David Nicholson, the senior director of director Intel Global Alliances for EMC, stopped by theCube with Dave Vellante at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.  He talked cloud and open source, as well as not so open IT ecosystems.

He started by saying that Oracle OpenWorld presents a contrast derived from the title, considering that the company is not even considering an open, vendor-agnostic venture at this time. He then discussed what EMC and Intel would perceive as an open environment, after Vellante highlighted that this is a rather subjective term.

Open, according to David Nicholson, ties x64 architectures with flash storage and virtualization. He described a horizontally arranged hardware stack that would be capable of running any application in a hybrid cloud, and is completely separate from the application layer.

Nicholson then went back to Oracle, noting Oracle Exadata offerings are technically open or can be considered as such if they’re used in an Oracle-only deployment, but not when it comes to running other applications.

Digging further into the openness concept,  he goes on to explain how EMC is working with the Open Datacenter Alliance that consults customers  that are looking to open up their IT infrastructure.  On the bottom line however, value is the key factor that determines whether or not a company should select a multi-vendor deployment over one that’s locked-in.

Vellante raised an interesting question regarding just how open is EMC, and in particular VMware considering that a Vblock can’t leverage Hyper-V or any other hypervior. Nicholson’s answer was that the technical definition of a Vblock does encompass VMware virtualization, but the same capabilities can also be achieved using other offerings. He exemplified that VCE customers have the choice of replacing certain components with that of other companies such as Brocade, HP and Dell.

Nicholson also discussed Oracle’s current position and outlook. He said that today there’s room for both open infrastructure and the closed ecosystem Oracle delivers, but on the longer run the company will have some catching up to do if it intends to become the Apple of enterprise IT.