>> Welcome back, everyone. We we are here live in our Palo Alto studios with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host of today's special digital event, hybrid, cloud and IT analytics for digital business. This is our one-on-one segment with Umair Khan, principal product marketing manager at CA Technologies. Where we get to do a drill-down. He's got a special product, UIM. We're going to talk about unified management. Umair, great to see you. Nice shirt, looking good, same as mine. I got the cuff links. >> I know, we think alike and have the same shirt. >> Got the cloud cufflinks. >> You got to get me one of those. (laughs) >> Good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Hey, I want to just drill down. We had the two keynote presenters, Peter Burris, we'll keep on the research perspective and then kind of, where you guys tie in with your VP of Product Management, Sudip Datta, and interesting connection. Peter laid out the future of digital business, matches perfectly with the story of CA, so interesting. More importantly, it's got to be easy, though. How are you guys doing? I want to drill down to your product, UIM. Unified management, what is that? Unified infrastructure management. What's making it so easy? So, like you said, it's unified infrastructure management. It's a single product to monitor your cloud, your on-prem, your traditional and your entire stack, be it compute layer, storage layer, application services layer. It's a single product to monitor it all, so a) you get a single view to resolve problems, and at the back end, people tend to underestimate the time it takes to configure different tools, right? Imagine a different tool for cloud, different tool for public cloud too that you use, I'm not going to name vendors. Traditional environment you have, or maybe one silo group is using hybrid infrastructure, right? So configuring those, managing those, it's tough. And having a single console to deploy monitoring configuration in the same time monitor that infrastructure makes it easy. >> You and I were talking yesterday, before we came here and were doing a dry run, about cars. >> Yeah. >> And we were talking about the Tesla is so cool compared to an older car, but it's got everything in there. It's got analytics, it's got data, but it's a car. The whole purpose is to drive. It has nothing to do with IT, yet it's got a ton of IT analytics in it. How is business related to that? Because you could almost say that the single pane of glass is analytics. It's almost like Tesla for the business. The business is the car. How do you view that, because you have an interesting perspective. I want to get your take on that. >> Absolutely. So I've seen a lot of people giving examples as well, but I think cars of today is a great example of how monitoring should be, right? Cars, yes, it's still about the look and feel and the brand, but when you're sitting in the car now you expect a unified view. You want blind spot detector, you want collision detector, everything there. Even your fuel gauge, it shouldn't tell you how much is left, it should tell you how much mileage is left, right? Everything is becoming more intelligent. And you know Peter talked about the importance of expedience in the digital business, so IT team needs that visibility, that end-to-end unified view, just like in a modern car, to avoid any blind spots and resolve issues faster, and at the same time, it has to be more proactive and predictive in nature. So that collision detection, all the car companies these days have a commercial on safety features, collision detection, and same with IT. They need to have that ability to use intelligent monitoring tools to be able to resolve issues before the customer experience suffers. And one of our customers says, if someone opened a service desk ticket, that means everyone knows about the issue. I need to be resolving that issue before the service desk ticket is issued, right? >> You don't see Tesla opening up issues, "Hey, you're on the freeway, slow down." But this is important. I mean, Tesla was disruptive because they didn't just build a car and say "bolt on analytics." They took holistic, proactive view of the car experience with technology and analytics in mind to bring that tech to the table. That's similar to the message that we heard from Peter and Sudip about analytics. It's not just a thing you bolt on anymore. You got to think about the outcome of what you're trying to do. >> Exactly. >> That really is the key. And how does that unified infrastructure management do that? >> So it's all about unifying all different, today's digital businesses are adopting a lot of technologies. Every developer has their own stacks. As an IT ops person, you don't want to be someone who says, "you cannot adopt this cloud" or, "you do not adopt this technology." You should be flexible enough to whatever stack they have. You should be able to monitor that infrastructure for them, get yourself a unified view to resolve issues faster. But at the same time, provide your dev teams the flexibility of choosing the stack they like. >> A lot of IT ops guys are impacted and energized, quite frankly, by the future that's upon us with all these opportunities, but the realities of having uptime is a for opsis key and also enabling new (mutters) like IOT. The question for you is, who is most impacted in the enterprise organization or in IT operations, by your modern analytics products and visions? >> So I think there are two groups, right? One is the traditional VP of IT infrastructure, IT operations, so he has a lot of concerns about his infrastructure is becoming more and more dynamic, more complex, clouds are being adopted, businesses talking about expedience, right? So he needs a modern approach to get that