Rich Napolitano, the president of EMC’s unified storage division, is attending the EMC World conference held this week and stopped by theCube to discuss a few of his favorite topics with Wikibon’s chief analyst Dave Vellante (see full video below).

Napolitano dedicated some time to note the more positive energy of this year’s gathering, which he credited to a more enthusiastic approach to the ecosystem that resembles VMware’s in a lot of ways.  From here, the conversation shifted to the channel.

Napolitano has faith in his company’s partnership with SAP and HANA, its in-memory analytics appliance. At the same time, however, he’s nearly as optimistic about the expectations that memory will replace storage because, as he put it, the current price tag just doesn’t justify a mass migration from EMC’s storage products.

The vendor in turn is investing a great deal into staying ahead of what is, at least for the time being, still a very profitable market. This year’s conference is all about building on the momentum from the 2011 megalaunch of over 40 products, and once again Napolitano highlighted the emphasis on the partner base.

Among the 42 products debuting at EMC World are several VNX and DataDomain solutions available exclusively through the channel, a decision that came as a result of a drastic expansion after previous conference.  There’s also the addition of thousands of new partners to the ecosystem, and approximately 6,000 to 7,000 new customers.

From here on, the discussion focused on the actual products fueling all this growth. The executive explained how vCenter Operations Manager fills an analytics gap EMC discovered after it started lagging behind competitors in this area, and revealed that the software will be integrated with VNX and VNXe in the future.

The interview with Napolitano in all covered a lot of ground, including how flash fits into the picture, VCE, as well as additional insight about the market and other areas.  For the full scoop check out the video below.