>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas for Vmworld 2018. It's theCUBE's three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host this segment, Alan Cohen, who's an industry legend, retired now, doing a lot of boards, as our guest analyst here for this segment. Our next two guests-- >> Another word for unemployed. (all laugh) >> Bartender in Silicon Valley ??? On boards. Our next two guests, Bruce Shaw, Senior Director of Globalization Solutions, remaking what it means to partner in the cloud, and of course, Keith Norbie, theCUBE alumuni, Manager of bus dev, does the bus dev for NetApp. Guys, thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending the time. >> Oh, thanks for having us. >> The first thing I want to get to is, give us an update on the relationship with NetApp and VMware. Obviously, Pat Gelsinger, spring in his step. Go back three years ago, his job was on the line. So much has happened, the relationship with Amazon, the clarity around the cloud, cloud operations, the role of infrastructure in that, with devops driving programmable infrastructure. Kind of the world's spinning in the NetApps front door right now. >> Yeah, we feel pretty good about it. Keith, he runs that relationship, so I'll let him lead the answer. >> I thought it was best said, and we can kind of unite together, VMware and NetApp on moving from data centers to centers of data. NetApp's been on this data visionary, and sort of the data authority track for a couple years now. You guys have known that; you've been to a net admin site. The relationship, really, is complementary from that perspective, and it goes back many years, more than a decade. If you look at our common base, VMware, of course, has 500,000 users in its install base. We've got a couple 100,000, so it's a gigantic opportunity together to move people exactly in the acts that Pat talked about in the keynote, act one through act four, and getting us all to multi cloud. When you look at the relationship, and the base of the ONTAP products that we have VMware and the architecture, all the way to cloud volumes, and then the latest architecture that we've just done with VMware for NetApp HCI, there's a lot to talk about. >> I've been covering NetApp since theCUBE, nine years, This is our ninth VMWorld, but I've been following the company since the late 90s when they went public. Always a culture of learning and adaptability, but to survive in the past 10 years, specifically, it's really been about adaptation, because if you look at that model, a lot of losers are dead, bankrupt, see companies come and go, but the ones that are customer-centric seem to win. Jassy on stage, very customer-centric. VMware, listening to their customers, got a great community. You guys have a very loyal customer base, both on the customer side, going back to the original products and the partners. >> Right. >> So Bruce, as you think about partnering in the cloud era, when you're now looking at all kinds of different relationships, whether it's in the staff from a technology standpoint, or go to market, or whatever the machination of the relationship is, you got to think differently, so I got to ask you the question. How do you partner? 'Cause it's not just about the profit anymore. What is value in this era? Take a minute to explain the vision. >> Yeah, and you hit it right in the head. The value question is no longer the primary driver of what you're going after. When I say value, just pure revenue stream. You want to look at, obviously, the evolution to an ecosystem, and we spent a lot of time with that on the internal side. Not that anybody cares about what we do under the covers. We restructured our business units from one single business unit into three, so we've got a cloud-focused CDS, which is cloud focuses on the hyperscalers, and our cloud volumes business. CIBU, which is our conversion, hyperconversion infrastrcutures, and then of course, the guys that handle ONTAP, and the big stuff on the back end that provides the building blocks to all of that. >> These are dedicated teams, right? >> Dedicated teams. Dedicated business units, and that gives us the potential of three pathways, in terms of which we partner, and my goal since I came in to run the group in January has been, how do we transition from a traditional alliances organization to evolve to one where we're much more focused on production of solutions, designing with our partners solutions that meet in the market. We're a very channel-focused company. We obviously, you look at the success that NetApp's had over the 10 years with Cisco and FlexPod, that's a meet in the market model, focused on validation to provide solutions for customers, for industry problems, and trying to replicate that through key strategic partners that hit the ecosystem to do it, and that's been a very effective approach for us, and we've spent a lot of time kind of recrafting the organization to match up both with our BUs, and then our delivery through what we call pathways, and that pathway begins from everything, from the channels to the GSIs. We have a new G100 account group, and then to our own sales force, of course. >> All right, so what's in it for me as the customer? I'm like, at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you're reorganized, sounds good. Focused teams, highly cohesive, good segmentation, dedicated teams. What's the impact for the customer? >> The impact for you guys, it's easier to implement, lower cost, quicker delivery, and the assurance that you actually have a validated architecture that's using best of ??? For what you want, as opposed to, I've bought a monolithic stack of something and I'm locked in, and maybe it's the a piece of this and the b of that. You can actually choose your Lego bricks to put together, and we'll stand behind it with the