end-to-end picture and make sure there are no blame games happening between different groups, and resolve issues really proactively. And at the same time, his tool and his analytics approach need to support modern infrastructures, right? If businesses wants to adopt cloud-based technologies, he needs to be, or she needs to be, able to provide that monitoring, needs to cover that approach as well. >> Is there one that pops out that you see growing faster in terms of the persona within IT? Because we hear Sudip talk about network, which we all want the network to go faster. I mean, you can't go to to Levi's Stadium or any kind of place and people complain about wifi. My kids are like, "Dad, the network's too slow." But in IT, network's critical. But only up to the app, so it's a bigger picture than that. Is there one persona that's rising up that you see that really hones in on this message of this holistic view of looking at modern analytics? >> I think rules are changing overall in IT, right? The system admin is becoming cloud admin, or the dev ops guy, so I think it's getting more and more collaborative. Roles will be redefined, reengineered a bit to meet the needs of modern technologies, modern companies, and so on. And we're also seeing the rise of a site reliability engineer, right? Because he's more concerned about reliability versus individual component. To him an app might be bad because of the network, because of the application itself, or the infrastructure that runs it. >> Okay, what does the UIM stand for and how does that impact in the overall stack? >> So UIM is our unified, as I mentioned before, unified infrastructure management product that's the most comprehensive solution on the market. If you look at technology support from your public-private cloud-based infrastructures like Amazon, Azure, or your hyperconverge. You can also call them private cloud, like mechanics, and being variable stack, or your traditional IT as well, from your (mutters) environments or from your Cisco environments, Cisco UCS, or anything. So it really gives that comprehensive solution set, and at the same time it provides an open architecture if you wanted to monitor some technology that we don't provide support for, it allows you to monitor that. And again, because of that, people are able to resolve issues faster, they're able to improve mean time to repair, and at the same time, I'll reemphasize the configuration part, right? Imagine you have multiple tools for each silos, then you need to configure that. In a dev ops world, you have to release applications faster, but you cannot deploy an application without configuring the monitoring for it, right? But if the infrastructure monitoring guys are taking three or four days to configure monitoring, then the entire concept of dev ops falls apart. So that's where UIM helps too. It really helps ops deploy configurations a lot faster through out-of-the-box templates in a unified approach across hybrid stacks. >> And developers want infrastructure as code, that's clear as day, and now they want great analytics. Okay, so I got to ask you the use case. I got to drill down on use cases, specifically, for the folks watching, whether they're maybe a CA customer in the past or one now, or not yet a customer. Where are you winning? Where is CA actually winning right now? How would talk about the specific use cases where it's a perfect fit and where you've got beachhead and where you can go. >> No, I think the places we typically win really well is as companies become more hybrid, if they're starting up in cloud-based infrastructures, they all of a sudden realize that the monitoring approach for traditional infrastructure is really not for cloud. The more technology that (mutters), you started with cloud and you want to adopt containers, and you start adding these monitoring tools. All of a sudden you realize this approach cannot work. I'm creating more silos, I don't the internal visibility and these infrastructures are more dynamic, going up and down all the time. I need a modern tool, modern approach. So typically, when you have hybrid infrastructures, we typically win there. And I think of a large insurance company as well, where initially we started working with them, and initially they had a lot of different tools that they worked on-- >> I think we actually have a slide for this. Can you pull that up on the thing here, the slide. Before you get to the insurance company, I want to get the graphic up. There it is. So we had the global 500 company, go ahead, continue. >> So basically worked with a global 500 insurance company. They had the same kind of issue, right? A lot of different technologies being adopted, cloud being adopted by a lot of the application team, and they wanted to really scale the business, digitize the business, but they didn't want the monitoring to get in the way. Right, so they implemented UIM, and they significantly improved mean time to repair and the time they spent in monitoring tools, right? That's the biggest thing. IT while monitoring may sound cool, but it's, the IT wants to work in modern innovative stuff. They want to stare at a screen, spending time and creating scripts and monitoring. So it really gave them the ability to get you the single tool to monitor increasingly complex and hybrid infrastructure. >> So you guys also ran a survey, also validated by Tech Validate, which is a third party firm which surveys top IT folks, on the three important ITOA, IT analytics solutions, correlation of data across apps, infrastructure, and network, 78%. Full stack visibility with in-context log monitoring and analysis, 65%. Ability to scale in high volume environments. So interesting how those are the top three. Kind of speaks to the conversation Peter Burris and I