A successful IT solution requires knowing exactly what customers want and need. Michael Bradburn, technical solutions architect of Oracle Solutions at Cisco Systems, Inc., and John McAbel, senior product manager of Oracle Solutions at Cisco, joined Brian Gracely, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld 2015 to talk about Cisco’s approach to designing solutions.

“From an architecture perspective, what we like to do is, we would like to give the customer one of the really best experiences they can have when dealing with a vendor that is going to eventually hopefully be in their data center,” according to Bradburn. “We pay a lot of attention to the details of what the customer brings to us, exactly what it is that they’re trying to run on the hardware, whether it’s an Oracle application or it’s a database.”

But this is only part of the process, Bradburn said. “Then we also want to pay an awful lot of attention to how much money they’re going to spend on a licensing perspective and how much they’re going to have to pay Oracle, because usually that particular piece of the puzzle is a whole lot more expensive than any piece of hardware that I can put into the solution.”

McAbel said this has also required broadening the scope of their testing. “When we first came to market with Unified Computing System (UCS) five and a half years ago, we were always testing these very large configurations,” he explained. “And customers were telling us that that’s great, but we need to have solutions documented that are more for small, medium business-type customers, and that’s been very advantageous for us.”

He added, “Customers really appreciate the fact we’re looking at different sizes of opportunities, not just the largest ones we can possibly put together in the lab.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE