>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody. Welcome back to Nutanix NEXTConf. This is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Rich Napolitano is here as the CEO of Plexxi. Good friend, long time CUBE alum. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pleasure to be here with you again. >> Yeah, so you know, I love the fact that you're back in startup land. I mean, you did unbelievable things at EMC, but really this is your real love, alright, runnin' startups, you know, eating glass as we call it. So, when we first heard about Plexxi, I have to admit, Rich, we were down at Strada that time and it was kind of heavy and really geeky. I'm not a networky guy. You've really done a great job of sort of transforming the messaging and the company's vision. Share with us what's up with Plexxi. >> Yeah, I know, again thank you for inviting me here and it's a pleasure. It's an exciting time for the company. You know, we're actually breaking out, right and so it's great to see the momentum. And, the team has done a fabulous job. The challenge in the early days is, you know, you have the technology and you're trying to establish your product market fit and we've done that now. And so, it's exciting to be at this important inflection point, you know, tremendous revenue growth this year. You know, we could probably be profitable if we want to be this year which there's not many startups that can say that. And, what's happened is fundamentally we really connected now what we have built, our technology to the ping points in the marketplace and we have, you know, deep deep clarity and understanding of that now. >> So, talk a little bit more about the sort of value proposition and kind of why you guys, why Dave started the company and why you joined, what you're all about. >> Yeah, so we're building the next generation networks. We're not building additional networks and so we're very focused on the next era of computing, you know, third platform, you know, and scaled down infrastructure, cloud, where the requirements on the infrastructure are very different. You need to just build a much more agile and flexible infrastructure. You know, the choice the public cloud is there and it's going to be there forever, but how do you build an agile infrastructure for private and for hybrid infrastructure? And, what we've realized, and Dave realized this early on, is that the networking architectures haven't fundamentally changed in a very, very long time. And, you know, there's an emergence now, and this is what we've really learned in the last two years, there's an emergence of this other data center network. You know, Sysco has been dominant and done a phenomenal job in traditional data sending networking, but there's this emergence of this other network and we now we call it by a name, which is the Hyper Converge Network, HCN. And so, in very simple terms, what is Plexxi? Plexxi builds the HCN for the HEI infrastructure. >> Okay, Rich, you're just going to have to unpack this a little bit so, you know, people in the networking world will be said, we understand that it was a lot of the east, west traffic, the traffic between those, but you know, architecturally you know, we kind of got rid of the sand and now we've got this distributed software model that I've got these nodes, so where was the gap that you were lookin' to fill and you know, does Nutanix understand that this was a challenge? >> Those are all great questions and very relevant to the challenge. So, when you really look at the problems we solved, we start, we pull it up to the top for a second and we've learned a lot about this the last couple of years. What people want is simplicity. They don't want complexity. And, we built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure. Everything from the applications to the operating environments, to compute, to the storage and to the network. And so, what we really bring to the marketplace is a much simpler approach to deploy infrastructure and we do that by simplifying the network dramatically. So, and we do that by having a software definable network that's built out of industry standard components. So, Plexxi really brings three things to the table. We figured out how to build this very elastic and agile fabric to allow you to compute storage, allow you to connect storaging a few things together. And, we do that on white box switches and that's dramatically reduced our cost point and is tremendously simple to deploy, but on top of that, we built our software abstractions. And, it really is the key to us is really our software control and our integrations into operating environments. So, what we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that build this fabric, but our software controller allows you to provision this network seamlessly in the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we're the invisible network. >> So, when Nutanix first started they were like, we're going to kill that sand 'cause you don't need some of that complexity, so when do I need this you know, fabric as you call it, as that interconnected tissue, you know, what size customer, you know, what kind of challenges does that, you know, really knock down. And So, if you're living within a rack you don't have any of these problems really. Right, I mean our integration into Nutanix is so sophisticated now that even within the rack we dramatically simplify your network provisioning so even within a rack our value proposition of simplicity and ease of use is compelling. We make the network invisible in that context. So, as you provision your VM's or your storage in a Nutanix environment, the network