[Music] hello and welcome to this power panel where we go deep with three storage industry vets two from infinidat in an analyst view to find out what's happening in the high-end storage business and what's new with infinidat which has recently added significant depth to its executive ranks and we're going to review the progress on infinidat's infinibox ssa a low-latency all-solid state system designed for the most intensive enterprise workloads to do that we're joined by phil bullinger the chief executive officer of it finidet ken steinhardt is the field cto at infinidat and we bring in the analyst view with eric bergener who's the vice president of research infrastructure systems platforms and technologies group at idc all three cube alums gents welcome back to the cube good to see you thanks very much dave good to be here thanks david as always a pleasure phil let me start with you as i mentioned up top you've been top grading your team we covered the herzog news beefing up your marketing and also upping your game and emea and apj go to market recently give us the business update on the company since you became ceo earlier this year yeah dave i'd be happy to you know the uh i joined the company in january and it's been a it's been a fast 11 months uh exciting exciting times at infinidad as you know really beginning last fall the company has gone through quite a renaissance a change in the executive leadership team uh i was really excited to join the company we brought on you know a new cfo new chief human resources officer new chief legal officer operations head of operations and most recently as has been you know widely reported we brought in eric to head up our marketing organization as a cmo and then last week richard bradbury in in london to head up international sales so very excited about the team we brought together it's uh it's resulted in or it's been the culmination of a lot of work this year to accelerate the growth of infinidat and that's exactly what we've done it's the company has posted quarter after quarter of significant revenue growth we've been accelerating our rate and pace of adding large new fortune 500 global 2000 accounts and the results show it definitely the one of the most exciting things i think this year has been infinidat has pretty rapidly evolved from a single product line uh company around the infinibox architecture which is what made us unique at the start and still makes us very unique as a company and we've really expanded out from there on that same common software-defined architecture to the ssa the solid state array which we're going to talk about in some in some depth today and then our backup appliance our data protection appliance as well all running the same software and what we see now in the field uh many customers are expanding quickly beyond you know the traditional infinibox business uh to the other parts of our portfolio and our sales teams in turn are expanding their selling motion from kind of an infinibox approach to a portfolio approach and it's it's really helping accelerate the growth of the company yeah that's great to hear you really got a deep bench and of course you you know a lot of people in the industry so you're tapping a lot of your your colleagues okay let's get into the market i want to bring in uh the analyst perspective eric can you give us some context when we talk about things like ultra low latency storage what's the market look like to you help us understand the profile of the customer the workloads the market segment if you would well you bet so i'll start off with a macro trend which is clearly there's more real-time data being captured every year in fact by 2024 24 of all of the data captured and stored will be real-time and that puts very different performance requirements on the storage infrastructure than what we've seen in years past a lot of this is driven by digital transformation we've seen new workload types come in big data analytics real-time big data analytics and obviously we've got legacy workloads that need to be handled as well one other trend i'll mention that is really pointing up this need for low latency consistent low latency is workload consolidation we're seeing a lot of enterprises look to move to fewer storage platforms consolidate more storage workloads onto fewer systems and to do that they really need low latency consistent low latency platforms to be able to achieve that and continue to meet their service level agreements great thank you for that all right ken let's bring you into the conversation steiny what are the business impacts of of latency i want you to help us understand when and why is high latency a problem what are the positive impacts of having a consistent low latency uh opportunity or option and what kind of workloads and customers need that right the world has really changed i mean when when dinosaurs like me started in this industry the only people that really knew about performance were the people in the data center and then as things moved into online computing over the years then people within your own organization would care about performance if things weren't going well and it was really the erp revolution the 1990s that sort of opened uh people's eyes to the need for performance particularly for storage performance where now it's not just your internal users but your suppliers are now seeing what your systems look like fast forward to today in a web-based internet world everyone can see with customer facing applications whether you're delivering what they want or not and to answer your question it really comes down to competitive differentiation for the users that can deliver a better user customer experience if you and i'm sure everybody can relate if you go online and try to place an order especially with the holiday season coming up if there's one particular site that is able to give you instantaneous response you're more likely to do business there than somebody where you're going to be waiting and it literally is that simple it used to be that we cared about bandwidth and we used to care about ios per second and the third attribute latency really has become the only one that really matters going forward we found that most customers tell us that these days almost anyone can meet their requirements for bandwidth and ios per second with very few outlying cases where that's not true but the ever unachievable zero latency instantaneous response that's always going to be able to give people competitive differentiation in everything that they do and whoever can provide that is going to be in a very good position to help them serve their customers better yeah