>> Live, from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the District, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. We saw Teresa Carlson yesterday, a lot of keynotes, we saw the CIA. Todd Osbourne is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances of New Relic, a company that's been smokin' hot, six billion dollar market cap, and really is takin' the world by storm. He's joined by Scott Drossos, who's the president of Infiniti, who is a public sector consultancy. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Thank you. >> So Todd, you heard me, I mean really, everybody's talkin' about New Relic, stocks been smoking, I read an article recently, "it's got to cool off, it's too hot." So why so hot, what's goin' on, why the appeal of New Relic? >> Well as our CEO Lew Cirne has been on a couple of times talking to you about, every business is becoming a software business in the public sector, which we're here representing at the Amazon public sector event. It's the same thing with agencies and all the digital experiences that are happening across all the government and whether it's education, higher ed, healthcare, any of the DOD or other agencies, there's always some sort of digital experience that folks are having with the citizens that all the agencies and organizations are tryin' to support, and New Relic's right there, right there at the forefront of every one of those digital experiences. Everyone's running software that's modern software, or shifting to that with modern software running microservices, running containers, shifting to the cloud, and anyone deploying that type of software needs to have New Relic as part of their engagement to monitor what's happening at the citizen or the customer level, what's going on in the back end, on through the infrastructure. And New Relic, whether it's a large enterprise that we're out there, like Dunkin' Donuts or Dominos, monitoring their applications and their eCommerce sites, or it's an agency in the public sector space, you got to have New Relic as part of those engagements. >> So Scott, when AWS services first came out, 2006 timeframe, we looked at it, we said okay, this is the future, but as much as it potentially simplifies lives, it brings a lot of new complexities. So you know, Stu and I used to talk about, look, the AWS is awesome, we're big fans, but the ecosystem has to grow. Consultancies have to come out of the woodworks, and help customers really, adopt. So that's really exactly what's happened. I presume that's how Infiniti got started, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the company, and what your value is. >> Sure, thanks Dave, so Infiniti is a 15 year old company. We're originally founded in public sector IT consulting, and we realized several years ago that the world was changing and that we needed to make the shift from IT consulting to cloud services. And so we dove in headfirst with AWS, and we really tried to move to the top of the curve very quickly, and so we were a little bit ahead of our market in public sector, being a public sector focused organization, but we felt it was important to get ahead of the market because now the market really is smokin' hot. But we thought it was important that if we're going to move into the cloud, we wanted to move to the top of the curve, and deal with things like DevOps, migrations, even machine learning, predictive analytics, so we kind of pride ourselves on having some of the largest public sector contracts in the US, even though we're, right now, predominantly California based, California focused. >> And what's your head count? >> We're about a hundred people. >> I mean this is the thing, we're seeing this trend toward a lot of, you know, smaller specialists, are really doing super. Why is that, or how are you able to differentiate from these big global SIs that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, vertical expertise, why are you guys winning? >> Well, first of all, I think we're able to be nimble and shift our focus pretty quickly to serve our market, to serve our customers, I think more successfully. But one of the thing's that's changed when the cloud arrived, is the cloud really let smaller organizations like us, act like big organizations, so we didn't need to go deploy millions of dollars of capital to go set up a massive data center, we can build an environment on the fly, as you know, in the cloud, and we can have access to world-class platform tools like New Relic, and we can help a customer, a large customer, perform just as well as if we were a large multi-billion dollar services organization. >> Todd, one of the interesting things to talk to customers about is their journey, and where are they, and the cloud migration and how do they do this, reinvent? A year ago or two I heard there were like seven or nine ARS to get there, anything from the full refactoring and building cool new stuff with server lists and things like that, to just the re-platforming. Lift and shift, is that a good thing, isn't that? Walk us through how New Relic with Infiniti, how are you involved in some of those migrations? There's no typical customer, but give us some examples. >> Yeah absolutely, so Infiniti, just like many of the integrators that we work with are all delivering services generally in a couple different areas. One is