comes along. The value proposition just is most compelling as you go to second, third or more racks. Some of our biggest customers deploy us in tremendous configurations, you know, 10 racks in 10 rows, thousands of servers. But, we can start as small as you know, one or two switches. And so, the value proposition really is, how seamlessly can you build your infrastructure, in other words, can you make the network invisible in these infrastructures? And, that's exactly what we do. >> You have this picture in your booth, these things that you're handing out, and it's really simple. You got the old way which is storage, server and networking all that complexity. Nutanix, really kind of attacked the server and storage piece, brought those together, connect to the network. What you guys are doing is collapsing that complexity even further. Is that right, so what does that mean for a customer from a scaling standpoint? >> So, if you look at the three tier architecture as you talked about, then we're maxing multiple networks. And, the first thing anyone does whey they deploy converged infrastructure, hyperconversions in particular, is they eliminate the SAD. So, that was another network, we just never really thought about it that way. And so, effectively what we do is we allow you to have the properties of a SAD on your network. So, for a storage guy, notions of like Fibre Channel zoning are inherent now in our IP oriented network. Our network is very low latency because of our architecture. So, as you scale your latency is constant as you would things like NVME, our latency is extremely low. It's not a multi tiered network, so you don't have the complexity of building a multi tiered network as you scale your converged infrastructure. The benefit of hyperconversion is that you can deploy these racks of infrastructure and easily deploy them. The challenge is that if you don't attack the networking problem you still bump into that as you deploy this infrastructure. >> That becomes your new bottleneck. >> It's your new bottleneck for performance, but it's really for administration. And so, our integration layer ties into Nutanix and makes us aware of Nutanix operating environment, its file system, when nodes are being added or removed, when you're doing STApps or backups, et cetera and the network is shaped in the context of that application called Nutanix. It'll do the same thing for VMware. >> And, when you say it's tied into Nutanix, is that you know, the Nutanix the kind of the software between nodes is also things like AHV. Do you have awareness of that? >> So, AHV or VMware and PRISM, so you know, our management console can be launched from PRISM now so you can seamlessly have an experience. You can't tell when you're really in Nutanix or when you're in Plexxi's management domain. But, more importantly, we're aware of when nodes are added. We understand if you're rebuilding your underlying file systems, et cetera, as the requirements on the network shift, as you add more workloads, as workloads move, as applications move on the infrastructure and you need more compute over here or more storage there, our network adapts to that. >> So, explain how this is different than, just say, Nutanix bringing its platform and partnering up with UCS, for example. What's different about what you're doing? >> So, we're, for one thing, we're only the network, right. And so, the compute infrastructure, we don't do that. We don't do storage. We don't compute. And so, we're just a network that is really, think about it as the fabric for compute and storage as opposed to a data center network where you connect, you know, your printers and your desktops and your infrastructure for your, you know, multiple sites, et cetera. That's the kind of Sysco, if you will, network. We're this embedded network in these hyperconvert solutions. Put one or two switches in your rack and as you pump out this converged infrastructure you just scale that fabric seamlessly. And, it's so well integrated inside of Nutanix you don't even realize it's another network. It's just embedded in the infrastructure. >> So, sorry Stu. From a buyer's standpoint, do I get to eliminate some other or limit my growth of my traditional network or do I have to throw that out and bring this in? >> So, we're totally compatible with existing networks. So, what you do is you do two or three things. We can insert into existing networks without modifying them, but you don't need to keep adding top rack switches and spines to your existing network because our, most of the traffic stays on this other network. The Nutanix guy, sales teams, are actually starting to call this the Nutanix Network or the Nutanix Fabric because it's embedded in their solution. So, most of the traffic between Nutanix and those goes on that network which minimizes your northbound traffic to your existing network which just frankly, removes a headache from traditional network admins to deal with this other stuff. And, that same way the network admin in the past didn't worry about sand traffic. You shouldn't have to worry about this other problems too. >> So, Rich, it's interesting, talking to Nutanix customers you're right, smaller customers don't have networking issues, some larger customers it depends on how good their network is. The thing coming on the horizon that's going to dramatically change this embedded network thing is got to be NVME over fabrics, so what does that mean for Nutanix standalone and you know, I got to think that that's a huge tie to bring you into a lot of accounts. >> I mean, it is clear that the next tsunami, I mean you know, we were all involved in the early days of