eric that stat you threw out of 24 real time uh and that that sort of underscores the need but phil i wonder how how this fits if you could talk about how that fits into your tam expansion strategy i think that's the job of of every ceo is to think about the expanding the tam it seems like you know a lot of people might say it's not necessarily the largest market but it's strategic and maybe opens up some downstream opportunities is that how you're thinking about it or based on what ken just said you expect this to to grow over time oh we definitely expect it to grow uh dave you know the the history of infinidat has been around our infinibox product targeting the primary storage market at the at the higher end of that market you know it's we've enjoyed operating in a eight nine 10 billion dollar tan through the years and that it continues to grow and we continue to outpace market growth within that tam which is exciting what this uh what the ssa really does is it opens up a tier of workload performance that we see more and more emerging in the primary data center the infinibox classic infinibox architecture we have very very fast as we say it typically outperforms most of our all-flash uh array competitors but clearly there there are a tier of workloads that are growing in the data center that require very very tight tail latencies and and that segment is certainly growing it's where some of the most demanding workloads are on the infinibox ssa was really built to expand our participation in those segments of the market and as i mentioned up front at the same time also taking that that software architecture and moving it into the the data protection space as well which is a whole nother market space that we're opening up for the company so we really see our tam this year with more of the this portfolio approach expanding quite a bit eric how how do you see it well those real-time applications that you talked about that require that consistent ultra-low latency grow kind of in in parallel with that that time curve you know will they become a bigger part of that the the overall storage team and and the workload mix how does idc see it yeah so so they actually are going to be growing over time and a lot of that's driven by the fact of the expectations that um steinhart mentioned a little bit earlier just on the part of customers right what they expect when they interact with your i.t infrastructure so we see that absolutely growing going forward i will make a quick comment about you know when all flash arrays first hit back in 2012 um in the 10 years since they started shipping they now generate over 80 of the primary revenues out there in in the primary storage arena so clearly they've taken over an interesting aspect of what's going on here is that a lot of companies now write rfps specifically requiring an all-flash array and what's going to be interesting for infinidat is despite the fact that they could deliver better performance than many of those systems in the past they couldn't really go after the business where that rfp was written for an afa spec well now they'll certainly have the opportunity to do that in my estimation that's going to give them access to about an additional 5 billion in tam by 2025 so this is big for them as a company yeah that's a 50 increase in tamp so okay well eric you just set up my my follow-up question to you ken was going to be the tougher questions uh which we've you and i have had some healthy debates about this but i know you'll have answers so so for years you've argued that your cached architecture and magic sauce algorithms if i caught that could outperform all flash arrays we're using spinning disks so eric talked about the sort of check off item but are there other reasons for the change of heart why and why does the world need another afa doesn't this cut against your petabyte scale messaging i wonder if you could sort of add some color to that sure a great question and the good news is infinibox still does typically outperform all flash arrays but usually that's for average of latency performance and we're tending to get because we're a a caching architecture not a tiered architecture and we're caching to dram which is an order of magnitude faster than flash or even storage class memory technologies it's our software magic and that software defined storage approach that we've had that now effectively is extended to solid state arrays and some customers told us that you know we love your performance it's incredible but if you could let us effectively be confident that we're seeing you know some millisecond sub half millisecond performance consistently for every single io you're going to give us competitive differentiation and this is one of the reasons why we chose to call the product a solid state array as opposed to merely an all-flash array the more common ubiquitous term and it's because we're not dependent on a specific technology we're using dram we can use virtually any technology on the back end and in this case we've chosen to use flash but it's the software that is able to provide that caching to the front end dram that makes things different so that's one aspect is it's the software that really makes the difference it's been the software all along and still on this architecture still mentions going to across the multiple products it's still the software it's also that in that class of ultra high performance architecturally because it is based on the infinibox architecture we're able to deliver 100 availability which is another aspect that the market has evolved to come to expect and it's not rocket science or magic how we do it the godfather of computer science john von neumann all the way back in the 1950s theorized all the way back then that the right way to do ultra high availability and integrity in i.t systems of any type is in threes triple redundancy and in our case amazingly we're the only architecture that uses triple redundant active active components for every single mission critical component on the system and that gives a level of confidence to people from an availability perspective to go with that performance that is just unmatched in the market and then bring all of that together with a set it and forget it mentality for ease of use and simplicity of management and as phil mentioned being able to have a single architecture that can address now not only the ultra high performance but across the entire swath of as eric mentioned consolidation which is a key aspect as well driving this in addition to those real-time applications that he mentioned and even being able to take it down into our our infiniguard data