had. Lot of data (laughs), okay, multiple stack issues, so you're talking about a holistic view. What's the importance of these top three trends? >> I think a lot of companies miss out when they only monitor a silo, right? Even when I talk about our unified product, it's unified infrastructure. Even within infrastructure, there's so many components. You have to unify them, and that's the UIM work. But as Sudip mentioned, we have one of the biggest portfolio in the market. We're not only good at unified infrastructure, but also the network that connects that infrastructure to the application, and the application itself, right? The mobile application, the user experience of it, and the code-level visibility that you need. So as the survey mentioned, one of the biggest issues that companies have is they want to aggregate this data from app, network, and infrastructure. And at CA we are uniquely positioned because we have products in all three areas. I think typically no vendor covers all three areas and we're tying these together with more contextual analytics, which includes log which we released a while back, and I love to give the example of logs as well, right? People even monitor logs in a silo. But the value of using log together with performance is performance tells you a system is slow, okay, but logs tell you why. So it's using context together with your performance across app, infra, and network, really helps you solve these problems. >> Well, the Internet of Things and the car example we use also takes advantage of potential log data because data exhaust could be sitting around, but with realtime it could be very relevant. Okay, so let's move on to some of the kudos you're getting. Customers recognize CA as a leader in ITOA, IT analytics, operational analytics. 82% of organizations agree with the following, little thumb-up there. "CA has the breadth and depth of monitoring expertise to deliver the cross-correlation of IT operation analytics data from app to infrastructure to network. I buy the vision. I'm going to challenge you on this. What's the most important thing you got that this survey says? Because that's a huge number. Some might challenge that number. So I'm going to challenge that. Why is that number so important, and describe how it's reached. >> So I think it's some of our customers that have bought the belief of this, right, because we have in the portfolio an application performance like I mentioned, infrastructure performance with UIM, our net ops product portfolio, we are the only vendor in the market with that holistic set of products and experience in all three areas. So that really positions us uniquely. If you pick up any vendor out there, they either started on the app side, just started going on the infrastructure side, or they're a pure network player, starting to go infra and trying to get into app. But we are the vendor that has all three, and now we are bringing all of these three areas together through our operation intelligence platform that Sudip mentioned. >> Okay, so go to the next slide here. This one here is kind of chopped down, so move to the next one, you can come to that, look at that, later. This is the one I want to talk about, because retail is huge. We cover retail as a retail analyst firm, but retail does have a lot of edge components to it. It's heavily data-driven, evolving realtime from wearables to whatever. I mean, it's just going crazy. So it's turbulent from a change standpoint, but it's heavily IT operations driven. Why is this important? It says "Global 500 retail company was spending too much time in issue resolution. They lacked end-to-end visibility across cloud, traditional, and applications. After implementing CA UIM, they improved their mean time to repair by 35-50%. I'll translate that. Basically, it's broken, they got to repair it. Things aren't working. Retail can't be down. Why did you guys provide this kind of performance? Give a specific example of how this all plays out. >> So actually this tech firm named the customer, but in a typical scenario in retail, everyone is getting these mobile apps, right? So you need to monitor performance of the mobile app, the application running on it, we have tools for that, and the infrastructure behind it. So typically these mobile apps are on the cloud, right? IT ops have a traditional infrastructure, but this is Amazon-based or Azure-based. They come to us, we are adopting these mobile applications, but at the same time, we don't want to set up a separate IT ops team for these mobile applications as well. So retail organizations are proactively implementing an analytics-based approach for their unified end-to-end view. So even though the mobile app might be siloed, but it's multi-channel in retail, right? So they might order from their application but they might pick up in the store, and the store might be running on a physical Windows machine, versus some cloud-based boss. >> So you're saying they get to the cloud real fast, then realize, "oh, damn, I got to fix this. "I need analytics." So either way the customer use case is they can work with you on the front end to design that reimagined infrastructure, or bring you in at the right time. >> And our monitoring tool helps that, gives that end-to-end view, right, from the user's genie all the way from logging in, to all the way to the transaction being updated on the inventory software, being updated on the store, all the back-end SOP system. So we monitor all these technologies, give them end-to-end views. And we give them proactive (mutters). That's what analytics is, right? If their experience is slow, again, a user shouldn't be telling them on social media, "I can't order this," right? That IT team should be proactively testing, proactively-- >> Agility, speed and