 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host on this segment is Brian Gracely and Brian and I are with wikibond.com. We're excited to bring theCUBE to Oracle OpenWorld here on the show floor, going through lots of the ecosystem discussions, how infrastructure is changing, and of course infrastructure delivers up to the applications which Oracle has a lot of big ones. Joining us on theCUBE for the first time is Eric Stofer, who is the director of the store-wise business line with IBM. Eric, thanks for joining us on the program. Thanks, glad to be here, glad to be here. So Eric, first time in the program, tell us a little bit about your role inside IBM, how long you've been there and what's your group do? Well, I am what we call ourselves the business line owner. So I own the P&L for the store-wise product family, which includes the spectrum virtualized software to find storage. And then I have a special role, those extra things as assigned, where I'm the lead exec in liaison with Cisco on the versus stack offering. All right, so we're going to talk plenty about Cisco I think, but where does that product line fit kind of with the IBM storage portfolio? Well, it's really the bulk of, I would say the revenue right in the mid-range and the store-wise family has several. I call it, you can call it little bear, mama bear, bigger bear, whatever, but we span from very small to very large. So in price band terminology, you can get something almost down to price band two, but certainly price band three all the way up into price band seven. And the good news is, we use the same software, spectrum virtualized, to drive all of those appliances. So they all behave pretty much the same way. Yeah, so Eric, those of us that watch the storage market, we think back, originally it was called kind of storage virtualization. Some of those solutions kind of migrated into what's now software defined storage. The value's always been really the software driving things, but can you kind of tease out for us, what are you talking about with customers and what makes this different? Well, one of the key things is, as you change your hardware technology, you can get the same software value on that hardware technology. And even as you begin to have hardware technology age, it didn't have brand new capabilities. But again, as you virtualize it with this software, you're then bringing greater value, whether it's compression, whether it's thin provisioning, whether it's remote copying, flash copies. And as an example, we just now announced, and we'll deliver next month, encryption for externally virtualized. So clients who want encryption, but didn't want to pay for self-encrypting drives, they can now get software encryption for all that investment they've made in the past. Yeah, so the storage industry, some guys people will say, well, it moves a little bit slow. Right now, there is so much going on. I mean, you've got all flash, you've got software defined, you've got cloud storage, lots of decisions for customers. How do you help guide them through what's the best fit? Where should they be thinking for a couple of years ahead in terms of architecture? Walk us through that process. Well, one of the things I like to impress upon a client is consistency of user experience. So they don't have to retrain their staff. And if they can use a platform like Storewise or Spectrum Virtualize as a consolidation platform, then they can build a scale once and take it forward as their business evolves. And then they might have different needs. They might want to go all flash. They might want to go, you know, cheap and deep. They might want, you know, but as long as they've invested in a platform that's very consistent, their skills basically can transport themselves to new capabilities and new technologies. I think, you know, it's not just about protecting investment of hard work, protecting investment of their intellectual capital and their staff. Because today, one of the things that my clients say is, hey, I have a hard time finding qualified staff and the turnover's pretty high. Right. And I got to imagine a big piece of that is you start them in the path of consistency of operation. It's consistency of process. And then VersaStack sort of fits right in there. It's, you know, take a lot of that friction of trying to integrate those silos together. Talk about, when you talk to customers, because silos have always been in IT, how do they start to think about merging those together in a VersaStack platform? Well, VersaStack, the good thing is, you know, some of the real secret sauce is UCS director and UCS manager. And they've done a tremendous, you know, my hat's off to some of the Cisco engineers that, you know, number one, we have a great set of APIs and CLIs on the store-wise platform and they integrated that in. So you can create workflows that do that whole integration, networking, compute storage, create workflows that are actually assigned out to people that don't have, you know, storage administrator skills and they don't have storage administration authority. So you can have a DBA. And I was just over in the theater here next door, you know, telling the DBAs, listen, you don't have to wait three days for your storage administrator to provision your storage. Self-service, let them go fast. Let them solve this problem straight. So Eric, you know, IBM's one of the best at balancing what kind of we call co-opetition. I think first time I heard the term co-opetition, it was in context to IBM. I think back, you know, when Cisco got into the server business, it was like, oh, ripple effect. IBM did some networking. IBM got out of the x86 business. So, you know, interesting