protection device but all with the same common base of software common interface common user experience and unmatched availability and we've got something that we really think people are going to like and they've certainly been proving that of late well i was going to ask you you know what makes the the infinibox ssa different but i think you just laid it out but your contention is this is totally unique in the marketplace is that right ken yes indeed this is a unique architecture and i i literally as a computer scientist myself truly am genuinely surprised that no other vendor in the market has taken the wisdom of the godfather of computer science john von neumann and put it into practice except in the storage world for this particular architecture which transcends our entire realm all the way from the performance down to the data protection phil i mean you have a very wide observation space in this industry and a good strong historical perspective do you think the expectations for performance and this notion of ultra low latencies you know becoming more demanding is is there a parallel so first of all why is that we've talked about a little bit but is there a parallel to the way availability remember you could have escalated over the years um because it was such a problem and now it's really become table stakes and that last mile is so hard but what are your thoughts on that i i think i think absolutely dave you know the the hallmark of infinidat is this white glove concierge level customer experience that we deliver and it's it's affirmed uh year after year in unsolicited enterprise customer feedback uh above every other competitor in our space uh infinidat sets itself apart for this um and i think that's a big part of what continues to drive and fuel the growth and success of the company i just want to touch on a couple things that ken and and eric mentioned the ssa absolutely opens up our tan because we get to we get a lot more at bats now but i think a lot of the industry looks at infinidat as well those guys are are hard drive zealots right they've their architecture is all based on rotating disk that's what they believe in and it's a hybrid versus afa world out there and they were increasingly not on the right bus and that's just absolutely not true in that our our neural cache and what ken talked about what made us unique at the start i think actually only increasingly differentiates us going forward in terms of the the set it and forget it the intelligence of our architecture the ability of that dram based cache to adapt so dynamically without any knobs and and configuration changes to massive changes in workload scale and user scale and it does it with no drama in fact most of our customers the most common feedback we get is that your platform just kind of disappears into our data infrastructure we don't think about it we don't worry about it when we install an infiniti an infinidat rack our intentions are never to come back you know we're not there showing up with trays of disk under our arms trying to upgrade a mission-critical platform that's just not our model what the ssa does is it gives our customers choice it's not about infinidat saying that used to be the shiny object now this is our new shiny object please everybody now go buy that what where where we position our ssa is it's a it's a tco latency sla choice that they can make between exactly identical customer experiences so instead of an old hybrid and a new afa we've got that same software architecture set it and forget it the neural cache and customers can choose what back-end persistent store they want based on the tco and the sla that they want to deliver to a given set of applications so probably the most significant thing that i've seen happen in the last six months at infinidat is a lot of our largest customers the the fortune 15s the fortune 50s the fortune 100s who have been long-standing infinidat customers are now on almost every sort of re-tranche of or trancha purchase orders into us we're now seeing a mix we're seeing a mix of some ssa and some classic infinibox because they're mixing and matching in a given data center down a given row these applications need this sla these applications need this la and we're able to give them that choice and frankly we don't we don't intentionally try to steer them one direction or the other they they're smart they do the math they can pick and choose what experience they want knowing that irrespective of what front door they go through into the infinidat portfolio they're going to get that same experience so i'm hearing it's not just a an rfp check off item it's more than that the market is heading in that direction eric's data on on real time and we're certainly seeing that the data-driven applications the injection of ai and you know systems making decisions in in real time um and i i'm also hearing phil that you're building on your core principles i'm hearing the white glove service the media agnostic the set it and forget it sort of principles that you guys were founded on is you're carrying that through to this this opportunity we absolutely are in the reason and you ask a good question before and i want to more completely answer it i think availability and customer experience are incredibly important today more so than ever because data center economics and data center efficiency um are more important than ever before is as customers evaluate what workloads belong in the public cloud what workloads do i want on-prem irrespective of those decisions they're trying to optimize their their operational expenses their capex expenses and so one thing that infinidat has always excelled at is consolidation bringing multiple users multiple workloads into the same common platform in the data center it says floor space and watts and and uh you know storage administration resources but to do consolidation well you've got to be incredibly reliable and incredibly predictable without a lot of fuss and drama associated with it and so i think the thing that has made infinidat really strong through the years with being a very good consolidation platform is more important now than ever before in in the enterprise storage space because it is really about data center efficiency and uh administration efficiency associated with that yeah thank you for that phil now actually ken let me come back to you i want to ask you a question about consolidation and you and i and and doc our business friend rest his soul have had some some great conversations about this over time but but as you consolidate people are sometimes worried about the blast radius could you address that concern sure well