typically a cloud adoption, or cloud migration practice. So working with Amazon, how do we get more and more of customer's workloads shifted to the cloud? Usually those projects are also going on with something in the refactoring world or application space. Usually they're also developing or shifting to some sort of DevOps practice, and that's also part of our sweet spot, what's happening in the application there, whether it's on the cloud yet or not, we're going to provide that visibility to that. And then the third piece is, there's usually something else happening with that, as I was mentioning before, the customer experience or the citizen experience, so what's the browser impact, what's the user experience on that, what's the, if it's on a mobile app, what's the user experience on there? So while Infiniti's delivering all those services for the clients, New Relic's part of all those services, so our whole model that we're tryin' to do with all of our partners is embed ourselves into all of those services, such that we can help Infiniti be more successful, deliver those projects on time, and really resolve any issues that may come up during those migration issues. >> Scott, I'd love to hear especially, I know I hear DevOps talked about a lot in New Relic's customers, is it pervasive around the agencies that you work with and please do add some color there too. >> So in the public sector, it's a range of readiness, but we're seeing a real wave building, we believe. We worked with New Relic on a very large DevOps, SysOps, very complex cloud services engagement, largest higher education cloud services engagement in the US, and in that case, just like Todd was referencing, when we implemented the migration of the legacy platform to the cloud, first of all we had to do, make choices around refactory, host, rearchitect and so forth, but then when we're managing that environment, and there's millions of users hitting that environment, we need to be able to make sure that we can monitor the application to make sure the application's performing well, and if there's an issue, we want to see the line of code that's causing the problem as quickly as possible so we can keep the environment up all the time. Even though public sector may not be driven by the same financials as say, commercial, they still expect to be up all the time. They still want to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud and so New Relic allows us to do that, but then, as we're looking at the users interface with the application environment, New Relic's browser and mobile, they let us monitor how that experience is going, and we can proactively get at the performance issues there that the application may not tell us, if there's an issue there. And then, we can do things like test middleware with synthetics and make sure that the whole environment's working, and then obviously on the infrastructure side, it lets us make sure that we're optimizing the environment for our clients. One of the cool thing is, when you in the past, you'd set up an EC2 instance, you may not see that you don't need as much CPU as you're using, and so you can size that appropriately, and allow your environment to still run at a high performance, 100% up time, but give them the cost efficiencies at the same time. So we use New Relic across board to help support the entire environment. >> I wonder if we could talk about the marketplace a little bit, generally and then specifically, the public sector? So Scott, I presume you're obviously public sector focused, but are you exclusive to AWS, no, you probably do some other stuff, is that right, is that fair? >> Well we are both AWS and Azure Gold, in terms of partner, but we do more of our work in AWS for sure. >> Okay, so we'll come back to that. And New Relic, of course you're a software company, so you want everybody to love your software, so if there's a cloud that a customer wants to use, you want your software to be on that cloud, fair enough? >> Sure, and also on PRIM, I mean a lot of our... >> On PRIM too. >> A lot of our applications we monitor are still on PRIM, and there's a tremendous amount of value there regardless of... >> I would just add, Infiniti is a trusted advisor, we like to see ourselves as a trusted advisor, so we do feel like we have to be multi-cloud and have an objective perspective. >> And New Relic is presumably the same way, I mean let the customers decide, so, and it's a hybrid world, folks, despite what Amazon wants, it's a hybrid world, and they even recognize that. My question is, there's a lot of discussion in the industry about Amazon as an infrastructure service provider and their lead or relative lead on the competition. It's our sense that there's still a lead there, what's your sense? >> Well AWS is still the leading cloud services provider in the marketplace. They lead in innovation, they lead in disruption, they lead in market share, they lead in so many metrics, and because they have that lead, and that's where we started, we've benefited from that, and we've invested heavily, and in the same way, we see New Relic, when we made a choice around who we were going to pick as a platform to support our customers, we wanted something that was cloud-born, didn't come out of on-premise and get sort of bootstrapped into the cloud, and we wanted something that was a complete