agility. >> Right, and without a unified view, it's not possible. >> All right, I'm at a bottom line here for you, and get your personal perspective. Take your CA hat off and your personal industry tech hat on. What should IT guys, what should they think of when working with CA? Why is CA good for them, and why should they look at you, and why should they continue to use you if they're an existing customer? >> So I think CA, like I said before, they're experienced in this space, right? And the investment we are making in analytics and cloud, we have a large customer base, so pretty much every customer, every enterprise, every industry you name, we have a customer there. And we have a huge portfolio already. So we have the basis from application to network to infrastructure, and are building this analytics layer that our customers have been asking us, that you're one of the rare vendors that have the most depth of information already available, right? So if aggregating that into an operational intelligence platform really helps puts us in a unique position by giving them the broadest set of data through a single platform. Right, and our experience for 30 years in monitoring, like Peter mentioned as well, and the investment we are bringing in cloud, UIM is a example. We were recently applauded by industry analysts as well that it's one of the best tools for single pane of glass for hybrid cloud environments. That shows how heavily we are investing in new, modern infrastructures like Amazon and Azure and even Utanics, right? >> Well, certainly you've got a lot of props. We just shared some of those stats and from independent firms like Tech Validate. But more, I think, impressive is that Peter Burroughs is on the cutting edge of digital business. You guys are aligned really with some of the cutting-edge research, where we see the market going, so congratulations. This digital event's been great. I want to ask you one final question. We see you guys out a lot at all the events we go to with TheCUBE, we go to all the cloud events. So you guys are going to be going to all the cloud events this year. So is that how customers can get ahold of you in the field? Which events will you be at? Where should they look for CA out in the field? >> So I think we're pretty much everywhere, on all the key events that you mentioned. Amazon Reinvent and C-World is coming as well. Customers should come to us and see how CA is helping people better manage the modern software factory, what we call it, every customer is in a digital economy, is trying to build software to deliver unique experiences, and at CA we talked about our IT operations, from dev to test to ops, we provide all the solutions. So C-World, Amazon Reinvent, you know, come find us there, or online at ca.com as well. >> All right, Umair, thanks for coming here and sharing your thoughts as part of our one-on-one drill downs from the digital event here at Silicon Angle Media's Cube Studios in Palo Alto, where we discuss the cloud and IT analytics for digital business, sponsored by CA Technologies. I'm John Furrier. I've been the host and moderator for today. I want to thank Peter Burris, head of research at wikibon.com for the opening keynote and Sudip Datta, who's the vice president of product management for CA for the second keynote. And all the conversation will be online, and thanks for watching, everyone. And check out CA. We'll see you at all the different cloud events with TheCUBE, thanks for watching.

live from San Francisco California it's the queue at vmworld 2014 brought to you by vmware cisco EMC HP and nutanix now here are your hosts John courier and Dave vellante okay welcome back at when live in San Francisco here this is the cube vmworld 2014 our fifth year I'm John furry with Dave a lot the extracting the signal noise we love talking to the executives the entrepreneurs the VCS all all the action is here on the ground ball tickets our next guest Eric Herzog the CMO and I think you're running biz dev as well yes is Deb for violin memory systems violin is went recently went public now on a complete transformation you're at the helm there from EMC so you know a little bit bout storage and flash welcome to the cube well thank you very much i always enjoy coming to the cube and doing it now for four or five years it's been great guys do an outstanding job we really appreciate it one of the things we're excited about aussies flash and every gets move them up here that's been in the storage and the periphery of stored with cloud and hybrid cloud is raving about the economic disruption of flash the performance of flash flash is super hot now doctors getting a lot of the press right now cuz the deal but still flashes at the under the hood that's where the action is so what's the update give us a take on what's going on in flash in violin what are you guys up to so the big thing is flashes at that economic tipping point so if you go back to late 70s and early 80s as everyone remembers everything was taped all the data centers were taped hard drives were more expensive they were faster and you got to the economic tipping port we're using a hard drive base to Ray was much better than using a tape subsystem than tape became backup archive which is still great at tape in fact I saw from one of the analysts who tracks such things that tape is actually still the cheapest media I don't see any CIO rushing to the all taped data center so what you've got now is flashes at that economic tipping point that between the savings and storage server software licensing power rack space floor space etc that when you do the economic analysis you can just literally do with the calculator pay is to go flash in fact flash is almost free these days so certainly the economists are ridiculously amazing in