um phil alluded to software and uh it is the cornerstone of everything we bring to the table and it's not just that deep learning that transcends all the intelligence phil talked about in terms of that full wide range of product it's also protection of data across multiple sites and in multiple ways so we were very fortunate in that when we started to create this product since it is a modern product we got to start with a clean sheet of paper and basically look at everything that had been done before and even with some of the very people who created some of the original software for replication in the market were able to then say if i could do it again how would i do it today and how would it be better so we started with local replication and snapshot technology which is the foundation for being able to do full active active replication across two sites today where you can have true zero rpo no data loss even in the face of any kind of failure of a site of a server of a network of a storage device of a connection as well as zero rto immediate consistent operation with no human intervention and we can extend from that out to remote sites literally anywhere in the world in multiples where you can have additional copies of information and at any of them you can be using not only for protection against natural disasters and floods and things like that but from a cyber security perspective immutable snapshots being able to provide data that you know the bad actors can't compromise in multiple locations so we can protect today against virtually any kind of failure scenario across the swath of infinibox or infinibox ssa you can even connect infinite boxes and infinibox ssas because they are the same architecture exactly as phil said what we're seeing is people deploying mostly infinibox because it addresses the wide swath from a consolidation perspective and usually just infinibox ssa for those ultra high performance environments but the beauty of it is it looks feels runs and operates as that one single simple environment that's set it and forget it and just let it run okay so you can consolidate with with confidence uh let's end with the the independent analyst perspective eric you know how do you see this offering what do you think it means for the market is this a new category is it an extension to an existing space how do you look at that uh so i don't see it as a new category i mean it clearly falls into the current definition of afas i think it's more important from the point of view of the customer base that likes this architecture likes the availability the functionality the flexibility that it brings to the table and they can leverage it with tier zero workloads which was something that in the past they didn't have that latency consistency to do that you know i'll just make one one final comment on the software side as well so the reason software is eating the world mark andreessen is basically because of the flexibility the ease of use and the economics and if you take a look at how this particular vendor infinidat designed their product with a software-based definition they were able to swap out underneath and create a different set of characteristics with this new platform because of the flexibility in the software design and that's critical one if you think about how software is dominating so today for 2021 68 of the revenue in the external storage market that's the size of the software defined storage market that's going to be going to almost 80 by 2024 so clearly things are moving in the direction of systems that are defined in a software-defined manner yeah and data is eating software which is why you're going to need ultra low latency um okay we got to wrap it eric you've just published a piece uh this summer called enterprise storage vendor infinidat expands total available market opportunities with all flash system introduction i'm sure they can get that on your website here's a little graphic that shows you how to get that but so guys thanks so much for coming on the cube congratulations on the progress and uh we'll be watching thanks steve thanks very much dave thank you as always a pleasure all right thank you for watching this cube conversation everybody this is dave vellante and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2018! Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re:Invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney. Host of the Cube: Amazon web services. There are maybe 2,000 people here at their event, re:Invent annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, computer networking, part of the main infrastructures involving changing very rapidly and spawning new use cases, new value propositions, it's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Erik Kaulburg, who is the vice president of Infinidat, Cube alumni, great to see you again. >> Nice to see you as well. >> Been on the Cube multiple times. I think last time it was at VMWorld, or a studio? >> At, actually, our product launch for the cloud storage solution, as well. >> So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just, for the folks who might now know Infinidad, explain what you guys do, and your disruptive innovation. >> So, for Infinidad, we're all about tier-one environments, and it's the data piece of that environment, today, although that may not be forever. And, it's consumed through a couple of different modalities, so one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the InfiniBox solution, which we shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today, and broadening that to address the secondary storage market with InfiniGuard and Neutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an iAd service in conjunction with other public clouds. >> Let's get that in a second, I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions, cloud storage, you're seeing pure storage had a big announcement of now they're doing a device, now doing software on premise, Amazon's going to have a device on premise, it's up for the cloud. Like, what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? Obviously, API, microservices, these are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity, but still a challenge. You guys are the center of it, what's the market look like to you? >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data is at the middle of everything, and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes, or primarily sell boxes today, are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments, and they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds, and the other is to build alongside it and enable