Flash and we saw that coming when we were at EMC, you know, I probably saw more Flash than anybody in the world actually, in terms of petabytes actually. And, NVME is that next wave, right. So, whether it's embedded in Nutanix or it's standalone bricks, you know, it's going to elevate the, this east, west, this need for this other network and you know, to pitch Plexxi a little bit, there's no better network that's tuned for this. The nature of our network is it's flat, it's extremely low latency, so we're actually awaiting the day that, you know, NVME hits the market in a big way because it will blow apart every other network, every hierarchal network will just be blown apart because the latency characteristics of a multi tiered network are just, are just clear. You can measure it. Also, we're doing a lot of stuff like that. >> Are any of your solutions ready for this today? >> We're ready for it. >> And, when you simplify the network like that, the entire infrastructure, and you provide that infrastructure with virtually no latency impact, now you can start to see the way in which application development changes and, you know, everybody's talking about digital disruption and how they going to pay for it. They're going to pay for it by, I would think, shifting labor resource from non-differentiated infrastructure to some of these more exciting areas. We've just heard that from two CIOs. >> We see this a lot. Telecom Italia is here with us. Sparkle, one of our bigger customers, we have a session this afternoon at 3 o'clock and Sparkle's going to be in the session with us and I just met a good hour with them here. And, it's all about the operating expense. It's like, Nutanix plus Plexxi reduces my operating expense and he's going to repeatedly say that. And, it's just clear that people cannot afford the complexity associated with traditional networks anymore. They can't hire programmers to build out, you know, not to pick on ACI, but complicated scripts for ACI, they can't afford to build those programs. Our integration layer makes that seamless, it takes it away. >> So, what's your relationship with Nutanix? You're obviously doing some hardcore integration. How do you describe the partnership and do you have other partnerships that you can talk about? >> So, right now we have a number of large scale, service provider customers we sell through distribution and other partners. We're partnering a lot with Nutanix now, a little bit with SimpliVity, but we're going to go after all of the HCI vendors ultimately. But, pretty clearly Nutanix is the leader and we've been developing a relationship at the top and in the field and parallel we've been recruiting Nutanix partners. AERO's our master distributor, so we're recruiting AERO partners that sell Nutanix and we're building a set of solutions. We announce our reference architecture this week with Nutanix, so we're very focused on Nutanix. They're clearly the leader in this space and they get our value proposition. Invisible infrastructure meets the invisible network. I mean, it's perfect. >> You mentioned before you could be profitable if you wanted to be. It's kind of, it's not in vogue to be profitable, Rich. People want growth, but you know, hey, this booming market's not going to last forever. >> Timing's different, timing is different. I think, actually I think it plays to our strength that you know, I looked at our financials a couple of weeks ago and I realized some about 80% of all that we've spent has been in R and D, and that's not common. Most starters at this stage have invested a lot more in the go to market and now's our time to go do that, but we have, now we have the advantage that we have such tremendous revenue growth that we can fund a bunch of it ourselves and the capital markets are different than they were two or three years ago when Nutanix was growing. So, I think it's prudent for CEOs now to be just more, more capital efficient because the markets are different and I think we're in a unique position now given all of our growth. >> Well, Rich, congratulations on the early success. We know what you're capable of. We'll be watching. I really wish you the best. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Nutanix, NEXTConf. Be right back.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, the Windy City, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here day two at Veeamon 2018, theCUBE's second year doing Veeamon, and I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Patrick Osborne is here, the newly minted VP and GM of big data and secondary storage. >> And CUBE alumni. >> HPE and many time CUBE alumni, did you get a sticker? >> Yeah, it's already on my laptop. >> Oh, awesome, great to see you again. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks so much for coming on, always fun at Veeamon. >> Yep. >> They have a big presence. Your show, HPE Discover, they painted the Chi-Town green. >> Patrick: Yep. >> What's going on at the show for you guys? >> So a huge partner for us, in our ecosystem, as you guys know, HPE and the world of virtualized workloads, like, you know, we definitely own the space in terms of the number of Veeams sitting on our infrastructure and they are a great partner. You know, we've got thousands of customers, and I think what we're seeing, too, is that as Veeam grows up into the midsize and enterprise space, that is, you know, that's where our wheelhouse is. And so we're getting a lot of customer interactions in that space, and then, with some of our offerings around Nimble and SimpliVity, where they play very well in the commercial segments, that's a great way for us to go grab new