terms of cost now on the performance side you're starting to see some segmentation yesterday were talking about capacity flash and performance flash what does that mean I mean I was how they different off is it flashes flash but you started to see these conversations that are being kind of workload specific is that where it's going we still in the flash adoption phase what's your take them now we're anthem at the maturation phase flash is shifting away from everyone assuming it's the same just think of the old hard drives you know even today got 7200 rpm 10,000 RPM and 15,000 rpm and it really makes a difference as you use those various capacities and the various perform em extra around them flashes and it's all the same medium same media same heads but they make changes flash is doing the same thing there is people focusing on performance flash violin being one of those we have one of the highest performing systems out there as measured by not by violin by third parties and they got other people that want to go would all say cheap and deep flash not as cheap as hard drive but let's make flash you know faster than hard drives but not uber fast and so you could put other workloads on it that are more capacity sensitive than performance sensitive so I want if we get to unpack performance a little bit so people talk about I ops they talk about latency how do you guys look at performance how should customers be looking at performance so it's really a package okay the number one enemy of most applications particularly in mid up to global enterprise is absolutely latency so I ops is important but if you don't have good latency I ops don't overpower that so you need to have both good I ops and really strong latency in order to optimize where that be an Oracle workload at sa p workload a sequel workload those types of workloads often are very latency sensitive the lower the latency the better the application functions and the more you can do with it so so who are the kings and queens and princes of latency you would put you guys in that mix and we are in that category we can guarantee under half a millisecond latency or five hundred microseconds whichever term you want to you is whether the array is empty or full we also have some customers that have done some host-based aggregation in production and we have one of the 25 largest companies in the world with multiple petabytes in production they aggregate on the host side are arrays and they're able to deliver to millions sustained I ops regardless of workload across all those petabytes and point 15 millisecond of latency now that's not what we claim on an individual array the spec sheet so they're really getting it and they've proven it to us several times so you know that's in the performance side of the equation so latency I ops bandwidth snot as much of an issue because bandwidth obviously you can get off a hard drives and hard drives are very good for high-bandwidth situation you're not going to use all flash in meeting or attainment applications or an oil and gas or a lot of the genomic research stuff because it's very bandwidth intensive and you could get great bandwidth off of low-cost hard drives actually and create you know giant mass cluster for example is better in those workloads but in database workloads virtualized workloads for example we have a customer that on a certain physical server had 14 vm virtual machines they then used our flash and they were able to get 50 on the same exact physical Hardware same size virtual machine same I ops for that those virtual machines and go from 14 to 50 just by switching to flash same vm was VMware same exact server infrastructure all they do is swap the storage out so that's an example of how a you get the performance and be you also get the economics because obviously putting 50 virtual machines on the same physical Hardware saves you money so I would think the big benefit to is consistency all right so you hear from customers are just give me consistent predictable right moments right so while you're in the same thing from customers yes absolutely so what you have when you look out at the flash world what you're going to see is certain people have a right cliff and what happens is when you hit the right cliff or they're going to have unequal performance they'll be better than a hard drive system for sure but there they'll still get a sawtooth not as dramatic as you'd see in a hard drive subsystem but sawtooth what we do is we guarantee consistent I ops and since latency whether the array is empty half full or all the way full and very few guys in the off lash community can do that I want to talk a little bit about the the stack so you came from a company you were running you know very senior executive at emc within the mid-range business VNX awesome stack been around forever a lot of value in that stack takes a long time to harden a stack a lot of the flash guys you know you guys included came out you solving a problem start selling stack takes a long time to mature so how should we be thinking about the stack so raid stack is always crucial you know rate is not just about performance redundant array of independent disks its number one function when raid came out quite evident across the bay here at UC Berkeley was for resiliency so that's the number one thing that a raid stack does the second thing it does of course is give you performance as well because you aggregate whether it's hard drives or flash drives or hybrids you aggregate the performance across the pieces of media so I think one of the benefits you're going to see from certain vendors in the flash base we being one of them is we have a long history we're on our fourth generation flash configuration and we basically rev our generations every two years so we're looking