validation that this works. >> Maybe to just kind of pull a layer back on that. Obviously today, we have Andy Jassy on stage with VMware a year later. People were extremely cynical a year ago when that announcement went down. Here they are, they're throwing up their hands. Actually, today-- >> Capitulation was the term. >> Yeah, right, it's capitulation now, but if you are now partnering, and you're building alliances in the cloud era. Three or four years ago, people were saying, "The cloud, they're the enemy. "We can't do business with that." That's what they said, that their customers, their partnerships. How has that changed, and how do you think about partnerships with the cloud providers today? >> Three years ago, the smart people out there said the cloud is going to kill NetApp. >> Right. >> Right? We're an on-premise, standalone storage company. The cloud is the end. Well, fast forward to now, the cloud is our best friend. It's our biggest growing area. You look at the business we do with the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye, and that's the fastest-growing piece of the business we got. We've made it very easy, through ONTAP, to work in either a cloud only relationship, or a hybrid, where you're moving things from on-prem to off-prem and vice versa, and that's becoming main focus of our business, and from an alliances standpoint, of course, once you have it in our own key ingredient, then it's what are the partners that we partner with to bring them into that, to make it a more cohesive solution. >> And then ???Senator, if I might have a second question. >> Of course. >> If I am a customer, and on one side you have your alliance with VMware, and the other side I have my growing initiatives with AWS, or Google Cloud, it doesn't matter. Where does NetApp fit between those two environments? 'Cause you have alliances with both sides. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> What do I count on NetApp for, because I'm looking multi cloud, I'm looking at migration. How do I think about you in that-- >> To me, I think it's pretty clear. It's all of it needs data to run, just like software needs hardware to run on. Even though it's in cloud, it's rendered. It is all about the transition of being very hardware-defined to being software-defined, to being really function-defined, and once you start to modernize an architecture that way, or a general organization that's trying to deliver IT services, it's the delivery of those things the start to define where you have to take things that are both on-prem and in the cloud, so the entire thing around multi cloud sort of requires that you have strategies for things that are in current data centers that just have to become more cloud-like in their functions and their functionality. Delivering it as a service is not just the mantra, but it's the time to value, and it's the consumption style. As an example, as we're trying to do things on-prem with our NetApp HCI solution, doing embedded OEM with VMware isn't because we want to sell VMware licenses. It's because we want to make it as fast a possible, and as easy for our customer to be able to turn it on and start using it, similar to your experience buying a new iPhone. We want to have you be able to add software to it, like NSX, like vRealize, or a full VMware private cloud stack is something that will hopefully take minutes, rather than hours, weeks or months, because we want that time to value, that consumption experience to be the king, and that extends to data protection, that extends to security. We're not just a storage company. We're a data company that's really in the game for the full stack, and the advantage we have is that we're in all the hyperscalers, and I think we can help VMware there, ??? >> The piece I'd add, I think that's different than before, is most companies think about alliances is us plus them, and in the cloud environment, it's us plus plus plus plus plus to get a solution, and having a much different approach, where it's, okay, we're going to have to be multi-partnered in a cloud environment to go get this done, and that also requires a different alliance motion. >> Less tennis, more soccer. >> Yeah, exactly (John laughs). Great analogy. >> It's yours. >> Tell them the source was theCUBE. >> This show demonstrates how an ecosystem has really extracted the maximum value out of the partners, because there's a ton of this extension to the partner, the channel partner, the pathway partner, to really go and do, moreso than VMware having to do it all themselves, or NetApp having to do it all themselves. It is about that three-way partnership between the product, the solution, and the delivery partner itself, and what AWS even say to them, they said in the partner keynote yesterday that what they want out of the partners is capabilities, and isn't that awesome? We want competencies and capabilities to understand who can deliver these certain capabilities, security, networking, storage, app refactoring, you can go down the list. >> I want to ask you guys, while I've got you both here. I want to get your reaction to something Pat Gelsinger said. He said two things I want get your comments on. One was, he made a comment that said, "No one should ever have to pay for DR ever again CapEx," and two, he made a comment about how AI's 30 years old, and, "Hello, AI, good to see you. "Welcome to the introduction of AI, 30 years later." >> I think he said it's an overnight 30-year success. >> It's an overnight 30-year success, exactly. So one, never pay for DR CapEx, and then hello AI, so again, that kind of signals what's going on. You got the service model, and then you got AI. It's an enabler, and one is a changeover. Curious what are your thoughts on the reaction to those two comments. >> I think the DR statement, while bold, might not be the solution for everybody (John laughs). I think there's certain folks that would say, based on their requirements, they have to have a traditional DR regardless, whether it's compliance or whatever else, but certainly, you should look at how the cloud infrastructure is targeted. There's a lot of cost savings to be gleaned from that, and we are absolutely investing in how we take the services we offer and make them much more readily available as a consumption model, as you go, as you consume, as opposed to a traditional CapEx type purchase. >> So a little bit over the top, but kind of directionally correct, in your mind? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Never going to go away. It's kind of like storage, it never went away. >> Certainly, I think it will continue to decline and decline and decline, but also to declare it over, people still buy desktops, right? That was declared dead in '97. >> Dave and I were just talking about infrastructures were supposed to be dead 10 years ago. >> Pat's always said he's been a fan of NetApp, so I don't want to project words into his mouth, but I think he's been there for us, in a majority of the NetApp and VMware interactions at Vmworld. >> There's a picture of Pat wearing a NetApp jersey at a CUBE event. >> Yes, that was a big moment for us, obviously. >> So the AI piece too, any thoughts on that comment or the AI comment? >> I'll defer the AI to him, but I would just say that on the DR thing is that, we already have that in cloud volumes, and a lot of the data services we're doing in AWS and the public cloud, so I think we present a clear example of that. AI. >> AI, Pat's exactly right. Something that's been around forever, that's really getting a lot of air time right now, but he's precisely right. We see the growth of AI applications in usage is absolutely huge, and when you combine that with the types of instruments that are collecting data, what's wired today versus what wasn't two, three, five years ago, obviously, as a storage company, there's just an exponential amount of data growth that's being captured out there, based upon these AI type machines that are only getting faster and smarter, so for us, we're welcoming the the 30-year success. It's great that it's here to the party. As we look at that ecosystem, that's where we're heavily investing and expanding our partnerships and our routes to market, because we're all so focused on that. >> Maybe just to follow on that, so the traditional conversation people have about cloud is it's somebody else's data center. >> It's somebody else's, right. >> But now, the cloud discussion is about, we were just talking about AI, self-driving cars, edge clouds, so the nature of where all this data reside is becoming much more dynamic and much more distributed. >> That's the point, it's much more distributed. >> How does that fit in to where you guys are going? >> We think it's great. It fits perfectly with our business model of being able to move your data around in a multi cloud environment, and have it where you need it to be, whether it's on the edge, even further out, kind of the fog of the cloud, or all the way at the center where you want it to be, so we think it fits the model that we have, from data everywhere, the data fabric. That's really what we've been designing for years and pushing to. This is the realization of that strategy. In our minds, is that's what we're arriving at. >> Partner program, quick update as we wrap up. What's the update on any kind of tiering? Do you guys have a strategy? You've obviously got more partners engaged. Sounds like cloud gives more touch points. Give a quick overview of what's going on. >> Jeff McCullough's our channel chief. He has done a great job coming in, and absolutely driving that program more aggressively out in to the field in North America. We've got a bunch of stuff, but I don't want to steal his thunder coming up at Insight, >> (laughs) That's okay. >> Not sure what I can steal at the moment. We are aggressively investing in the channel program. We have been, and will continue to be a channel-driven company. Even myself as the alliances head, we look at always, and Keith mentioned it, that third piece of the three in the box is always who's the delivery partner, and how can we help them, and obviously, the underlying tenet of that always is, let's make it meaningful, and let's be honest, meaningful to a partner is, they make money, they have services that they can absolutely embrace and then deliver. >> What's next for the relationship with AWS, and what other top partners you have. You mentioned NVIDIA before we came on camera. What's next for VMware and some of your top name partners? >> We've got some big announcements coming up with VMware, if you want to tease one of them. >> The reality in the world is that, if you want to buy solutions from VMware, a VMware validated design is kind of the pathway to really getting the mark of validation, and so we're on that path as well. We're looking to get that down the road. We've got some early tracks to it. We announced the first leg of that at this show called the net verified architecture for VMware private cloud. That gives us the first proof points that we're running the entire stack on NetApp HCI. We're going to use this as a way, along with ONTAP over time to be able to have on-prem solutions, as well as cloud volumes. With futures, they showcased it yesterday, with some future previews of VMC with cloud volumes, so look for that to come in the future timeframe. >> ONTAP AI? >> ONTAP AI. >> Back to your AI question, we just announced a joint meet in the market solution with NVIDIA, a conversion architecture, where it's NetApp storage, NVIDIA's GTX CPU servers. We've got some switching in there from Cisco, and you've got a very solid conversion infrastructre