relationship. Talk a little bit about the partnership, how you're working together. And especially, you know, it wasn't surprising to me but, you know, kind of the new stack solution that you build together. Yeah, you know, we've had, I think, I think the Cisco relationship is at least 13 years old. And we've, you know, we've resold their fiber channel gear for quite some time. Great GTS practice around networking, whether it's, you know, IP networking or fiber channel networking. But I think when we, IBM divested the system X business, it gave the storage business an opportunity to sort of stretch ourselves a little bit where we might have been a little bit more encumbered. And it just made a lot of sense to join up with Cisco. And so, so far, so good. I mean, it's really been great. It's kind of given us a shot in the arm. The Cisco guys really love our solution. You know, they, you know, the engineers there believe strongly and store-wise. Eric, any proof points you could share? I know the versus stacks are relatively new, but, you know, Cisco's got a couple dozen partners in the storage space. Of course, everything they've done with VBlock, with NetApp, with FlexPod, you know, on and on. I wrote an article I got over a dozen of them that I think they're doing. So what differentiates the IBM Cisco relationship and where are you with kind of the customer adoption of versus stack? Well, I think one of the visions that both of us had was it's not just about adding storage, another storage platform to UCS. So what we've done, even just recently, is we've done a red book on Spectrum Protect, which is our backup solution on top of versus stack. We've done PureApp. So PureApp is sort of the key orchestration guts of WebSphere, right? So they tested and published a paper on PureApp on versus stack. So taking a broader view of what Cisco and IBM can do together is really the vision. It's not, again, not just another storage solution, working with our GTS brethren, you know, because they've got a great practice, those kinds of things. You know, we'll continue to branch out. In fact, it's not branded versus stack, but we did a big data, you know, big insights, and we did a big CVD with UCS. So that's kind of a way to think about the Alliance blossoming. So Cisco's been in the server business for quite a while now, they're doing very, very well. But the name Cisco and Servers, if you went into most IBM customers might not click with them. What surprised you about the partnership in terms of Cisco's knowledge of servers and applications that are helping you go, you know, I can talk about best of breed, I can make the customer feel comfortable. Their solutions engineering organization, I think is the one thing that kind of brings that to home because they're focused on specific workloads, specific use cases, let's drive down to a given industry, a given application, let's engineer the solution, let's test it. All the building blocks are the same, but if we can do some best practices around configuration and things like that, whether it's SAP, whether it's Oracle, whether it's DB2, whether it's Epic, you name it. So it's really a level of expertise and advanced capabilities. Customers feel comfortable at this point, it's never a barrier. Absolutely, and the interesting thing is the CVD process, I call it a recipe. Some of them are more advanced than others. Partners and clients, when they get comfortable using the recipe, then they feel comfortable and confident enough to branch out, change a few ingredients, right? I mean, I use that cooking analogy because it seems to fit very well. Once they have a few recipes that they're very confident in, they can create their own recipes, right? So they don't have to necessarily be tied right in exactly to a CVD, but the proof point is there. And it's similar to what we've done in IBM with Redbooks over many, many years as well. Sure. Eric, can you talk a little bit about how Oracle Solutions fit into the solution either store-wise alone or in the home versus stack? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the best examples is the Flash Systems V9000, the CVD that we just delivered jointly with Oracle, or with Cisco. That solution is a great accelerator for Oracle workloads. I mean, IBM and Oracle have been on stage together talking about how the Flash Systems V9000 does such a tremendous acceleration of certain workloads. We even have some cases where they're batch workloads on top of Oracle, or they're online workloads. And, you know, I mean, even a client testimonial about 45 times improvement performance. So those are the kinds of things that are value we can bring. Now it's Cisco, IBM, and Oracle. Cisco's been sort of defining some of this software-defined networking space with their ACI architecture. You talked about software-defined storage. How well do customers understand that concept and what's the adoption rate you're seeing around this software-defined concept in the data center? I think it's spotty, quite frankly. There are some clients who want to roll your own, so to speak. They have the skills, and they're focused on cost. They love the software capability that we have, and they're willing to do that. I talk to mid-sized clients a lot of times, and they say, I like the idea of an appliance. You guys do the integration. So I may not really rush headlong into software-defined. So I think the jury is still out. In terms of a strategy, absolutely the right strategy. Whether it's software-defined networking, software-defined compute, software-defined storage, I really truly believe that. But there will be a different adoption rates, depending on the skill level and what's really important to that