leverage. Okay. I know one of the value propositions of FlexPod is its flexibility. I mean, it's not just VMware, but it's other hypervisors. You mentioned OVM before. You've got specific solutions for Oracle VM. You'll see a whole portfolio continue to unfold from NetApp and others around breadth of capability. You could expect to see all the major enterprise apps, all the major hypervisor layers, all the major native deployment models of what people are doing with Oracle apps. You hit upon a key point. I think the two keys of FlexPod are around the solution integration effort that we're doing and the flexibility angle of what FlexPod really brings. It's not our intent to have a one-size-fits-all model at all, including even how it's fulfilled. Our goal is really to build reference architectures that are flexible and deployable the way the customer wants to do it. So you think you can get Larry to drop some of those OVM Flex Pods inside of the Oracle public and private cloud? We hope so. You know, if our product is good enough, why not? Why not? Let's talk about Flash a little bit. I mean, it's a hot topic. You're hearing a lot here at the show from Oracle on Flash, and virtually everybody else on Flash. It's NetApp's posture, what's your angle on what's going on with Flash, specifically from a solution standpoint. Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think this little question that Flash is the disruption force that's amongst us now, it provides a value proposition that is new to the whole stack. And I think what we've been saying all along is that it affects every layer. It's not just a storage play. It's not just a server play. There's roles for the use of Flash technology throughout the entire solution stack. And that's the approach that we're taking. And as you know, we've added Flash plug-in modules to our controllers a long time ago and had tremendous uptake from that 15 or 16 petabytes of Flash, you know, more importantly accelerating exabytes of raw capacity. So that part's been obvious for a while. You know, SSDs are another angle to the storage side of it, and we've had great plays there. Most recently, we announced not only a host side software product, but also a host side partnering program to enable the linkage to the application running on the server side, which we haven't previously natively owned. And I think it's important linkage for us to bring the value of our back end to that front end while leveraging Flash capabilities throughout. So I think what you'd expect to see on the solution side is more front to back integration architecture to take advantage of Flash without necessarily having to own every step along the way. Great question. I remember thinking back a couple of years ago when you were helping NetApp think through its big data strategy, and it's starting to come together. From a solution standpoint, what are you doing there? We're doing a lot there. You know, I think one interesting thing about the FlexPod discussion is the methodology we've developed in the company to be solutions focused. And you're going to talk to a few others here tonight from NetApp that will go through that. But a solutions orientation and a pod orientation need not apply only to enterprise applications. That need not only apply to VMware or hypervisor environments in general. They can apply to anything because conceptually what you're trying to do is build tight integration of all the piece parts needed to give a customer a specific best-in-class solution. So why not with Hadoop? And why not for HPC or video solutions? You'd expect to see a lot of that stuff coming from us. All right, Brenda. Well, thanks for stopping by. Spending a little time with us. Have a great evening and good to see you again. Thank you. All right, take care. All right, everybody. Keep it right there. We'll be coming from AT&T Park. This is theCUBE. Right back.