 Okay, we're here, it's live, day two Oracle Open World. Moscone is draped in red, that means the cube is here, and we're covering wall to wall. This is day two Oracle Open World 2013. This is the fourth year we've been here at Oracle Open World inside the QLogic booth. Our friends at QLogic are kind enough every year to help us out with the cube and give up a fair amount of their booth space so that we can broadcast live from the show floor. This is the QLogic booth, this is the cube where we extract the signal from the noise. We go out to the events, we're bringing the best guests at these events, bringing their perspectives to you. I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Vic Carbat is here, he's the Vice President of Marketing at QLogic. Vic, welcome to the cube. Thank you Dave, good to be here. So, what do you think Open World this year? 60,000 people, the lines are getting longer. People keep coming to Oracle. It's hard to get into the city, but it's worthwhile being here. So, what's the vibe like here? You've been hanging out the booth a little bit, customers coming by, what are you hearing on the show? So, there's a lot of excitement. You can see that there's a lot of things happening in the industry, both databases and enterprise in general and around storage specifically. It's a level of industry excitement that hasn't probably been there for a couple of years now. So, it's good to see that people are re-engaging at the technology and user technology deployment level. Vic, you've been in the industry for a while now, you've been tracking some of the changes. What are some of those changes that you've been tracking? And what are the ones that are important and relevant to QLogic and its customers and how are you guys really leveraging those trends and capitalizing on those trends? So, I think there's two kinds. There's technology trends and then what's important to end users. And you have to be careful to differentiate between those two. From the technology side, obviously a lot of activity around SSDs, a lot of activity around low latency transports, more CPU cores, meaning more scalability going into individual server nodes, which is driving IO requirements. Virtualization, again, continues to increase from an OPEX optimization standpoint. So a lot of technologies that feed into some of those trends are what QLogic and other vendors are looking at. End users, I think, a little bit different. They're looking at how do we get more out of existing infrastructure, whether it's putting more multi-core processors in, trying to reinvigorate existing infrastructure in some cases, and the vendors that can help them leverage their existing infrastructure are likely to win. At Wikibon, we've looked at these forces of some of the things that you mentioned, flash, virtualization, and what used to be known as Moore's Law, we still generically refer to it Moore's Law, but now we're sort of attacking it with cores. And the multiplicative effect on IOs, and literally it is, you do the math and you've got more cores or more processing power, you've got virtualization, which creates the IO blender, you've got flash, which speeds everything up. And it creates just massive, massive amounts of IO, you combine that with data growth, and it's a real challenge. So, what role does QLogic play in addressing that stress point in the industry? So, Dave, you mentioned Moore's Law, I think the other code assault to that is Amdahl's Law, where you can optimize any piece of an equation, but even if you take that piece of the equation to zero, unless you've done something with the rest of it, you can make a whole heck of a lot of difference. And I think what we've seen is Intel and the OSVs, they've done a great job on one side of the equation. Now the IO vendors are focusing on what we do here. And on the IO side, it's not even a question of just saying, hey, let's go drive more IOPS or drive lower latency, but looking at it from, again, Amdahl's Law perspective of where are the real bottlenecks in the infrastructure? And this is where some of the things we're doing with regards to our fabric cash products, really look at it from a different perspective. It's like, we're not going to necessarily optimize for a particular microbenchmark, but let's see what it takes to optimize application performance. So you're talking about a systems view? Precisely. Okay, and to your point, you guys, you don't build systems, end-to-end systems, but you work with people that build end-to-end systems. So how do you gain visibility on those other parts of the system given your place in the value chain? Obviously there's partnerships and there's collaboration, but I wonder if you could specifically talk about how you address that challenge? Well, internally at KeyLogic, we've got an entire organization that engages with end-users at a very deep level. These guys are chartered with looking at what the end-user pain points are, and then we have other teams that engage with our OEM and OSV partners. So basically between these three legs, we're able to triangulate effectively in terms of where the real pain points are and get perspectives from different vendors. So now we can get an OEM technology perspective, an OSV technology perspective, as well as an end-user pain point perspective, and try to make the right decisions on that basis. We're certainly a very focused OEM company, so our route to markets are still very OEM, but having that feedback is useful. So Vic, if we look at some of these trends that are going on, QLogic's made a lot of changes. At least I've been watching QLogic for over a decade now. Many people would think of QLogic as a fiber-channel company, but can you talk a little bit about what QLogic's doing just in general? Is it fiber-channel, there's Ethernet, there's Flath? How is QLogic chaining its conversations with its OEMs and its relationship to customers? So, Stu, I think the company at its roots eight, ten years ago was a fiber-channel company. I think now I would more rightly characterize us as a high-performance storage IO company. And what we've really done is combined a collection of technologies, whether they be Ethernet or other block storage technologies, and we're using those as a foundation in the launching pad for other products. For example, Fabric Cache. Fabric Cache is one example of where we took stuff that we developed through our block storage protocol expertise in both fiber-channel and iSCSI, combined it together with what we've done in some of our routing products, and even though the routing products were much of a focus, that IP was combined together to generate the Fabric Cache technology. So we're looking for those types of common threads