 Okay, we're back, hello everybody, this is Dave Vellante from wikibond.org and this is siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage of Oracle Open World 2011. And we're here with Mikael Loftrand of Dell Force 10. Get some big news today. Mikael, welcome back, you're a CUBE alum. Thank you, thank you, I'm happy to be here. It's just a few weeks ago, right, at VMworld, I believe. VMworld, yeah, I participated in the panel discussion we had about this. Yeah, so a little different event here, wouldn't you say? Oh yeah, 45,000 people here, it's great. Yeah, it's good to be back in San Francisco. Yeah, no offense, I've had enough of Vegas this year. I don't know how you feel, but it's good to be in California. So tell us what you guys announced today. Let's start there with the 12C. Yeah, so actually yesterday Oracle announced and launched Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C. And as part of that, they also announced that the plug-in framework there, Oracle basically had a beta program and Dell Force 10 developed the plug-in framework, which basically gives us the ability to get greater visibility into the networking devices and the health of them. Yeah, so 12C is Oracle's sort of cloud management, enterprise management play. Is it fair to say Oracle was a little late to that game or playing catch-up, is that unfair? So looking at the announcement they had yesterday, I think that it looks like a very mature product. They have worked long time on perfecting it. So yes, they might be late in the game, but on the other hand, they are taking an enterprise class management platform into the cloud area. Yeah, and Oracle's not typically first, and it doesn't have to be, right? It's usually a medium speed follower. Yeah, well, they have a lot of customers, and I'm sure that they will be successful here as well. Worked for them so far, hasn't it? Oh yeah. So this project came out of Force 10, right? Your group, you were telling me? Yeah. Talk a little bit about that. How did it start? Talk a little bit about the Oracle relationship. So I guess that this happened a few months back when we talked to the enterprise manager team, and they started off the beta program. They wanted to be able to monitor the networking health. So for instance, if you have a problem with your application, it might be slow, some kind of issues that you might experience. And as part of that, obviously they want to see if there's a networking problem at the same time, right? So basically, we created this plugin so that directly embedded in Oracle Enterprise Manager, you can see if there's a health issue, a performance issue on the networking devices. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Force 10. Dell has made a bunch of strategic acquisitions over the last year and a half, two years, what exact timeframe is. But you know, just to name some, Equalogic, Compellent, Perot, Smaller10Garina, Force 10, really building out a robust enterprise stack, completely changing its strategy of being a reseller of other people's technologies. I mean, Dell really didn't own a ton of IP prior to these acquisitions, and now it owns a lot of IP. Where does Force 10 fit? Why did Dell go out and acquire Force 10? So I think that you're spot on with all the acquisitions, strategic acquisitions and so forth. If you look at the portfolio that Dell has with its storage products, its server products, and you also have some security products, if you add on to that, if you want to create complete solutions, you have to have networking in there as well. And that's basically where we fit in. Force 10 has always been very focused on high performance networking. And we have lately in the past, I don't know, two years, been focusing a lot on ease of management as well, with something called open automation. And that's basically where the plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12 fits in as well. It's part of the open automation framework from Force 10. So what are the big trends that you're seeing, Mikael, in networking? You guys are obviously all in an Ethernet. Ethernet, we think, is the king, although I'm not sure Larry Ellison agrees with it because he loves InfiniBand, but it's horses for courses. But where do you see as the big mega trends in the networking space? So I guess that it has to be around the management. So if you look at cloud networking, for instance, over the past few years, there has been a lot of kind of enabled all VLANs on every port and so forth. Lately we have seen the VMware and Citrix, for instance, with the virtual switching technologies coming. And moving forward, I guess that what you're gonna see is more automation on networking. So the trend, I believe, is that application requirements will drive the network configurations. So Force 10 is a company that's got, you do a lot of work at the top of Rack Switch, you've got core switches. There's a lot of talk in the industry about end-to-end visibility. And I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. The premise goes, something like this, that with virtualization becoming increasingly popular, the physical relationships become sort of hidden. It's a black box and end customers and maybe OEMs, you guys are an OEM, are looking to provide end-to-end visibility, management, security, and the like. Is that a valid premise, first of all? And secondly, is that Force 10 strategy? So great visibility into networking, yes. I think that that is definitely necessary. And as I mentioned about the manageability, if you're going to automate a lot more, you need a lot more information. So that basically means that the visibility needs to come from every switch into maybe a central database or data model where you can actually collaborate and get that information, see trends on the network, and react to different types of events. What about at the server level? Do you see Force 10 ever getting into that business? Essentially, we're at Q-Logic's booth, they do adapters. Could you see doing that? Or is that just a business that you want to leave to Intel and Broadcom? I don't know what the plans are from Dell's perspective yet. I think that this acquisition closed in August. But quite frankly, when it comes to the adapters, I think that that's going to be handled by other companies. You might see some kind of development from Force 10 in that area. Maybe some integration to facilitate that end-to-end visibility. So the premise of end-to-end visibility is, in your view, a correct one. How you get there remains to be seen. You've got to make a business case. And if I interpret it right, there may be a better business case for partnering and working with the guys who are doing the big volume right now. Yeah, we need to evaluate the options, basically. Yeah, okay. Let's talk about this, you know, the whole cloud trend. So there's a lot of discussion around new applications, big data, Web 2.0, scale out, and the implications on the network. Directly going to access the servers and what many are called flattening of the network. Can you talk about that a little bit? Is that a customer imperative? Is it an analyst, you know, buzz phrase? Is that real? From a lot of the discussions I had with customers, flattening out the networks basically means that you get better performance, lower latency. That's what they want to achieve. Also, you have the V-motion type activities that makes it easier when you have flat networks. So it's definitely a trend. What will happen there, I think that is yet to be seen. You mentioned management as the big trend. Really the overarching trend. You didn't mention virtualization. I was somewhat surprised at that. I mean, obviously, virtualization is huge trend. You wouldn't debate that, I'm sure. My question is, what are you seeing in Oracle, the Oracle base with regard to, or your Oracle customers with regard to virtualization? Where are they going? Is it a mix? Is it VMware? Is it, you know, Hyper-VM? I mean, everybody's doing VMware. OVM, Oracle's virtualization. What are you seeing as far as virtualization adoption? Specifically in Oracle. Specifically in Oracle? Yes. So I would assume that when it comes to Oracle, I can't speak for Oracle, of course. Yeah, I mean, within your Oracle, you know, within your custom, Dell's customer base for those customers that, or even the Force 10, because you're new, for those customers that happen to be Oracle customers, what are you seeing there? Is there as much enthusiasm for virtualization as there is in other parts of your customers? Absolutely, virtualization is growing, definitely. It has been around for years. It's mature. OVM is obviously improving. We've seen that with the announcements they have made now. So definitely a trend that is going to continue. Okay, good. Well, Mikhail, I know you're busy. I appreciate you coming by theCUBE and sharing some of your perspectives with us. It was great to see you again. Great to see you again. Good luck with everything. Congratulations on the announcement. And thank you. We're going to bring in my colleague, John Furrier, and appreciate you stopping by. Thank you very much.