After a long seven months, QLogic finally found its man. Prasad Rampalli, senior vice president for an engineering division at EMC, was recently announced the new president and CEO of the California-based data center networking company. Interim CEO Jean Hu will shift back to her position as Senior Vice President and CFO; Hu had been appointed Interim-CEO in May. Poaching Rampalli from EMC, a man who has over 30 years experience working with Intel and EMC, is a move that was largely unnoticed by the tech community during this past holiday season.

Rampalli is known as a strategic thinker who focuses on long-term growth. For QLogic this is a good thing, because he will be immediately tasked with the balancing act of maintaining a flat to slowly declining FC business with the potential growth in Ethernet and other solutions, like flash. Back in July, then Interim-CEO Hu explained why the storage adapter supplier was getting out of the Fibre Channel switch business:

After careful and comprehensive analysis, we decided to cease development of all future ASIC switch products. This decision included both future Fibre Channel and the Converged switch ASICs. This decision does not affect any [currently] shipping switch product, which we’ll continue to sell. It also does not affect certain near-term OEM switch development and qualification programs, which we are committed to complete for our Tier 1 customers.

And that is the ball Rampalli just picked up. QLogic has to span the “widget” embedded OEM business and broader solutions business. Broader solutions that will make people aware of QLogic and in turn asking for innovative features such as the FabricCache offering and “unified port FC+Ethernet” capabilities. The OEM business is similar and competes with product lines that Intel has, a company and business of which Rampalli has first-hand knowledge.

Rampalli is also no stranger to SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE as a welcomed repeat guest. Most recently at the EMC World 2013 conference, Rampalli discussed how as a storage solution, ViPR changes storage itself into an API, enabling IT and DevOps teams to work seamlessly with storage and not have to worry about what they’re connecting to—what lies beneath can change without greatly damaging the overlaying application layer. His understanding of software-defined storage solutions and the accompanying API layer bode will for QLogic’s FabricCache. As storage moves back to compute, Rampalli posses the perfect skill set for maximizing value at that layer.

Here is that full interview:

QLogic has an uphill battle over the next year as the establishing PCIe flash card market, and QLogic’s HBAs are PCIe flash cards, could legitimately pass QLogic by. Rampalli and QLogic are going to have to demonstrate that the company’s flash-enhanced storage adaptors are better than PCIe flash offerings from EMC, Fusion-io, Intel, LSI, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, Violin, and WD/HGST. The growth opportunities in Ethernet and Flash are there, but QLogic has development complexities hitting from both the development and software-addition sides.

One area QLogic is gaining momentum, proving a fine opportunity for Rampalli and his team is the growing China IT market. This past December, QLogic inked an OEM deal with Huawei for Gen 5 adapters. QLogic Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapter technology provides large OEM customers such as Huawei with a competitive advantage by delivering unique features, such as port-level isolation, which increase reliability and scalable performance in our dual-port adapters. In the Fibre channel market, QLogic accounted for 54 percent of overall revenues in this space, 15.4 percent more than the nearest competitor.

The OEM market and the vendor’s position give Rampalli and QLogic a fighting chance in our real-time dependent, data-driven world. As an arms dealer to storage, QLogic has a good horse to bet on in the FabricCache and unified port FC+Ethernet race. QLogic FabricCache is a networking card that works with a flash card. According to Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst at Wikibon, while QLogic does have a bundle that pairs their card with a standard PCIe flash or SSD flash, they are not looking to compete with the flash/storage providers. There is opportunity to partner/OEM on some technology. That being said, there are a number of players (Fusion-io, Virident, PernixData and more) that are delivering solutions that could close the window of opportunity on QLogic’s FabricCache. Rampalli might just be the man for the job.