Lloyd Carney, Brocade’s new CEO, came to discuss his new position within the company, as well as future development strategy with theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at EMC World 2013. Carney has only been Brocade’s CEO for about 100 days, therefore he comes with a fresh perspective on the company and its future direction.

Brocade has been involved in a partnership with EMC for more than 15 years, and Carney mentioned his company treats EMC “as more of a customer than a partner,” expecting their collaboration to get better over time. “What I’ve learned is the strength of partnership,” he stated, saying that “every partner wants to see us succeed.” Talking about why companies choose to partner with Brocade, Carney mentioned that the company is pretty focused on what it does, partners and customers trusting their expertise in the network solutions.

“We have stronger partnerships today than we did a year ago,” he explained. The benefits Brocade brings to scale-out NAS are unparalleled in his opinion, “no one even comes close.”

Talking about EMC’s latest ViPR release, Carney notes that it embeds Brocade’s network analysis tools, giving access to this tool to 15,000 joint customers of the two companies.

Asked if there will be a bridge in the future between the Ethernet and fiber worlds, he stated the bridge comes from people who are doing NAS. A scale-out NAS looks a lot like a SAN infrastructure, he explained  Brocade is leveraging all of their fiber expertise into the NAS world.

A brave new world for Brocade’s new CEO

Talking about him being a new hire for Brocade, theCube hosts Vellante and Furrier asked Carney what got him hooked to the company. “Technology.  I’m an engineer,” he replied. “There is no doubt in my mind that we have superior technology here. […] This is the best fabric in the market.”

Exploring future trends, Carney stated there will always be SSDs, there will be fiber channels and there will be NAS. “You will see an architecture were you will have multiple types of storage,” Brocade aiming to be the main provider of connectivity between them. He also mentioned the industry will see more people moving into virtual environments, thus there will be software applications running on top of data centers.

Detailing Brocade’s growth strategy, Carney stressed the company’s focus on customer advocacy. He wants Brocade to be recognized as the No. 1 in customer satisfaction, as well as No.1 network solutions provider. “We have the who’s who of the customers today,” he mentioned, and if the company manages to provide existing customers with the next generation product and keep them happy, it will be extremely successful.

The company plans on continuing to grow their Ethernet fabric solution and capture margin, as well as releasing more virtual appliances.

Talking about open in software and what the future holds, Carney said “there will be multiple proprietary open solutions.” He added, “We have to ensure that our platforms are manageable, provisionable,  and are flexible.”