platform. So New Relic was really a clear choice for us. It was not a, we looked at the entire market when we made that choice. >> So the narrative in the market used to be, oh, security in the cloud, now we hear the CIA say hey, security on the worst day in Amazon's cloud is way better than I ever saw with client server. It was a pretty powerful statement, so let's assume security, people are relatively comfortable with security these days, even though I'm sure there's still some issues with regard to corporate edicts, and flexibility, and audits, let's put that aside. SLAs is another big one. People often criticize the public cloud SLAs, and cost, oh it's so expensive, I can do it cheaper on PRIM. Are those myths, are those realities, is it a it depends? What's your sense? >> I mean they're all, they're all factors that all of our customers are looking into. I would say what we're hearing a lot about right now, is how do we help provide more visibility to everything that's happening, so if you've got a developer now that has the ability to write code, put it on any cloud they want, spin up containers, spin down containers, go try out server-less base of architectures, they've got a lot of flexibility to do what they want. Government agencies, as well as customers, one of the things they're looking for is what's actually happening? Who's doing what? The governance piece is a big piece and I think New Relic plays right into that in terms of helping control all that. One of the things that we're, is one of our sweet spots, is as you move to DevOps and a truly microservices architecture, one of the whole values of that is speed, keeping up with how fast the whole market is moving, and customers and agencies, what they want out of that, is to deploy applications where they're releasing multiple times a day. You have to have visibility into everything you're doing across the stack to be successful in that, and that's really New Relic's sweet spot in terms of doing that. So providing that visibility, instrumenting the applications in the infrastructure before, and then helping provide visibility to things like governance, things that other, not necessarily our sweet spot, but other companies in the industry are doing things throughout the DevOps life cycle in the governance realm, things like that. So we're part of that ecosystem that's helping Amazon and the other cloud providers be very successful, helping customers and agencies be very successful deploying modern applications. >> It's all about that visibility. >> Scott, one of the things, when we look at any rollout of new technology or migration, once it's up and running, then what, so wondering how your firm's involved in, you know, is there re-training, is there things go on, once this is in place, now what? >> Well Infiniti, what we found in public sector is that everybody wants to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and the benefits, and most public sector isn't going to reduce cost, they're just going to want to re-use cost more wisely. So some of the confusion around cost savings is that they're getting way more for their dollar in the future state, and the choices you have to make around how fast you want to get to the cloud, and what you want to get out of the cloud when you're there, those all effect the equation in terms of what you're actually outcomes are immediately and in the long term. So we often see that in public sector, some of the legacy applications, they may not naturally or easily move all at once, and so you have to make a choice, are you going to do some refactory and architecting before you get it there, are you going to get in the cloud now, and then do it afterwards. Either way, there's benefits, but you have to make choices about what, how you want to approach it. >> Yeah, when you talk about, after I've rolled this in, I've heard from some customers, they're like, after I've gotten a cloud, I love it, but I had to dedicate an engineer for financial architecting because there's all of these things we need to do. Are we still in that state? And once again, do you help with some of the training as to, okay, or is it plugging them into the Amazon ecosystem and how do they get certified and ready to use all of this. >> So Infiniti works with clients differently, we work with some in a more episodic, lighter capacity, and we work with some in a wholistic capacity where we are that engine for them, where we provide them the complete cloud services team to do everything from migrations, architecture, DevOps, SysOps, SecOps, machine learning and all the way through. And so when we're providing those services, we're doing those kind of things, we're making sure that the next improvement is worked into the architecture. Last year, the customer I was referencing earlier, we did just under a hundred releases, so that's a hundred releases that we're using the New Relic platform and our architectural solution, our solution architects, rather, to make sure that it's faultless, that the process is efficient, it's effective, it's secure, and that we're driving efficiencies wherever possible. So it really depends on what the customer wants. If the customer wants to hone the environment, they may have to go a little slower to account for their learning, their learning curve, and we'll help them, if that's what they