 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. We're live at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. I'm with wikibon.org, and this is our spotlight on the High Performance Data Center. I'm here with Jason Kudzafis from EMC, who's the Global Alliance Lead with Oracle. Jason, welcome. Thank you. It's good to have you here. It's good to see you on theCUBE again. OpenWorld, big event, huge. I mean, basically shut down a big part of San Francisco. That's true. The mayor was here the other day. I live here now, so I felt a disruption, but it's great. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's good to be back in Moscone. I'm happy to be here. You know, Las Vegas is fine, but seven, eight, nine, 10 times a year is just a bit too much. I wouldn't know anything about that one. So a lot of shows this year in Las Vegas, so. Yes. But good event. We've had a lot of traffic here. Great audience, so let's get right into it. I mean, what's happening? EMC, Oracle, you guys, IDC announced today, or I guess recently, you guys put out a press release that EMC is number one in Oracle environments. Correct. Not much shocked. I mean, you're number one in a lot of environments, so when you cut the data, it's not surprising. You're probably more number one in Oracle than you are even in some other areas because it's the high volume transaction processing space. Correct. That you're so much known for, right? But what else is going on with Oracle? Things have changed a little bit over the last couple of years. We're almost two years into the sun acquisition, so you guys have become more frenemies. Correct. Very common today, yes. So it's the whole nature of the industry, so talk a little bit about what that relationship is like and where you fight and where you're friends. Sure, yeah. And this is an interesting week for us. This is our 15th consecutive Oracle Open World. 15th. 15th. And mine as well. And this is an interesting week for us. We delivered a keynote address on Monday and it had been 10 years since we were the keynote presenter here and a lot's changed to your point in those last 10 years. And one of the biggest changes is that Oracle obviously has expanded their product portfolio, moving from a software provider into the hardware and infrastructure space. EMC's expanded our portfolio into the software space with many of our acquisitions, VMware, Documentum, and others. And today there is definitely overlap in our technology portfolios. One thing that's remained constant is the just massive amount of joint customers that we have. We have over 70,000 customers together. And our focus is absolutely keeping their interests at heart, understanding what they're trying to do, what their challenges are, and building solutions to address those. And today that really consists primarily of how do we optimize the Oracle software that they have, applications, databases, and middleware with the EMC infrastructure. The new big theme within that is obviously virtualization. A lot of customers are looking at how do we incorporate virtualization on the server level as well as storage and enhance some of the Oracle investments that they've made. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you've heard Larry Ellison say, hey, we want to sell our own IP, period. Yes. EMC and Oracle are very much alike in that regard. That's true. EMC wants to sell its own IP. Absolutely. And so a lot of times when an acquisition like SANA is made, you certainly understand what's happening in corporate. Larry's statement is clear. But in the field, things are different. Absolutely. Great point. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, no question. We both set our corporate directions. We both set our corporate strategy. You listen to our CEO's paint vision and vision's very important. When we get down to the field level and we're in front of a customer, a lot of it comes down to what's their particular business challenge and what are they trying to accomplish and how can we help them do that? And what we've always fallen back upon is, let's let the customer choose. Let's give them the ability to choose the direction they want to go. That direction could be moving more towards an Oracle infrastructure and Oracle hardware. It could be moving more towards an EMC software environment. We build solutions at EMC to give them the flexibility to do that. So they can either take their existing environments and plug new technologies into it, like new backup, new virtualization, new storage hardware, or build prepackaged offerings that allow them to go in that direction as well. But we maintain a very healthy relationship with the Oracle Salesforce. We're active in the Oracle technology centers that are based all over the United States. We have joint service centers together where we actually integrate our cooperative support. And right now the field, depending on where you are and in particular account, works together in some instances and other instances we compete. Yeah, so that was my other question. The field is one and then the other is you've got to do certain technical integrations. Yes. Has that changed? Yes and no. On the one level, since what hasn't changed is we have a very strong engineering integration relationship with Oracle. We have engineers focused on Oracle. We have people that meet with Oracle every week. And we have several great engineering projects with Oracle. The number of them is fewer. So there's less than there were in the 90s, or maybe even the early 2000s. But the ones we have are really impactful and deep and there's some good examples. Yeah, so obviously everybody, you can't be here and not get a dose of exa-mega. Exa-logic, exadata, yes. And so, but to Oracle's credit, the technologies that they're using, whether it's flash or columnar compression, these aren't radically new technologies. They've just done a good job packaging and a phenomenal job of marketing it. How do you guys respond to something like that? What's very clear, the strategy is to integrate everything and push it in one box. It's alluring to customers. Sure. You can't keep doing the same thing that you always do when a big mega trend like that comes down. How have you responded to that trend and what are you seeing? Yeah, so we've had two responses. The first is we've maintained focus on making our infrastructure as integrated to the Oracle software as possible. So the Oracle database apps, middleware, high performance, backup recovery, provisioning, replication, all of the bread and butter capabilities, every Oracle customer struggles with, we maintain that integration as tight as possible. To your point, some customers do want a pre-packaged configuration. They want to have less moving parts, they want to have less steps to configure and