“The percentage of servers by volume that are x86 is 96%,” he said. “Revenue is 65%. That means that anything that isn’t based on x86 architecture is niche and declining.

“[EMC and VMware's] resources will be optimized by x86, multi-core, scale-out, cloud environments,” he said. “The industry and the customer base has spoken.”

Gelsinger has been with EMC since 2009; prior to that he was with Intel for 30 years. So I asked him how the Oracle-EMC relationship has changed over the last couple years with Oracle pushing its own storage and its own virtualization platform now more than ever.

“[Oracle and EMC] have 70,000 joint customers,” he said. “So more than anything we find ourselves working together to support and enable our core products with their core products.

“But if you’re an EMC customer today, my sales guy will try to sell you our security product, our backup product. Everybody does that. This is the way business is done. We are competing for where the future is going. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree.”

Gelsinger pointed to the large number of joint customers and the fact that EMC gave the day one keynote at OpenWorld to prove that the Oracle-EMC relationship is sound. While that may be true now, last year’s OpenWorld included a keynote from HP, which also has thousands of joint customers with Oracle. Things can sometimes change in a hurry.