Jason Kotsafis, a director at EMC, dropped by theCube with Dave Vellante on day three of the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference to elaborate on how EMC and Oracle position themselves with and against one another in the enterprise market.

Kotsafis, who is attending the 15^th consecutive OpenWorld gathering on the behalf of EMC, pointed out that there are 17,000 joint customers that leverage both Oracle and EMC offerings in their deployments.  He continued to say that the emphasis is on optimizing Oracle software, i.e. apps, middleware and databases to run on EMC hardware, especially today when virtualization has gotten into the mix.

Kotsafis moved on to discuss his company’s overall ‘field strategy’ when it comes to working with joint customers. The main thing he highlighted is that EMC offers them more flexibility by letting them choose the Oracle components and EMC components. Later in the interview he got back to this point, noting that when customers want a preconfigured offering such as what VCE (a joint venture between EMC and Cisco) is offering, they have the choice of running software from other vendors. This, however, is not the case with Oracle, he said – a company that is known for taking a route that’s anything but vendor-agnostic.

Closer to the end of the interview, Kotsafis started talking backup, an area other EMC execs also discussed in theCube throughout the conference.  He exemplified some of the opportunities that lie in Oracle with his company’s own usage of their software: Oracle databases grow constantly, and that means more backup.  Newer backup techniques such as dedupe reduce the amount of data that needs to be backed up over time and thus increase recovery time, he said.

Finally, Oracle’s Exadata big data offering was brought up.  Kotsafis belives that the company still needs to catch up with the rest of the market if it plans on establishing a foothold in the unstructured data analytics space.