Speaking live inside theCube at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco, Patel told Wikibon’s Chief Analyst Dave Vellante that VMware and Oracle have very different strategies when it comes to virtualization, often putting the two vendors at odds.

Said Patel:

Oracle’s strategy is to sell the full stack, top to bottom. And what we’re talking about is abstracting out the hardware from the applications layer. So those are two very distinct strategies that present customers with a fairly stark choice, which is why I think Oracle wants to keep VMware at arms length, won’t really do much with us. But customers are voting overwhelmingly [on] the flexibility and the choice and the abstraction that the [VMware’s] cloud architecture gives them. So we see a lot of customers that want to virtualize [their Oracle environments] with VMware … We have very health and growing numbers of customers virtualizing Oracle products on VMware but Oracle is doing [its] best to thwart that.

During his discussion with Vellante, Patel also talked about VMware’s partner ecosystem and why its technology partnerships are growing at a rate of 50 to 60 a week.

“We estimate for every dollar spent on VMware, 15$ or 16$ is spent on the rest of the ecosystem, and that’s hardware, software, services, the whole thing. That’s why all the systems integrators are really ramping up their VMware expertise. They’re seeing tremendous opportunity to go out and build private, public, hybrid clouds.”

ServicesAngle

With the advent of cloud computing and Big Data, Patel said he sees significant opportunities for start-up services firms that specialize in related skills and technologies. “[Cutting edge enterprises] are doing things you couldn’t imagine a few years ago. People need help and special services to figure out how to do that in their own business,” Patel said. Concerning Big Data in particular, Patel said, “We’re just now realizing there are all these great information feeds available … I think we haven’t even realized the services and design expertise they’re going to need for that.”

Check out the full interview below and all theCUBE Oracle OpenWorld coverage here.