that goes specifically and targets the AI market. >> And AI, they're a pretty strategic partner, you guys with NVIDIA. >> They are. >> They've been hot lately, I mean, talk about AI. >> There's a lot of guys smiling in that booth over there. (Bruce and John laugh) They look pretty happy. >> They can't make enough GPUs for all those block chain miners. >> I think the key factor for the new alliance model is that the context shifts depending upon the market you're trying to reach, so if it's the AI market, typically NVIDIA's going to lead that conversation. If you flip it to the EUC market, and you look at GPU acceleration for BDI, they're an ecosystem to VMware driving the Horizon package, so it's a very interesting context that you have to be very savvy on to understand how the technologies fit together in a way that solution partners already today are putting them together for customers, and that AWS and all the hyperscalers know natively. >> You guys get a lot of good props. Congratulations on your success. Notable hallway conversations, certainly here and out in the field, I've talked with customers. You guys are good. With the solid state drives, and the software investment you made, it's paying off, so congratulations. >> Flash has been huge for us. >> Good luck with the new reorganization. Bruce, Keith, good too see you. >> It's great to see a solid player of come through the ACI. >> We're here on theCUBE. We'll be right back. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Alan Cohen. We'll be right back; stay with us.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018 brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamOn 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Stu, always great working with you. Bruce Shaw is here, he's the Senior Director of Global Alliances and Industry Solutions at NetApp. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I got to start out with NetApp, I mean, we've followed NetApp for decades, ya know, from the very beginning back when I was at IDC, Stu, you were probably still in your mother's womb. (laughing) But you guys are back in a big way, I mean, for a while there it looked vulnerable. You took advantage of the Dell EMC merger. You're gaining share again, you're growing, stock price is up, there's a spring in your step, what's going on? >> Well, a lot of things are going on. I think we've had a lot of leadership additions to the company, Henri Richard joined and took over as the CSO with the company. We've got a new CMO in Jean English. But more importantly, a lot of the areas that we were late to the market, and candidly we've admitted we were late. We didn't have a good Flash story a couple years ago. We've been very aggressive with Flash over the last 24 to 18 months. We're now the fastest growing Flash storage provider out in the market, and we think we'll exit this year as number one. In fact, we think that's the current course and trajectory. We're very happy with where that's going. The FlexPod partnership with Cisco was great this past year. We had a record year in Converged infrastructure, which was a down market, we picked up about 13 points a share according to IDC, so a lot of the cylinders are starting to fire, but the one that is probably the biggest and the most shocking for folks is three, four years ago, the belief was that cloud was going to kill on-prem storage for companies like NetApp. I think the one thing that they did right ahead of the curve was they embraced the cloud. They've got great partnerships with Google, Amazon, the hyperscalers, and cloud strategy and the business that drives the company there is the fastest part of the company, and Anthony Lye runs that team, and it's doing an amazing job. >> Explain how, and you're absolutely right, many, most, frankly myself at times, felt that way. Explain how cloud is a tailwind and not just a one-way street into the roach motel. >> Oh well, there isn't an enterprise today that isn't thinking about cloud in some way, shape, or form, right? Now, ya have prognosticators on either side saying it's all going to the cloud or something less than that, but the truth is when you look at a strategy like ONTAP and the ability to move your data, whether it's on-prem or to the cloud and manage it through our data fabric story, that's where NetApp really starts coming into their own. I think, again, that's where we've been able to take advantage, and it's not just having it one way or the other or being good just with the hyperscalers or good with the guys that want to be secure because most companies do a hybrid story, and they want to bit of both. >> Well, I think the one thing that I would observe about NetApp, having followed the company for many, many years, which I think gives you an advantage, is NetApp really has always had storage services in software that were largely decoupled from the hardware, and that allowed you to get into cloud early, don't ya think, Stu? >> Yeah, absolutely, and Bruce, we're here at VeeamOn, and their message sounds a lot like that to me, so maybe help explain, we were just talking to Veeam's CMO, when you hear some of the descriptions of storage services, software, multicloud, and everything, NetApp and Veeam sound alike. How are they complementary in, ya know, maybe where do they bump up against each other, yeah? >> Yeah, well, we both compete in the same market, which is storage, so of course, there's areas where we're going to compete with each other, but we are very complementary in terms of the story and the markets that we serve, right? NetApp is incredible strong in the enterprise. Veeam has great commercial channel presence, so from a route to market there's a lot of complementary stuff we do with each other. Price point, in terms of where we hit the market and the things that we go after, we have a