want, but if they want to go faster, and they want to take advantage of our expertise, we make that available, and we're happy to do that. >> We had the former CTO of the NSA on yesterday, who now works for Accenture, and we were asking about sort of, federal versus commercial, are we sort of still taking, learning lessons from commercial and bringing it to federal, or is it because federal has so much interesting technology around analytics, does it go the other way, and he said, "it's funny, when you're on the inside, you think all the innovation is goin' on outside, now that I'm on the outside I say wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in federal." We heard Teresa yesterday talk about Aurora, she talked about the VM wear partnership, so things that were announced a while ago and actually being adopted in commercial coming in to federal. So how does it work? Is it more of a two-way than it used to be 20 years ago and I wonder if you could comment? >> Yeah, from Infiniti's perspective, absolutely. We work with clients to understand the problems and where they want to get to, and then we innovate with them. You're pretty dependent on the subject matter expertise of the organization. I think our customers like that, they like that they're part of the solution, but then they need the expertise that we bring to create the next generation solution. We just created something in the higher ed space called, a college called Architecture Builder, and it was after teaming with a specific college, and working in that space for a long time, but we wanted to create a way for colleges to rapidly implement a complete architecture integrated with all the different things, including New Relic, quickly and successfully, and that was done in partnership with them, so we did the work, but we couldn't have done it without them. >> Todd, New Relic obviously, you're a believer, you drink the Koolaid every day. Why New Relic relative to the competition? How do you guys differentiate? Pitch me. >> So it's really all about being successful in that modern software space, again, as I've mentioned, and so New Relic is the only SAS only platform, so we're not going to put anything on PRIM. We've got ourselves one of the biggest and best DevOps team that develops our software, we roll code everyday, and our customers get the benefit of us being a pure SAS platform. Part of that is scalability. What we can do at scale is unbelievable. There was a customer that was just talked about on the news today that I can't mention, but they just went from basically zero to $100 million on an application just in the past 90 days. It's one of our customers and we've scaled, we have no problem scaling with customers that are doing things like that, and again, the full platform value that we have now, looking at everything from the front end on the browser and mobile applications, through the application, which is core to us, it's where we provide that code-level visibility, the ability to trace across all the different microservices that are happening, connected back to that infrastructure. That full platform now provides such tremendous value up and down the stack, but not only to the technology leaders but also to those folks that are business leaders, chief marketing officers, heads of practices at the consultants we work with, all these folks are all getting value out of New Relic. >> What would that customer who should not be named say about the value contribution of New Relic to that scale? >> The value's unbelievable. That's a commercial customer, but their business is taking off like so many of our customer's businesses are at an unbelievable scale. They can't be hamstrung by having to do a server upgrade, or having to go back, working with a release of code from a couple weeks ago, they have to be as fast as possible 'cause their business is moving so fast, their agencies are moving so fast, they need a provider that's going to provide that visibility to that at the speed with which they're moving. >> Awesome so, you got one more? >> No, we've got to run. >> Yeah, we've got to go. So this is the last question, so impressions of AWS Public Sector Summit? I presume you guys, like we did, had to register yesterday. There were some logistic issues, but other than that, maybe you could give us your last word on the summit? >> Well Infiniti is very committed to public sector, so we really enjoy coming to the Public Sector Summit. It's great to connect with our partners, like New Relic and others, and it's great to see the latest innovations coming out from AWS. >> Yeah and I've been to, I don't know, 10 or so summits around the world so far this year. It is unbelievable the excitement and the amount of people that are now excited about what's happening in the clouded option world, and Amazon's piece in that, and what's happening here in D.C. this week is no exception. >> I would second that. It's been a while since I've been at summits. Stu, you go all the time, and they are just exploding and growing, and this is one of the best that's out there. So thanks guys, for comin' on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest after this short break. John Furrier's here, you're watchin' theCUBE live, from AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

[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