Rob Crawford, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales for QLogic, is now an alumnus of theCube so when Stu Miniman of Wikibon brought him in for interview there was a great deal to cover from the past year. He joined the California-based networking infrastructure solutions company in May of 2011 and has recently seen the anniversary of his time with the company.

QLogic is well known for their variety of technology across SAN infrastructure and Crawford has a lot to say about the QLogic’s position in the shifting market.

“This is a time when fiber channel is at an exciting transition, 16 gig technology is now coming into the market,” he told Miniman when asked about the rise of fiber channel. “When that transition happens in the market, we want to make sure our technologies are relevant. A lot of what we’re doing technology-wise is converging to support multi-protocol; if you look at our switching technology, adaptor technology, and our technology as it applies on the host-side, one of the great things we’ve announced in the industry is the ability to use multi-protocol.”

Miniman pointed out that QLogic is big on bringing SAN from the storage side and from the networking side at the same time.

Appearing at HP Discover 2012 continues QLogic’s long-time partnership with HP and we’ve seen some market-inspiring announcements between the two companies earlier this year with a storage deal creating the HP BLc QMH2572 with 8gb Fibre Channel inside. Not that long afterwards, the storage-company unveiled its 10GbE converged networking with Fujitsu in the ETERNUS storage system.

And as recently as early May, the company announced a partnership with Extreme Networks to converge fibre channel and fibre channel over Ethernet.

Needless to say, all this news coming fast, and hitting hard will help their bottom line and potentially catapult them into an enviable position in the infrastructure market. Profits have been rising for the company and Q4 is looking good.

QLogic is prepared for the cloud

As cloud becomes a large player in the market for both storage and networking, Crawford sees that QLogic is an IO-centric company.

“We see that as a really great opportunity for us,” he says, “cloud environments more than anything you need flexibility–so flexibility with converged infrastructure, but you also need people that understand multi-protocol, that can move data between different types of environments. And as people build out their cloud environments sometimes that’s public cloud, sometimes it’s private cloud, sometimes it’s co-located.

“You’ve got a lot of different options, and having flexibility with infrastructure really makes that happen.”

As we’ve seen the cloud is a major player in future technology and knowing that QLogic and HP both have their eyes pointed in that direction likely means we can anticipate faster backbones to support smarter storage.