logos, be present in the channel. So it's a really good partnership for us on both ends. >> I definitely want to understand what's going on in big data, but before we get there, let's talk a little bit about secondary storage and your point of view there. We know that data protection is moving way up on the list of CXO priorities, we also know there's a dissonance in the customer base, between the expectations of how much automation is actually there from the line of business, versus what IT can deliver. >> Patrick: Yeah, yeah. >> And so there's this gap and now you have multi-cloud coming on in a big way, digital transformation, and so it feels like backup and recovery and data protection is transforming. Throw in security and it even complicates it further. What's your point of view on what's going on in this mix? >> Well, certainly the sands are shifting in the secondary storage market. I think because of a heightened customer expectation in this area, whether it's, you know, I want to do more with my data, running things that we do at Veeam, like test data, automation, Sandboxing, security, you know, ransomware. All those are higher level data services than just what people were doing in the past around backup and recovery. So for us, we're really focused a lot on automation right in this space. The death of backup and recovery in that traditional space is essentially caused by comPlexxity, right? So automate or die in this space, nobody wants to deal with backup, right? What you want is outcomes, and what we're doing is, for our product line, we've got sort of this three-tiered mantra, of predictive, cloud-ready and timeless. So we want to be able to, through platforms like InfoSite, be able to heavily, heavily automate all those activities. Cloud-ready, because, you know, as we talked before, it's a hybrid world. People, especially in secondary storage, want to have some data on-prem, and certainly a lot of it for archival and retention off-prem. And then, timeless is sort of this scenario around, even though I'm operating a data center, I want the purchasing experience to be elastic, and like, again, the cloud, right? So consumption-based as a service. So that's what we're trying to bring to the market for secondary storage and storage in general. >> Dave: Awesome. >> Patrick, as I look at this space, you talk about that hybrid, multi-cloud world that we talked about. The two big, main things are data and my applications. So you talked a bit about the data, connect for us, kind of the applications and things, cloud native and 12 factor microservices, versus traditional applications. And you've got that whole spectrum, what are you seeing from your customers and how are you helping them? >> Yeah, so, we're definitely seeing a lot of the tech leading customers in the enterprise from HPE, you know, the big logos, right? They're out there disrupting themselves, disrupting industry, are massively betting on analytics, right? So, they've moved certainly from databases to batch now, it's all, you know, I think people call it fast data, streaming analytics, Kafka, Spark. So we're seeing, that part of our business that HPE's growing, like, non-sequentially, right? So it's really good business for us. But what's going on right now, is that the customers who are doing this, these are all net new apps. Kubernetes, you know, new styles of application, it's not a rip and replace, it's more of an augmentation scenario, where you're providing new services on top of existing apps. So that is very new and I think one of the things we'll see over the next couple of years is, how do I protect those workloads? How do I provide multi-cloud for them? So it's an interesting space, it's very nascent, a lot of tech-heavy investment going on for the, you know, the big players in the market. But that's going to have a long tail into the mid range. >> How will the data protection architecture sort of change for those new emerging applications? You know, maybe IoT is another piece of that. And maybe, where does your partnership with Veeam fit into that? >> Yeah, so we are having a number of strategy discussions on that this morning, you know. And I think that space is, you know, there's a lot of identification that has to go on. Do I want to back it up, do I care? Right, are those persistent streams? Or that IoT data that's coming in, do I really have to back it up at the end of the day or can I back up the results? So, a lot of it is not just an availability issue, it's certainly a data management issue. But a lot of the tools that we would need to do that, today, they're focused on bare-metal, VM wear, virtualization, a lot of stuff that hasn't been written yet, right? So I think there's a lot of actual tech development that has to go on in this space and I think we're kind of poised together as partners to deliver in that area the next couple years. >> You guys have this tagline, "We Make Hybrid IT Simple." >> Patrick: Yes. >> IT, you know-- >> Patrick: Very quantifiable. >> It ain't simple. (laughter) So, where does storage fit into that equation? >> Yeah, the stats that blow my mind was, I think IBC came out with this, was that there's essentially around 500 million apps in the data center today. And then, in any sort of spectrum of bare-metal, being virtualized, maybe being containerized, in the next four years there's going to be 500 million net new apps, right? So that's like, it's mind blowing, in terms of, most people have a flat budget, maybe a little increase. So you think that you're doubling the amount of apps you have and all the services around it. So for us, the automation piece is absolutely key, right? So