deploy, and they want it bundled into a package. One of the offerings we have is a coalition with VMware and Cisco called VCE. And we can actually package the operating system virtualization server and network and storage into a configuration and deliver that to an Oracle customer, for example. But the difference, I think, between that strategy and Oracle's is that we allow open choice of what application you'd want to run on that appliance today. So if you look at Exadata, for example, it's primarily designed for Oracle workloads. Many customers run Microsoft, they run SAP, they run other homegrown applications. The VBlock architecture that we approach is designed to give them standardization and fast implementation, but open flexibility of the apps that they want to use today or tomorrow. Yeah, so that's, I think, a very good approach. I mean, the world is heterogeneous. Oracle doesn't necessarily see it that way. And yeah, to their credit, they're doing very well. So you mentioned backup. Backup's an area that is obviously growing. You see data that there's so much more copies and non-production data than there is production data. So it's been a big opportunity. You made a big data domain acquisition. You've got a rich portfolio there with Avamar and NetWorker. Yes. It's finally coming together. Yes. In I think a more logical way than I've seen in years at EMC, talk about the backup opportunity in Oracle. What are you seeing there in any integrations that you're doing? It's tremendous. I mean, one of the things that's constant about Oracle Information, Oracle Apps, Oracle Databases is they grow. And we've seen this at EMC. We're one of the largest Oracle customers in the world. We run over 70 application modules, over 50 database grids, and we run most of our business on Oracle. And once we've implemented it, those databases grow every year. And backing them up is a requirement. We have to back them up. And if without advanced backup capabilities, we would be backing up that same data every day. And our backup storage would grow linearly and recovering that data would be very difficult because you're sifting through large amounts of data that you've backed up repeatedly. So one of the key things that we've implemented with Oracle and built solutions around is the concept of deduplication. So how do we look at data that we're backing up as we're backing it up and compare it to data we've already backed up and not back up the same data twice? So how do we actually deduplicate that data before it gets to the backup storage whether that's tapered disk? And over time, reduce the amount of data that we're backing up every day on a daily basis. That helps drive down storage cost and that's a big deal for a lot of customers. A bigger benefit is the speed to recover the data should you have an outage. Because you're deduplicating, you're backing up less data over time. You can actually recover more quickly. So the combination of using Oracle Recovery Manager, Oracle RMAN, the backup technology for the Oracle DBA, we operate that seamlessly with EMC data domain for example as the backup target for the Oracle RMAN backup. And so we can allow them to back it up faster, recover it in less time and with less storage. I wanted to touch on big data, Jason. Oracle threw its hat in the ring. I had to give EMC marketing credit. Cloud meets big data. We had Jeremy on back at 2010 EMC World and he said, I'm all about messaging. That's my big thing. Cloud meets big data was good messaging and now you're seeing everybody sort of hop on that bandwagon. To your credit, I think EMC was first at that intersection and I have to say John Furrier was really first but any rate, parallel universe I guess. But so what are your thoughts on that? Oracle throws its hat in the ring, confirmation that the messaging is right. What do you make of the whole big data space generally in Oracle LAN specifically? Yeah, I mean it's similar to what we saw with cloud. So Oracle I think was about a year or so behind on the cloud message. At least. And now big data so I think what you're going to see is all of us embracing these terms that our customers are struggling with and so forth. Big data for us involves data that, traditionally with Oracle we focus on structured data. So we've looked at relational databases like Oracle 11G, structured data management. Big data to us is this new class of applications in many cases that are semi-structured or unstructured. Extremely large amounts of data that we cannot process through traditional infrastructure we've used for example for an Oracle database environment. So you've seen EMC acquire new technologies. For example, Icelon, Green Plum, technologies that look at the infrastructure from a different level better able to handle these large volumes of information. Now big data isn't necessarily not related to Oracle. I'll give you an example. So EMC inside our own IT organization runs a very large Oracle data warehouse. We have a 15 terabyte Oracle data warehouse on Oracle 11G RAC and Linux and on EMC storage and it's gone very well for us for many, many years. We had certain analytics though that for our customer service, for our executives we just could not run in enough time to get those dashboards rendered and we were compiling batch reports and it was taking days to do this. So you went out and bought a company? Yeah, we acquired Green Plum and put it next to that data warehouse and we extracted the Oracle data into the Green Plum warehouse. So we essentially have Oracle and big data side by side. Yeah, so that's not Oracle's forte, fast loading. That really is Green Plum's strength. So that, Gelsing, actually showed that slide with a Duke, Green Plum, Oracle. Yes. An interesting way to see the world of Oracle, I'm sure sees it differently with Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. Yes. But it's a legitimate use case and we've seen it a number of times. T-Mobile as an example is a customer that we interviewed and there were a couple others that I can't think of exactly which ones, but they were doing just that and the value proposition was time to value. Yes. You know, compressing the time to... We literally saw some of our queries go from, you know, 13X faster. Our data loads went from six days to 30 minutes by putting in this architecture. So we had a good solution before but we looked at big data analytics and how do we do this in less time? We tried a new architecture and the results were really unbelievable. Yeah, nice. All right, Jason, well, thanks very much for coming inside theCUBE, sharing your thoughts on Oracle Open World. I had no idea, it's 15 in a row for you. That's amazing. 15 in a row, we'll see you next year. That beats my or my Comdex records, the old Comdex days, but thanks very much. Thank you.