given client. You know? So, Eric, a lot of customers here. I'm really impressed looking around the show floor. They walk around. The booth presentation seemed to have full seats, and it's hopefully not just that they're getting a giveaway or getting entered in something. If you haven't had a chance to talk to some users here, what are the conversations you have? What are some of the big questions that they're asking you? What's top of mind? I think especially because we're here primarily because of VersaStack, there's still not a great deal of awareness. We have done a good job, we thought, driving awareness around VersaStack. And yet, I still find that clients are going, oh, okay, I know IBM Storage. I know UCS. Oh, you guys put this together. Oh, great. I think that's probably the thing that we're working on the most. Our partners jointly are very well-enabled now, and we focus very well on that. And now we're starting to really move it into the clients. I mean, we've got, I mean, I had a dozen references on one slide just a little bit ago, but we've probably got a dozen references and we've got over a hundred clients. So, and I said, we're now on every continent, we've got a VersaStack on every continent now except Antarctica. So there's a lot of talk about cloud this week. I mean, you could argue this has become Oracle Cloud World, it's supposed to open world. IBM has made a lot of investments around cloud as well. Acquisitions, expanding out SoftLayer, Watson, all those. What are your customers talking about? Just cloud in general, what's their comfort level? What's their thinking in terms of strategy? Where does cloud fit into your customer space? Again, I think it's very mixed, depending on the client's focus and their skill set, and their sophistication, their focus on cost. But one of the things that we see most is deploying a private cloud to begin with. And VersaStack is a great toe in the water in terms of private cloud. You don't have to necessarily set out on a strategy that I'm going to do hybrids and all public or whatever. So start with private cloud, use VersaStack, that's what you're delivering to your clients, right? They're end users, get them involved and understanding that. And then you actually have more flexibility at moving it to a public cloud, creating a hybrid solution. I think it's important part of our conversation to say, start with something that you've got more control of, but will behave like hybrid or public, right? Gotcha. There's obviously a big spectrum there. I was just talking to a service provider. I'm curious, are you putting VersaStack? Are you talking to service providers? Is that going in there? And how much is going into kind of the managed, hosted private cloud? In fact, two of our most prominent references. A company called iVirtualize in Toronto, they were one of the first buyers of VersaStack. And their quote literally was, it's perfect for us to deploy cloud workloads. So they're a service provider. Another one, Dutch cloud and the Netherlands. Another, again, MSP, CSP space, the flexibility to ease the quick ways to deploy it and then re-purpose the workloads and the compute, the networking, the storage for them fits great. And in that space, are they driving towards certain types of applications or is there a customer profile that maybe better fits a service provider running VersaStack? I think it's actually fairly mixed. I think what they, and these are on a big scale, they're fairly small service providers and their customers are fairly small. So you'll find lots of different workloads, whether it's Microsoft Office or whether it's a database application, whether it's, and I think because we in store-wise have had a pretty good penetration in healthcare, we're going to start seeing some of these healthcare providers go to the cloud as long as they feel comfortable about the security of their data. Because especially in the US and in Europe, the regulatory things they have to prove in terms of whether it's HIPAA or HIPAA squared. There's a lot of things and Europeans have the same kind of care for their data as well. So, you know. Well, and Cisco obviously totally agrees that they made an acquisition this morning a company called LandCoke that does network security analytics and so forth. So yeah, obviously we're hearing that. We're hearing it here at Oracle Open World Security at the chip level, security end to end. More and more customers, that's top of mind for them and they're willing to invest to make sure they're protected. What do you think we can expect? I mean, technology's moving so fast. Just give us a glimpse into the roadmap. What's coming next versus stack? Well, we've done a pretty good job of laying the foundation with the V5, V7 and V9. So what we're going to do is start climbing the stack in terms of middleware and applications. So, you know, we're talking with the Cisco team about a CBD for Oracle, for SAP HANA, more integration, more packaging. Again, back to their discipline that they've learned over the last four or five years, solution-oriented, use case-driven. We're going to do that. Take the friction out of the, not of all that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we'll focus on some of our sweet spots that are joint between Cisco and us. And obviously we'll focus on some of the IBM middleware and some of our software vendor partners as well. Sure. All right, well, Eric Stover with the Storewise Business Unit, really appreciate you coming to share the progress of versus stack. Customers getting to know it, testing it out, lots of environments. We'll be right back with lots more coverage of Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching. Great.