lot of opportunity where there's not overlap to help each out to the point they're now, the relationship's evolved over the last four years where we're actually doing OEM of each other's products. We've got our E-Series we just announced yesterday that we're OEMing with these guys, which again is targeted at exactly those markets. The story between the two that we're both at our core not hardware companies, not storage companies, but data management companies really is where this starts to come together and play well. The fact that they're mutually supportive of each other makes for a really strong value proposition for the customer and the channel, especially the guys like the service providers or ya know, hybrid cloud providers, it's a big time story for them. >> So you're growing with, the partnership with Veeam is growing. >> Right. >> Ya got a combination of trends that become tailwinds, but then you've got execution. Can you explain what are those tailwinds, and what's the execution ethos with the partnership? >> We are a channel-only company for all intents and purposes. >> Dave: Oh yeah, I don't know what the number is now, but you've always been very, very high performing. >> Yeah, I know, so we look at businesses that we drive, and channel is at the core of what we do, so when you have a tailwind like, ya know, where we are with Flash and the growth there, the channel partners are making more money, the programs that are coming for them, we're not taking business that they're doing today and pushing it towards the cloud. Again, we're talking about the story that's transitory between the two, so for a lot of the channel providers that are out there getting in the market, that's a very powerful story for them. That it's not a competitive business, we're not going to try to create our own cloud service to take away from them. We want to help them as they migrate between the two. >> All right, Bruce, one of the other areas we're hearing a lot about at this show that I think lines up with NetApp is the analytics and AI, can you maybe talk about how that ties into the products? >> Yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of these markets like AI, like analytics in terms of what companies are doing, it sheds off a tremendous amount of data, right? And that data is at the heart of what they want to analyze and go through, and when they bring those things to market, the goal is how I quickly move it from where I'm capturing it to where I need it, and ONTAP does a really good job of doing that in terms of being able to take the data to where they need it, whether it's at the edge or whether it's back at the core of the company, so that you can actually do the real work with it and gain the insights that drive the business. >> Bruce, what's the resale agreement that you have with Veeam, can you explain that? >> We have Veeam on our price list. Our sales reps can sell Veeam, can be compensated for it, vice versa, they can absolutely hook in and drive away with NetApp, and now that we're getting products like E-Series where their product is embedded in ours, that only strengthens that kind of motion. So for a NetApp sales rep today, if they have an opportunity where Veeam is needed on it as part of the offering, it's absolutely in their wheelhouse to go sell it, and they get the sale level of love and attention from quote and comp standpoint that they would if it was NetApp only products. >> So this is kind of interesting innovation that Veeam, I think, has been out in front of, they, and I dunno how they do it, Stu, but I think Veeam understands the lifetime value of a customer and is willing to make, put sweat equity into a deal as part of a partnership to make it transparent to a partner sales force. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's innovation in business model. >> Absolutely, we're very proud of our sales force and the work that they're able to do. We view ourselves as kind of the last big enterprise standalone storage company that's out there doing this, and I run strategic alliances, and some partners integrate really well with our sales guys. Others, it's more of a, ya know, it requires more work. To your point, Veeam has done a superb job at identifying how and where they play with our folks and getting together where we go to market together. >> It's interesting, we used to, ya know, several years ago now, ask the question can NetApp remain independent. We've seen all these independent storage companies kind of go away. Used to have this conversation with David Scott at 3PAR all the time, EMC itself wasn't able to maintain it, and then NetApp got to the point where it was almost too big for an acquisition, and although stock price was down, everybody, NetApp was the rumor of MNA more than any company I can think of in the storage business, but now you're seeing sort of antithetical to what most people expected, it's kind of like the cloud we were talking about before, storage companies emerged. Pure was the first one over a billion since NetApp. What are your thoughts, and what's that, I wonder what, you guys must talk in the hallways about that whole, the dynamics of the industry. It seems like it's still a viable business model to be best of breed. >> It's very viable, so I took over running the strategic alliances at the beginning of January, and my dance card's full. I can't believe the number of folks that are calling up wanting to partner. I think we've gotten much more mature in terms of how we view the market and our ability to get strategically with other companies to be successful, and there absolutely is always going to be a place out there for a best of breed story. Customers want the best technology that they can get to handle their business needs, and if we partner with great partners, whether it's Veeam or others to