As the Senior Director of Product Marketing & Management for QLogic, Satish Lakshmanan knows where the data-center and information infrastructure company wants to take their business. So, when Dave Vellante and John Furrier got him in an interview in theCube at EMC World 2011 it was no surprise that he had a lot to say about the nature of the data infrastructure business.

As Big Data and cloud-technology continue to drive industry standards and data needs, QLogic has a lot of forward-thinking innovation when it comes to the convergence between communication and computing. In fact, a lot of these thoughts came out during their recent earnings call, but sometimes it’s easier to hear it straight. During the interview, Vellante mentioned to Lakshamanan that QLogic has done a very good job of taking ownership of their brand and moving out of the card business and establishing themselves as a data-center brand by focusing on convergence.

And Lakshmanan responded by pointed out that QLogic is looking to wade hip-deep into convergence wherever the industry takes them and he believes that the future is all about properly predicting the market needs. If you think about QLogic’s pedigree and history, they’ve been more about fiber and infrastructure, he explained, FCoE, Inifiband, 10gbE, which are all net growth areas. They’re looking at the total available market doubling by 2014. Therefore, the challenge will be producing the right products that OEMs will be willing to qualify and embed.

Lakshmanan believes that convergence will drive this market and it’s highlighted through the adoption and deployment of FCoE in production datacenters. In fact, QLogic recently sold an FCoE CNA solution to Payformance, a healthcare payment solution provider. They adopted the technology, deployed it, and now they’re running datacenter traffic over an FCoE network.

Forward thinking, QLogic would like to provide data infrastructure for anyone who wants it and to do that they’re looking for all-in-one products that are capable of simultaneously handing multiple protocols on one chip. In fact, they see this as the best-possible-in for all Big Data and cloud-based technology because it means that any company can come to them for a data appliance that will connect into whatever system they want to build around it. He even pointed out that EMC bought chips for their cloud-enabled technologies, making QLogic part-and-parcel of EMC’s cloud strategy.

The more different protocols, systems, and setups that QLogic appliances and chips can function within, the more of the market ecology they’ll be able to expand into. As a forward thinking strategy this appears to be an extremely powerful position because it means that more OEMs will be looking to them to power data infrastructure devices capable of plugging in almost anywhere and it also means that they can be brought on board early without having to commit to an entire system architecture early.

Satish Lakshmanan says that QLogic sees four pillars for their market strategy: the capability of supporting multiple protocols on one piece of hardware; making their chip’s processing fully off-loadable—i.e. it shouldn’t take up any CPU or memory resources and do all its own processing; provide security for cloud environments—such as IPSec over TCP/IP and iSCSI, FSCB encryption and auth; and finally I/O virtualization—to help prevent bottlenecks for high data throughput.

During the interview, Lakshmanan likened QLogic’s position to that of one of an arms dealer—they don’t intend to wed themselves to any one architecture; but instead desire the capability of providing systems infrastructure wherever and however it’s needed. Putting them in on the ground floor of whatever future direction the market takes itself. Multi-protocol, security-enabled, I/O virtualized chips will be able to do that and if it converges with FCoE and 10gbE, the more the merrier.