anything we can do with InfoSite as a platform, we're going to be extending that to other products, you see we've done it for 3PAR, we'll be bringing that experience. But anything we can do around automation, analytics, that's going to take a lot of the mystery and comPlexxity out of managing these apps and services, I think is a win for the customers, and that's why they're going to buy into the platforms. >> Yeah, it's like, imagine if you're a young family, you've got two kids and you have twins. >> Patrick: Yeah. (laughter) >> Uh-oh. (laughs) >> Or you decide to have two more, like I did. (laughter) >> Patrick, we've been talking about intelligence in the storage world for decades. >> Yes. >> Why is it real, you know, more real and different now, than it was in some of the previous generations? >> Yeah, I think, you know, some of the techniques... So, we've had systems that have called home and brought telemetry home forever, right? But I think what's going on is that, as you take the tools that we've developed, and a lot of them are new, right, that are allowing you to do this, it's the practition of the data science, which is like the key, at the end of the day. InfoSite is an amazing piece of technology, a lot of the magic is in the way that you set up your teams, and to be able to take that on, right? So, it's no longer a product manager, an engineering guy, support person in a different organization, right? What we have is what's called a peak team, right? Which just takes all the functions, brings them together with a data scientist, to be able to take a look at, how can I do machine learning, AI, a more predictive model, to actually take use of this data, right? And I think the techniques and the organizational design is the big change that's happened over the last couple of years. Data's always been there, right? But now we know what to do with that. >> Yeah, and like you said before, the curve is reshaping, it's not this linear Moore's Law curve anymore. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> It's this exponential curve. >> Patrick: Exactly. >> I can't even draw it anymore you know, it used to be easy, just put the dotted line straight out, now it's twisting. So, that increases the need obviously, for automation. Now talk about how HPE's automation play is differentiable in the marketplace. >> So I think a couple of things from a differentiated perspective. Obviously we talked a lot about InfoSite as a platform, as a portfolio company, we're definitely trying to take out the friction, in terms of the deployment and automation of some of these big data environments. So our mission is to be able to, like you would stand up some analytic workloads in the public cloud, to provide that same experience, on-prem, right? And essentially be the broker for that user experience. So that's an area that we're going to differentiate, and then, you know, in general, there's not that many mega portfolio companies, right, anymore. And I feel like, that we're exploiting that for our customers, bringing together compute networking and storage. And certainly on the automation side. So you know, for us, I really feel that you're no longer going to be buying on horizontal lines anymore. You know, best of breed servers, best of breed networking, best of breed storage, but bringing together a complete, vetted stack for a set of workloads, from a vendor like HPE. >> Yeah, and it was just announced, the deal's not closed yet, but just to mention to the audience, HPE just made an acquisition of Plexxi, a networking specialist-- >> Patrick: Yeah, a good friend, too, Rich Napolitano. >> Rich Napolitano. Just this week, which is interesting, because that brings cloud scale to some of the hyperconvergence infrastructure. It's essentially hyperconverge networking, so really interested to see how that plays out. HPE has made a number of really effective acquisitions over the last several years, starting really with 3PAR, was the one. Clearly Aruba, you know, the Nimble acquisition, you know, SimpliVity, so, SGI. So some really strong, both tactical and strategic moves for HPE, really interested to see how Plexxi sorts out. Okay, we got to talk sports for a minute. I asked Peter McKay this question, I asked his boss, some sports fans, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> (sharp inhale) No. >> No way? >> No way, no way. >> Okay, that's consistent with McKay. >> Yeah, no way, that's like trading Montana, that didn't work out. >> That did work out, right? They traded Montana, then they won another Superbowl. >> Yeah, I know, I mean, I think, for me, he's an icon and then he's still operating at maximum efficiency, which is amazing, but I think he got a lot of legs in him. >> What do you think of the... Well hopefully he stays, hopefully he does play 'til 45. What do you think of the Garoppolo trade, though? Are you disappointed that they didn't get more, or do you think it was the right move to hang on, just in case Brady went down again? >> I think it's the right move at the end of the day, right? You're not going to get much from him anyways, and they're certainly not going to pay him out as a backup quarterback. What I don't like, though, is the fact that he's gone to the 49ers, and that's where most of my engineering team is in the Bay Area. So, to have to deal with yahoo 49ers fans, you know, for the next couple years, is going to be painful. But it's good, it's a good renewed rivalry. >> So you're not a-- >> Celtics, Warriors, you know, Patriots, Niners. >> You're not an instant transplanted 49ers fan, because of Garoppolo, right? >> Patrick: No, absolutely not. >> He's a