EMC’s Director of Strategic Alliances Jason Kotsaftis is a regular attendee of Oracle’s OpenWorld, 15 times in a row.  At theCube, he sat down with SiliconANGLE CEO and Founder John Furrier and Wikibon Co-founder Dave Vellante, to talk about the evolution of the industry, their relationship with Oracle, and Oracle’s cloud approach (full interview below).

Director of Strategic Alliances Jason Kotsaftis on #theCube at Oracle Open World 2012 #OOW

Kotsaftis mentioned that when he first attended the conference, Oracle was a software database company while EMC was a storage company.  But now, Oracle has gone from software and apps to infrastructure and EMC from hardware and storage up into software.  He noted that it’s an interesting example of how the industry is converging and building complete infrastructure stacks.

EMC and Oracle has a complex relationship which Kotsaftis describes as “coopetition,” which means they are cooperating and competing at the same time.

“It’s great.  There’s obviously coopetition with most IT vendors today and EMC and Oracle are no exception,” Kotsaftis says.

“What brings us back to Oracle World is really the fact that we have 70,000 customers together, and most of them are going to be here at the show and they want to hear from EMC and Oracle as they run Oracle applications, middleware, and database software on EMC infrastructure, how we’re going to help them with the challenges they have integration and support.  So the relationship today is a balance of, in some areas we do compete, but in other areas, we actually do very good engineering together,” Kotsaftis explained.

They actually announced a great example of that relationship with Data Integrity.  He explained that a lot of Oracle customers are faced with the challenge of silent data corruption wherein from the database to the storage, the data may get corrupted.  So in collaboration with Oracle and Emulex, EMC engineered a way to check the data as it moves to the stack to make sure it hasn’t been corrupted.  And this is important because as more data is generated, the higher the chance it can get corrupted.

EMC is one of the early cloud adopters and Kotsaftis found Oracle’s current stand on cloud interesting. A few years back, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison dismissed the cloud as nothing more than the internet and now, even if Oracle claims that the cloud is about application choice and choice of deployment, what they really mean is that it’s all about having the right stack, which in Oracle’s point of view is what they offer.

To watch the full interview with Jason Kotsaftis, see below.