Nick Ilyadis is the chief technology officer for Broadcom’s networking and infrastructure group; he’s also attending this week’s Dell Storage Forum, and stopped by theCube to give his perspective on the event and the industry as a whole (see full interview below).

The discussion started off with Illaydis’ personal opinion on Dell’s networking strategy. He believes that it’s in a rather solid position thanks to a number of acquisitions in the past few weeks and the company’s existing engineering muscle, which added up entire portfolio-worth of solutions.

Dell and Broadcom’s partnership began when after the former acquired EqualLogic, the Broadcom executive continued, elaborating on the history a bit more.

At this point, the focus shifted to the ‘intelligent’ network. According to Illaydis Broadcom is in the very forefront of this trend – his company innovated the technology that’s being used to offload workloads from the CPU to the controller. The firm is not the only one offering such solutions, but the CTO claims that there’s a differentiating factor in the form of a big efficiency gap: Broadcom’s smart network hardware is touted as 150 to 200 percent faster than competing offerings from Intel.

Another area in which Illaydis dug a little deeper during the session with Wikibon’s Stu Miniman is software-defined networking. His firm plays an instrumental role in this trend after all: he cited the fact that the Stanford team that pioneered the new architecture type used Broadcom switches, and that the networking giant is actively contributing to the development of this movement. At the same time he also argues that while the OpenFlow standard is undoubtedly a central element of the software-defined network, it’s not the only one. Certain vendors are innovating and offering capabilities that fall under the same category and have just as much potential.