carpet-bagger, right? >> He's out, he's off the team, he's out of the house. >> I love it, okay, Bruins were a big disappointment this year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We thought that, you know, the Celtics were super exciting, let's go there, I mean. You know, you watched the Celtics early in the year, 'cause your like, after Hayward went down, you're like, kind of' we were all walking around like this. And then you-- >> I felt like, it's like where Kennedy was shot, right? I know exactly where I was, right? >> Right, and you had people blaming Danny Ainge for, like, making a move, I'm like, come on, guys. And you see what happened with the young players, and then they sort of tailed off a little bit, they were struggling, you know, Ky was trying to find his way and now they're the exciting team. Up to on Cleveland, I mean, you got to believe that Lebron is going to step up his game with a little home cooking. But let's assume for a second that they get by Cleveland (laughs) which will be a huge task. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the NBA who can stop Kevin Durant, but I'd love to see Marcus Smart try. >> So two things in that scenario. One is that, who needs Kyrie Irving more right now, Cleveland or Boston, right? (laughter) Which is amazing, can you imagine saying that a couple months ago? It blows my mind. And then, for me, it's a revamping of the NBA, right? If you get the Celtics versus the Warriors in that style of play, I mean, it's definitely, it's changed the whole game, right? Shooting guards, ballers, I think it's fantastic to see, you know, a whole new style of play in the NBA. >> It's so exciting to see the Celtics back in. >> Team basketball, defense, passing, all of it, it's great. >> And ESPN is losing their minds, they don't know what to do. Stephen A Smith doesn't know what to say. >> Patrick: ESPN Live. >> He's actually pissed I think, yeah. (laughter) So, now, Stu, you're a Yankees fan, of course, and you know my line on the Yankees. Stu's kind of a weekend Yankees fan. My line on the Yankees is, that sucks you can't beat us in April. (laughs) Here it is in May. >> Dave, I'm just quiet around you, because I know where my paycheck comes from. >> I appreciate that perspective, Stu, okay. >> Patriots win, we're in agreement. >> Think about all these renewed rivalries, it's great. Celtics, Sixers, Red Sox, Yankees, it's unbelievable. >> And like I said, San Francisco-- >> Patrick: Phillies! >> And the Pats. >> The Pats! >> Well Patrick, always a pleasure seeing you, thanks for making time out of your busy schedule. >> Yeah, absolutely, it was great. >> For coming on theCUBE. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, right after this brief break. You're watching theCUBE, Live from Veeamon 2018. (upbeat electronic music)

okay we're back this is Dave vellante and silicon angles continuous coverage of EMC well we're back with Dave Cahill we had to take a break to interview Sanjay mirchandani and Dave thanks for letting us call inaudible there we were talking about SolidFire you unique focus on cloud service bars you're the only all flash array company focusing exclusively on cloud service providers you were talking about how you're in beta you're working at aha get a lot of good feedback bring us back to that and give us a quick update on that program yeah so we are like I said before we're in early access for the select group of cloud provider customers will continue to beat on the product with them over the course of the next few months and then towards the end of the year will go full GA to the broader market you know when market focus from our standpoint is large-scale multi-tenant clouds and where that's most prevalent today is public clouds large-scale virtual private clouds and private cloud providers yeah so um seen a lot of action in this space obviously across the entire hierarchy right and we saw EMC were here at emc world they just made a big acquisition I don't know how big actually there's a lot of rumors about the number yeah yeah I had rich Napolitano on earlier the acquisitions going to be part of his group and he said we never announced the number you don't know that I'm I said I called 400 the globe did I called 400 the global be fact what they'd say for 20 30 for 30 I had called 400 but I mean you know yeah the mark is frothy but it's a huge market it's got to be 20 plus billion yeah you know of total available market and you guys got to be excited about that on the one hand it's validation on the other hand it might be like oh oh yeah now we got to move yeah you know it when you're at the intersection of flash and cloud your life's noisy to begin with right and so in some ways EMC doesn't do us any favors by paying for 30 million for extreme I oh but but at the end of the day it's an incredible validation of the opportunity and the opportunity here isn't flesh EMC did not pay 430 million for flash they paid for a next gen art architecture capable of scaling out on a new medium and that's the difference I mean you can look at this market and it is it is so noisy and everyone's raising their hand and throwing I ops in a box and saying I'm in business but the trick is you know when you're architecting for scale it's a totally different set of design constraints and I think what you saw with emc is they're so close to the flash market that they were able to see that hey you know what we cannot retrofit an existing architecture into this problem we need to go get our own you know extreme IO slot it in they grabbed it early enough they can influence development they can spread it across their lineup I mean I think it's a great