those major public clouds, and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry, with regards to the public cloud. >> What's the role of storage here at re:Invent, because, like I said, Holy Trinity is of infrastructures, computer storage, and networking, and as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with Cloudify, is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? >> Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like, we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday, and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data, so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows, and get things done quicker. We use less PHP type resources to get a problem solved, so I think that category of solutions, where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value, or more value in the end application, is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. >> What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? >> Well, I think, in general if you look at the adoption patterns of their block, file, and objects storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases, and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there, outside of the traditional, traditional cloud native object architectures, in the block and file arena, which has largely been untapped by the data and storage services, and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. >> What is the competition? What's, like, NetApp doing? Let me ask, everyone's got to be on mobile clouds. Amazon, clearly the leader. They're making the market, so unless, say Kubernetes doesn't intermediate their services, for the most part, that's the market leader, but you got to play on a lot of clouds, because customers aren't going to have one cloud, they're going to certainly be hybrid on premises and cloud, but certainly be on multiple clouds. What's, like, NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? >> So, what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest, what I see is they've got tied immigration, which is very impressive, with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is, when you want cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. >> Like what? >> So, you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure. Let's say, if you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. >> Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. Neutrix Cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. >> So on a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility of Infinidad, and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio, but specifically, with regards to cloud storage, Neutrix delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS, of course, and it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA, which we've talked about, which we believe is best in class, as well as enterprise-grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve. Large-scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things, which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. >> And what's the core problem that you solved with this product? >> It's, you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue, anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities, and even business guarantees provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last, let's say, 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So, that's what we're addressing, making it easier for storage to accomplish that. >> You guys always have impressive customers, always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. >> So, our customers have fallen into two categories, with regards to Neutrix Cloud adoption. The easy case, and the most natural for many of them, since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure at a large scale today, is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the Neutrix cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster-recovery target, things like that, and we think that there's value there. There's lots of companies which do DR as a service, to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case, which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications, and bringing them the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. >> We talked about the cloud guys, so we don't want to put you on the spot here, because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage, and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block, file, that good stuff. Now, with the cloud, and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie-in with you guys, because storage is not necessarily just a magic, quadrant-like thing. Oh, back-up and recovery, this and that, you're starting to see much more of a platform approach. And successful platforms enable things to be successful. It's not like I built it for this, purpose-built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform, and if so, what does that mean, and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? >> I think you said it, actually, better than I did, that ultimately, we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So, if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a back-up optimizing environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all those today, and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single, kind of, data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. >> So, were you looking at, you know, kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat, and one of the things that I'm thinking of is, how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, you know, utilize it, across multiple environments? >> So, many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach, and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily, and how, ultimately, they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the Neutrix Cloud service. >> Right. >> So we can have clients up and running in less than a day, from initial contact to large scale adoption, and it could be even faster than that as well. >> Now onto your relations with Amazon. What's it like, what's the details of it, what's the value, what's the connection point? >> I think we all agree that tier one applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure, and so, to the extent Neutrix Cloud enables those tier one applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship, so we're absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them, there are certainly areas where we overlap, but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strategies. >> So, who are