at a raid stack that's in the eighth year time frame some of the other flash startups you know they've been shipping for two years you have a two-year-old raid stack an eight-year-old raid stack has got much more resiliency it's got more test time for us in particular our sweet spot is in the upper mid to global enterprise if you look at the fortune global 500 list over 50 of those customers use violin which when you're big company is one thing when you're a small company like us to have 50 of the global fortune 500 using your products it's got to be pretty resilient in the stack or they wouldn't be using it I mean I was on it I probably spoke one-on-one or maybe one on 2132 over 500 customers in the first half of this year and the on flash and i would ask every one of them who's used an all-flash array and it was actually pretty low penetration still right not surprising violin came up a lot TMS came up a lot I mean not and then and then pure a little bit and then you know bits and pieces but violin was consistently there's guys did a good job early on getting into this space but I want to ask you about sometimes I call it channel ft the urinary Olympics and particularly around data reduction and so you guys are now you know throwing your head into that ring how should we be thinking about sort of data reduction compression d2 obviously drives pricing down rank it helps create that that's I think part of the reason why we're at that tipping point that and you know ml see how should we be thinking about data reduction there's a lot a lot of you know finger-pointing in line not in line post process give us your point of view so the bottom line is dated ed will help you in two primary workloads virtual desktop and virtual server okay beyond that it doesn't help you compression helps you in database oriented workloads and there are certain data types that are not compressible at all so for example mpegs JPEGs and other data types are not compressed with all their already pre compressed by the nature of the data type so everyone needs to be wary that just as when you get your miles per gallon when you buy that brand new car it will vary and it will vary by workloads so if you've got a workload that's heavily already compressed you're not going to get benefit from anyone's compression including arms if you've got a workload that's already been d duped you're not going to get a benefit from anyone's d do so you have to segment your workloads I think the other thing Dave in addition to what's driving that price point which is compression and D do is multiple workloads so for violin in particular our average arraign we've already publicly talked about this our average array shipping is well over 30 terabytes that's not true of a lot of other guys when you've got 30 terabytes with the average database being four to five terabytes people don't put one database on our stuff people who sell five terabyte arrays and a recent large coming just announced the new five terabyte array they're going to put one database with us at 30 to 40 terabytes average people run three four five databases does anyone really buy a vmax or a netapp 8,000 class or a high-end IBM box and run one workload on that in the hybrid world or in the hard drive world no but that's now that people are running multiple and mixed workloads on flash arrays that plus the dee doop and compression is driving this economic switch over and why flashes the right choice for your data center well you guys do obvious do a lot in database generally and specifically oracle database via Oracle's big on pushing hybrid Columba compression and trying to lock out its competitors for grants abating in that what are you seeing there in Oracle environments and I've again I've talked a lot of customers and the the instances of hybrid columnar are still very limited right in theory on the road map how what are you seeing what are your thoughts on that what do you talk to customers customers must say well you know Oracle's locking you out you know how about I just a chubber a couple things first of all on the price points it won't matter because people run violin arrays with mixed in multiple workloads already so even if you want Oracle stuff if you were to buy the Oracle if you're going to buy Oracle compression or compression to any of the database from the database vendors themselves for us it's still benefits us we don't sell a lot of five and ten terabyte arrays we sell lots of 30 and 40 and 70 tera byte arrays we can even scale are raised up to 280 terabytes which most the other guys can't do and I'm talking now raw capacity not d duper compressor capacity at the same time while the database guys are trying to do that one thing I'd encourage the end users do is just look at the list price it's available readily Oracle's is available it's a pretty high ticket item so whether it's violent or any of the other flash vendors that have compression it won't compress as well as Oracle's will or any other database vendors but the price is pretty high so if you get reasonable compression from a storage render it's going to be a lot less expensive than using that from the database vendor down maybe the database vendors an Oracle change their strategy but right now it's a very high ticket item and when you get it from the storage vendor and even if it doesn't compress as much it's still a lot cheaper so you'll have to take that as part of the financial analysis when you're looking at your database deployment now you made a big personal bet on violin I mean you and I i was there in the front row and you announcing the latest sort of v NX which is a great announcement I mean it was you guys ticked a lot of boxes it was a lot of hard work and I realize that but my one big question was what about all