where we have a lineage and a heritage of technology excellence in storage and how we can leverage that into some of these new product spaces. Okay, I wonder if we could talk for a second about kind of the cloud, because if you look at hyperscale environments, the keynote this morning, you had EMC and Oracle both talking about their vision of the future. You just get pulled in through your relationships with the EMC's and Oracle's of the world, but how do you view that changing dynamic of how Google and Facebook build architectures and how the enterprise are going? Where does Q-Logic fit in the picture in those kind of environments? I get asked that a lot, and I think you have to view the Googles and Facebooks as part of the cloud, but not the entire cloud. If you look at the way everybody can't roll their own solutions. And there's also the whole aspect of enterprise clouds, private cloud infrastructures, and those still rely on some of the same things that enterprise data centers rely on, which is they have block storage requirements, they have security requirements, they have uptime requirements, and as the cloud model begins to manifest itself, managing that storage is going to become important. All the same things that we brought to the enterprise are still relevant in the cloud environment, albeit maybe with a slightly different complexion. And that's one thing I think people sometimes lose sight of, because everything is not about the Googles and Facebook. By the way, I love Facebook, use it all the time, but the enterprise guys, as they move into the cloud, they're going to have some of these pain points. So where we're focusing is how do we maintain the SLAs, the security, the reliability, and the performance scalability in those enterprise cloud environments. Vic, I don't know if you got a chance to see the keynote this morning, but Joe Tucci gave a keynote. Safra Katz introduced Joe Tucci as her friend. Joe reciprocated, calling Safra his friend. It was very, very cozy, which is fine. I tweeted out, you know, it's nice that they're cozy on stage, but I guarantee in the field it's not so amenable. But nonetheless, the interesting part was you had Joe Tucci set up a vision of a horizontal infrastructure, virtualization across the application portfolio, and then Thomas Kurian came on and set up Oracle's Vision. We've been hearing it for three or four years now. Vertically integrated stack, you know, but people called the red stack. From the standpoint of that horizontal infrastructure, more virtualized, cloud-based, across diverse sets of application portfolios, working with different networking storage and server products, you know, ecosystem-based integration, versus that sort of red stack approach. From QLogic standpoint, you sell the both. You know, you don't care who wins as long as somebody wins and the market's growing. But are there requirements that are different for each of those perspectives from your standpoint, or are they the same? I think they are different in that you're embarking on a corporate strategy that says that we're either going to be on open systems play, and we're going to work with ecosystems, or we're going to build an ecosystem around what we want to do. From QLogic's perspective, we've been more successful and we plan to continue our success driven by the premise that having an open systems approach where you're working with your ecosystems partners is the right way to go. And then layering on top of that value add that certain ecosystem partners can take advantage of. But if somebody chooses not to, it's not necessarily going to impact them negatively. They just won't get necessarily upside. So one of the things we've done here for example, we're doing a lot of end to end work. So we launched our 16 gig and CNA products with Oracle this week. But part of that was also that we are also participating with Oracle on some of their target side storage platforms. So moving forward, you now have the ability where you have our stuff end to end, it can take advantage and we can deliver different levels of performance, SLAs, QS. Stu was talking before with you, Vic, about your fiber channel prowess. You guys obviously have a hardened fiber channel stack. You're known for that capability and your implication was hey, it's more than that, we're evolving as a company. As the head of marketing, from a brand standpoint, what do you want the Q-Logic brand to stand for for people? I think the most important thing is trust. If you build your company on a Q-Logic infrastructure, you can count on that product to be there for a long time. If there's any issues with it, you can count on Q-Logic to back it up. Because at the end of the day, whether you're talking about enterprise or enterprise cloud, that's the key thing of value. And when we say, so trust in the context of the storage IO connectivity in your data center. Who do you want to turn to? Q-Logic. Okay, so my last question, Vic, so what should observers be looking for? Sort of milestones that you want to hit for the company, for the marketing group, for the organization overall, over say the next 12 to 18 months. What should observers be looking at as indicators of your progress and your success? So I think you're going to see continued activity on the fabricash side as we continue to explore that market and expand the features and functions that we offer in there, looking at more end user value being brought back in that we can deliver to our OEMs as a product. I think you're going to see accelerated rates of innovation. We have 32 gig fiber channel on the horizon, 128 gig fiber channel coming after that. And that's something that has changed, I think people's worldview has changed versus four or five years ago where they might have said, well, 16 gig might be the end of the line and Ethernet's going to be there. I think what we found is now there is room for FCOE, there's room for fiber channel, there's room for iSCSI, and there's customers that do have religion on any of those vectors. You have to be able to address those needs. So you're going to see us kind of innovating in all directions. It's like the energy market, all of the above. All of the above. It's a buffet. Well, Vic, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Thanks for having us in your booth. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Great to see you. It was a pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody. I'll be back with Stu Miniman. We're going to tease up the backup and recovery spotlight. Critical area data protection within Oracle. Things are changing, changing fast. Cloud's coming into the picture. So keep it right there. This is The Cube, right back after this word.