This week Wikibon co-founder and analyst Dave Vellante interviewed NetApp Virtualization Evangelist Vaughn Stewart on theCube at Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle is both a customer of and, since the Sun acquisition, a competitor of NetApp. “These days all your partnerships have some amount of overlap,” Stewart says. He describes the relationship as “Co-optition.”

Vellante talked about Wikibon’s research which found that NetApp and EMC were the leaders in the market in terms of integration. Stewart said that EMC and NetApp got an early mover advantage regarding integrations because they recognized that storage was no longer confined to the array. You’ve got to look at the whole stack, and VMwware made that possible.

Vellante also asked whether a cartel of big players might be emerging, with EMC having acquired a majority ownership in VMware (and he didn’t mention it here, but there’s also Oracle’s acquisition of Sun). Stewart said EMC and VMware have been doing a good job of keeping the two companies separate. He said that since VMware pulls more traditional storage elements into the virtualization level, NetApp is able to plugin at the application level and compete on the merit of its own unique capabilities. That helps level the playing field. He says the real way to compete is to offer innovative capabilities outside of the traditional APIs that can be plugged into the virtual environment.

Shifting gears, Vellante asked Stewart about big data. Stewart said he thinks companies are underestimating the amount of data they’re going to need to store in the coming years. He said he doesn’t know how big data is going to play out, but recommends that companies make sure they have a scalable storage environment in order to be ready for whatever they need to do with big data.

On the subject of Oracle, Stewart says customers have been looking for more maturity in terms of how to virtualize Oracle. Stewart says that customers at the C-level are seeing the virtualization level as more of a management layer. They’re hoping to use it as a place to standardize operations. However, many people on the ground in operations such as DBAs would rather have a single vendor and aren’t too worried about the nuances between different hypervisors. NetApp can change the IO paradigm, so they end being brought in to help with Oracle virtualizations.

Here’s the full interview:

As mentioned in the interview, Billy Beane was at NetApp’s booth at OpenWorld. Here’s SiliconAngle founder John Furrier’s interview with Beane:

You can find more of theCube’s OpenWorld 2011 coverage here.