flash like well we have all flash too well you said all the right marketing things and then you know several months later here you are at violin big personal bet all right you have senior executive at emc years not bad I know a lot of travel but you know pretty pretty good life hey yeah a lot of a lot of people working with you for you you know a lot of great customers why'd you make that that choice so a couple things first of all violence got an incredible set of customers when they divulge the customers to me under NDA I was like shocked I couldn't believe who the customers were you know I worked at IBM as well as EMC so of course all the big boys are your customers and they always will be but the number of really big companies they had was very impressive incredible technology this year has been all about the software stack which violin has been very mediocre at now it's got a whole set of software potential and as you know Dave I've done seven startups five of them been acquired and I can smell a stinker this is not a stinker so it past the fume test after doing seven startup so it you know feels like the what was that attraction obviously the IPO went off without a hitch right in terms of at least going public but it stopped in climb there was a little hitch excuse me absolutely being a low I'd like violent emerging player also the market team is huge yeah so that's I mean one market opportunity so with that kind of the IPO stumble if you will you still came on board yes that was not an issue for you like okay I'm going guns blaring well in addition doing seven starters I've done this is my fourth turn around and all of them have ended up very well IBM wat one of my turn arounds i was at mac store as the senior VP of Marketing when CJ Mack store that was another turnaround although be at a very large company obviously mac store at five billion at the time of the acquisition but done a number of turnarounds as well so it's it's an attractive thing to do it's a fun thing to do you feel you could really do this yeah the park I know I'm a good man but I'm not that old yet yeah it's pretty straightforward you get the customers give them some good product collect some cash do it again well I mean it's all about execution you know and violin get a lot of really great things they did really well by the customers customers love them great tech support great field support the SE teams even a group of consulting engineers and all the consulting engineers actually RX oracle and microsoft guys know their learning story but they know all about the database community and we got a couple guys from actually ex vmware guys as well so that's that's a big thing but I think the key thing is you got to execute on all cylinders and we had a great technology leadership group that did the first set got the company to the first hundred million but it wasn't the right guys to grow the business make the visit and by the way you guys interview VCS all the times you know it's very common you get to a certain point and then the founding executive team sort of needs to move aside great technology guys but not the best business men and that's a strong attraction we're just talking some VCS up here some tier 1 Greylock and any a move the question that came in over text and the day was texting me that we wanted to ask was you know at these big valuation the private companies it's hard for the employees to make money so the silver lining and your opportunity is there is a lot of growth opportunities and money-making opportunities for the management team and investors right so so that's a good position to attract some town yeah that's well that's the that's the appeal yeah when you think about there's certain guys that are really good at IBM EMC Microsoft HP VMware and they're never going to do well in a start-up you got other guys that are hybrids can be big and small company and the attraction for those that can do both is you can bring the seasoned management that you learn at an IBM and EMC a Microsoft a VMware bring that to the small company which has great technology would often does not have the discipline and rigor that a big company does and what you have to do is bounce the drive for new technology and new customers with the business model and not become overly bureaucratic and that's the attraction of a turnaround as well as guys who do lots of startups is to be able to do that and grow the company and the key thing has got to grow it properly and that's the upside well you're getting your track records phenomenal we've been following your career tech athlete for sure now Wall Street you got to kind of do the dance and you know keep keep nice and get these guys back to snap them in line right that's kind of the key focus to as well right yeah it's it's about financial execution right now we brought out a whole bunch of new products our windows flash array in line to you to compression a whole class of I'd say unmatched enterprise class data services in the off flash erase space and you've got to be able to leverage all of that and that's a key thing you've got the technology if you don't execute on the business side you know you go out of business and we've got the right team in place now to take the technology where it needs to deliver the business value to the shareholders and the and the stockholders Eric herzlich CMO violin memory systems you know my philosophy in my experience although you know not as extensive as yours is in a growing market a few missteps can be rewarded with great product so you guys have certainly a good product to get a mulligan with a growth market wind behind your back so congratulations seeing things on track and really exciting to see good company this is the cube here at vmworld 2014 right back into the short break