move but for us it's an incredible validation of the challenge that we're trying to solve every day which is scale out next-gen scale-out storage systems with flash as a means to an end but but flash is just the beginning of the story otherwise you're dead in this space so you're saying that the EMC moved to acquire extremely Oh was an admission that can do that the traditional controller-based architectures aren't going to cut it in this market space and so they had that piece with the enterprise flash drives and they had a PCI you know connect with VF cash and is a big opportunity in between that they were missing well I mean you know they have a whole portfolio right they called it baskin-robbins you could take you take VF cash you take thunder whenever it comes out you take extreme I oh and then you take their legacy and then you let you know emc Salesforce as long as you position it accordingly have at it but the trick is you know when do those flavors start dripping into each other right and as long as you segment them based on workload of customers that appropriately that's fine this is the key Dave the software and the management capabilities around that infrastructure and that's you know listen the flash is a is a commodity component of the architecture you know we're in and to me it is it is just the beginning of the innovation you take this hardware without the ability to scale without efficiency without performance control without complete automation you can't drive the economics necessary to take this flash and you know let's go at two for two or three percent of the market today with super high performance I ops to open up the rest of that market you need software and you've got to crack the code on the economics of efficiency automation performance control to open up that market much wider than just that two to three percent of the workloads that needs screaming fast I ops you know last year at vmworld we talked to some of your early customers and one of the things that we uncovered in those discussions was their different from the traditional enterprise guys right there thinking about running a business we were just talking to Sanjay Mirchandani about transforming IT go do an IT as a service and I'll tell you he's way ahead of the average I teashop most I tea shops are just starting to think about this transformation where's cloud service providers that's their business yeah and so one of things they said to us was look we're looking we're interested in the capability that companies like SolidFire bring because we can add value on top of that or we can sell that value to our customers right so it's not a cost plus model it's a hey this is something you need and you'll pay through the nose for because it's quality of service around applications is that is that bearing out to be true in your early beta trials and I mean this the cloud provider market is survival of the fittest right the biggest difference at the highest level is you know you've got guys traditional enterprises where I t is a cost center for this cloud service provider set I t is a profit center right and these guys look at it in terms of quality of service cost of service or breadth of service and if they're not improving or differentiating relative to the gorillas in the space on you know quality of service cost of service of breathless service that they're going to be out of business and that's the mandate that they have and so it is totally about delivering a service to their end customers not just turning a bunch of knobs to a captive user base which is what traditional enterprise IT is about ok so I'll give you the last word you know what's next what should we be looking for from from from SolidFire over the next six months yeah so from a SolidFire perspective and I think the most interesting thing for us is is just heads down and development right now so over the next six months we're going to continue to push forward with the early access customers let them prove out the solution and let them start to charge to market with their respective services and also I think you're going to see the market developed as well where cloud providers realize that it's not just about hosting data they need to host applications they need to compete on breadth of services relative to Amazon and for that that requires different mindsets and requires different architectures you think we're going to see you emerge this year a new definition of what's what was traditionally known as tier 1 storage you know the emc v-max the the IBM ds8000 HDS I mean those are it goes guys are the only tier 1 players you think that we're going to see a new definition there that's around multi-tenant around supporting horizontal applications across the port so I don't as much look at it in terms of tears I always break the market into either workloads or customer sets and I think of or than anything else you're going to see this customer set continue to emerge that cares about large-scale multi-tenant cloud environments yeah when I say to I don't mean tiering I don't confuse you with that I mean do you mean the last you're right versus module yeah ok ok all right ya know in that sense I do think that yes there is a new class of guys going at that performance tier I mean that's another thing that emc did with extreme IO is you know look at the Prophet pool that was at risk where is the MC you know that sin is flowering and market right edge end of the day 430 million is because of barges nothing yeah relative to the opportunity there Dave Cahill hey thanks very much great to see you man right that's all a good trip back keep it right there with right back