Prasad Rampalli, CEO of QLogic Corp., a leading data center networking and storage networking infrastructure solutions provider, as well as EMC Corp. strategic partner, plans to guide the company into new waters as it raises its presence in the cloud market.

“We want to be the preeminent solutions provider for enterprise and cloud: simple in statement but ambitious,” says Rampalli. “We want to accomplish this in two phases over the next three to four years. Phase one is to absolutely be Number One as a rock-solid foundation for I/O connectivity.”

Rampalli stresses that QLogic, known for its high-quality adapters, switches and other server solutions, is more than a hardware company. “The core team is comprised of one third engineering and two thirds software and firmware development,” he says.

This balance provides an advantage as the company adapts to virtualiztion, flash, and other technologies that stress the system. “The key disrupters when building the next generation of data center architecture are flash and the move to 25, 50, and 100G Ethernet,” Rampalli says. “At the end of the day, people care about mission critical reliability, and unquestioned latency and performance. We think that I/O is a very critical pillar for this emerging architecture.”

Rampalli’s immediate goals include the development of 25, 50, and 100Gb controllers with “full low-latency fabric protocol capabilities,” he says. “We also plan to partner with some key players with a big cloud market presence. We’re going to have intelligent software that will support encryption and mirroring and is enabled natively in the data path by our connectivity cards to provide high value-add services.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more wall-to-wall EMC World coverage from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.