provide that for them, I think the viability of NetApp only gets stronger not weaker. >> It's interesting because now ya got NetApp, Pure, Nutanix, soon to be Veeam, as billion dollar independent pure play companies in the storage business. Isilon couldn't get there, Data Domain couldn't get there, Compellent couldn't get there, 3PAR couldn't get there, Lefthand couldn't get, EqualLogic, I can go down the list. They were never able to reach that escape velocity, and maybe it is cloud, maybe cloud is that weird tailwind for people who can figure out how to take advantage of cloud and hybrid cloud, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think it is, number one. I think also the companies that you mentioned at various times, and I'm a hardware industry dinosaur, I've been around forever. A lot of those companies you talk about the difficult moment from them was hey, we're a storage company, now we want to add compute or now we want to go into this part of the market that put them at odds with the guys they were partnering with. George, our CEO, has been absolutely maniacal with his vision of our path forward is managing data, period. Whatever that form takes, we don't need to be a compute company, we don't need to be a networking company, we want to be a data company. I think how that then drives the decisions, whether it's partnering with cloud, whether it's going into new markets with HCI, even if it's things about transforming the legacy data center from traditional data center and how it's managed on-prem to something that's all Flash driven and much more efficient and much more programmable than it was in the past, so it's easier to administer, those are the areas that we can go innovate, and as long as we're partnering with the right partners out in the industry, that makes us a very good viable destination for the customer without worrying about well, do we have a compute node, are we in the server business now, are we suddenly in the switch business? Those are things that are not even on our radar. >> Yeah, I mean, you guys are in a unique position from that standpoint. You're very large now, you're the largest independent storage company, so everybody wants to work with you. You don't bump up into these adjacencies, and you can make bets, you can place your chips in areas whereas some of the startups, there's tons of innovation, but it's really hard to hit that escape. The amount of resources that you need, the money you need for promotion, the talent war that's going on out there, the go-to-market challenges, the partner challenges, so you guys are in a pretty good position right now. >> We really are, and I think we've actually done a lot of the restructuring internally to continue that and capitalize on it. Probably the biggest change, which outside the company, most folks wouldn't notice immediately, is that we moved at the beginning of this year to a three distinct business unit structure where we're focusing on three parts of the business to go forward. We've got our cloud business unit, which is driving into, as I said, the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye. We've got cloud data center, which is more of the new technologies like HCI and Converge and object storage technology like StorageGRID, and that's, right now that's an incredibly fast growing business for us. Then, of course, we've got our traditional storage software infrastructure business where we have products like E-Series and modernizing the data center, which is primarily driven with this transition to Flash. You've got three BUs now that are maniacally focused on the different areas of the market where we see here's an immediate opportunity in Flash. Here's a slightly longer opportunity in things like hybrid cloud and HCI and Converge infrastructure and a much longer term bet was how does the cloud really become a piece where we're managing between all of those. It lets us be a lot nimble between it. It's almost like three subbusinesses where we're going to market. >> Yeah, Dave, and actually that aligns perfectly with the research we've been doing for over five years from server stand and true private cloud, you've got the hyperscale, you've got the transformation locally in spanning those two, and then you've got that transition from the traditional. >> Oh, I think it's a sound strategy, and it'll serve us well in the years to come. >> There's obviously a lot of noise about artificial intelligence in the marketplace. You've got some companies trying to position to be the platform for machine intelligence or artificial intelligence, what's NetApp's point of view on that? >> Well certainly, we share some of that, but again, I think at the end of the day for us, it's much more important about fine, wherever I'm capturing that artificial intelligence is not likely the place where I'm going to do a lot of the analytics and work on it, so it really does come down to, ya know, am I moving it up to the cloud to do that work, where am I making my big insights, where am I mining through it, and then how am I relating that back, whether it's at the edge or whether it's at the core data center, and again, we think with ONTAP, with the partners that we're going to market with for AI, for ML, IoT, that's the difference maker for us at the end of the day. It's not that we're just another storage company storing the telemetry data off of a car for AI, we're putting it into a format and a form that's usable quickly, efficiently, real time, where Tesla can go make a decision on the car right now, not days, weeks, months from now. >> All right, Bruce, well hey, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and good luck. >> Enjoyed having me, thank you. >> All right, great. >> Good to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching VeeamOn 2018, this is theCUBE.