you competitors that you're most, kind of, focused on? Well, you shouldn't be focused on your competitors, you should be focused on what you're doing, but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? >> I would say others that people would lump in this space, include NetApp Solutions in the public cloud environments, we see a couple of small start-ups, like Zadara, for example, from time to time, but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services. And customers have to think about, well, I'm planning on replatforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective and often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environments. So, that's when we come into the conversation, and from that point forward, generally, if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. >> You know, when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Gabe and I would always talk about Infinidat. You got good pedigree of a team. Classic storage. You have a good storage market. You guys take a different approach with this start-up. Founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce, what's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidad. What are they buying? What are they really getting, besides the product performance? What's the culture like, what's the company's view on the future world, serious insight. >> I think there's several elements to that, of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So, Moshe Yanai, who basically defined the enterprise storage category overall back in EMC, had a succession of teams that he's built over the years, and he's really brought all of those key elements together. Three generations of storage expertise. >> Successful, by the way, three generations of exits, >> Absolutely, yeah. Building an organic business, selling a business, and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some point. >> How's it going so far, how's business in general? >> Well, you know, we're private, so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal, the adoption of our portfolio solutions, in addition to just the core product, has really put us in a position of a very strong, long-term independence. >> Portfolios in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving, or both? >> It's, actually, on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general, as a, you know, into a lot of different use cases, because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So, we go where the data is. >> What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What're you lookin' to do next? >> Well, we did just have a major product release, so I'm glad that we've that, you know, out there, we're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements, and then ultimately, you know, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. >> All right, Erik, thanks for coming on the Cube show, thanks for the update. Infinidad, check them out, successful exit, multiple ties in the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great, storage has been going away, neither is networking, and neither is computing, it's only going to get better, stronger, as the cloud brings in more capabilities with machine learning and more use cases, new work loads, new capabilities. The Cube bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier and Lauren Cooney, on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(funky music) >> Welcome back. Now we're sitting here with Eric Burgener, who's a research vice president in the storage coop at IDC. Eric, you've listened to Infinidat's portfolio announcement, what do you think? >> Yeah Peter, thanks for having me on the show, so, I've got a couple of reactions to that. I think what they've announced is playing into a couple of major trends that we've seen in the enterprise. Number one is, as companies undergo digital transformation, the efficiency of the IT operations is really a critical issue. And so, I've seen a couple of things with this announcement that will really play into that area. They've got a much larger, much denser platform at this point, that will allow a lot more consolidation of work loads, and that's sort of an area that Infinidad has focused on in the past, is to consolidate a lot of different workloads under one platform. So I think the efficiency of those kind of operations will increase going forward with this announcement. Another area that sort of plays into this is every organization needs multiple storage platforms to be able to meet their business requirements, and what we've seen with this announcement is, they're basically providing multiple platforms but that are all built around the same architecture, so that has management ease of use advantages associated with that. So that's another benefit that will potentially allow CIOs to move to a smaller number of vendors, and fewer administrative skill sets, yet still meet their requirements. And I think the other area that's sort of a big issue here is what they're announcing in the hybrid cloud arena, so clearly enterprises are operating as hybrid clouds today, well over 70% of all organizations actually have hybrid cloud operations in place. What we've seen with this announcement is an ability for people to leverage the full storage management data set of an Infinidat platform, while they leverage multiple clouds on the back end, and if they need to move between clouds they have an ability to do that with the way they're operating with this new feature, the Netwrix cloud, and so that really breaks the lock-in that you see from a lot of cloud operations out there today, that in certain cases can really limit the flexibility that a CIO has to meet their business requirements. >> Let me build on that a second, so really what you're saying is that by not binding the data to the cloud, the business gets greater flexibility in how they're going to use the data, how they're going to apply the data, both from an application standpoint as well as a resource and cost standpoint. >> Absolutely, I mean moving to the cloud is actually sort of a fluid decision that sometimes you need to move things back, we've actually seen a lot of repatriation going on. People that started in the cloud, then as things change, they need to move things back, or maybe they want to move to another cloud operation but they might have moved from Amazon to Google or Microsoft. What we're seeing with Netwrix cloud is an ability, basically to do that it breaks that lock-in. >> Great. >> They can still take advantage of those back-end platforms. >> Fantastic. Eric Burgener, IDC research vice president, storage. Back to you Dave.