>> Is about what our youth is, and who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> Narrator: Congratulations, Reggie Jackson. You are Cube alumni. (gentle music) Live from Silicon Valley it's The Cube covering Google Cloud Next '17. (upbeat music) >> Hi, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Google Next 2017 happening in San Francisco. We're shooting live from our 4,500 square foot here in Palo Alto in the heart of SiliconANGLE. Happy to welcome back to the program, I guess we haven't had him for a little while, but one that we know quite well, Ron Bianchini who's the CEO of Avere. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so Ron, for our audience, why don't you give us the update? What's happening with Avere the company itself, and what brings you guys, which I think of you, no offense, you guys are infrastructure company I think of on there. How does cloud fit into the whole discussion you guys are having, and your customers? >> That's great, great segue. So, we started out as an infrastructure company and really what Avere learned to do, our whole IP, actually let me start this way. We started in 2008. Think about where the world was in 2008. People were trying to figure out how to get flash into the data center. And what we did is we came up with a storage system, a NAS server, that knew about two types of storage. It knew that there was very high performance nearby precious flash storage, but that big bulk storage, much cheaper, 1/10 the price disk was a high latency away. And we're able to take that solution, and we started out in the data center, we went after very high performance applications, but showed how you could do it at very low cost. >> It's great, nine years later, I mean, storage is infinite and free, right? >> That's right. The good news for us is the world is very much in the same place. The cost delta between flash and disk has stayed at 10 to one. Both have gotten a lot less expensive, but that difference between the two has stayed. It turns out a solution that knows how to use local high performance flash and store big bulk data at high latency away is an ideal solution for the cloud. And really what we're helping customers now is we're helping customers that are in the data center, in the Enterprise data center, we're helping them adopt cloud. And it works two ways. We support the gateway model where you can keep your compute on-prem and put your big bulk storage in the cloud, and we enable that model without seeing any delta, any change in performance or availability. But we also do the opposite of that, we enable customers to put their compute out in the cloud, and now the big bulk capacity could either stay in the cloud or could be on-prem. So really, I think about us as an enterprise data center play, just like you said, but now we're helping customers take baby steps and slowly adopt the cloud. >> All right, so terms I heard from Google this week, they talked about building the planetary scale computer. They talked about Google Spanner which gives us global, the time synchronization across the globe, the things that those of us with storage backgrounds, it's like, boy these are big, heavy challenges. >> Ron: Big words, right. >> Talking about some of the things, just physics that we try to figure all that. So, how do you guys fit into that? I mean, doesn't GFS, Google File System, solve all these issues for us? >> Right, great. So, one thing to understand is that enterprise storage uses a very different consistency model than Google Storage. So, there's a theorem called the CAP principle, C-A-P. It's consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. And basically what the CAP principle says is, of those three parameters, pick two, because it's impossible to build a storage system that does all three. And really, GFS is all about availability and partition tolerance, because they have big, scalable solutions. What it doesn't give you is exact consistency, and that's what NAS solutions do. NAS solutions are really the high consistency, still partition tolerant because you have big distributed scale systems, but you don't get that high availability piece. And it turns out, in the enterprise there are times when you need high availability storage, that's what you get from Google's file system, but then there are also times you need high consistency storage, that's what you get from an Avere solution. Imagine a bank account where you deposited a million dollars, and then you withdraw a million dollars from two locations, maybe 10 seconds apart. If you don't have a high consistency model, it might be possible to withdraw money from both places. That's what NAS guarantees. >> Ron, I want to get your viewpoint, I'm sure you talk to a lot of your customers. What's their mindset of cloud today, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with people stop by your booth at Moscone West. >> I think you said it right, Google is proposing big, scalable, huge features that the customers are trying to get access to, but moving everything from the data center into the cloud all at once to get them is a big, scary step. And so really what we enable people to do is to take baby steps. If you want to move a little bit of your capacity to the clouds, or petabytes of storage in the clouds, like one of our Genomics customers does, you could do that. Your compute and a lot of where they start in storage stays on-prem, but now they're leveraging the cloud for big, scalable capacity. Then we have other customers that want access to the compute and the performance of the scaling you can get. We allow them to get access to that as well. >> Any commentary on, I think about just the trend itself. There's no doubt how big cloud is and how fast it's growing. When we look on the data side Diane Green threw out a number that only 5% of the world's data sits in the public cloud, and that's going to shift. We know that there's a lot of compute-heavy workloads that really started out in those environments, or are leveraging that. So, there's a lot of kind of reasons why we haven't had the data there. We are starting to see some rapid acceleration. What do you see happening in the environment? >> I think that's right. I think the 5% number just gives us a window into how big this cloud movement is, how much is still left to be accomplished. We talk about cloud, cloud, cloud, as if it's already happened, but we're only at the cusp of what's possible. And that's really what we see as this next big phase of the cloud is ingest, is cloud adoption, it's migrating applications and storage into the cloud. >> Yeah, you said what, the future's already here, just unevenly distributed. >> That's right. It hasn't quite made it yet. >> You guys are headquartered in Pittsburgh. >> We are. >> I'm out of Boston. I always joke every time I come out here, it's like okay, I'm going to go spend a week in the Valley and in San Francisco, then I'm going to go back to the real world where I'm not seeing autonomous vehicles in front of me. You guys have some cool autonomous cars driving around Pittsburgh these days? >> Ron: We absolutely do. >> And not everybody is fully cloud-native, serverless and everything else like that. What are you seeing in the marketplace, what's interesting you these days? >> There's no doubt that in the future world all data, all applications, everything will be in the cloud unless there's a very important reason to have it nearby. We think with our Genomics customers, it has to start where the patients are. It has to start on-prem, and then it gets migrated to the cloud. But there's no doubt in the future all compute, especially the big, scalable things that we hear Google talk about will be there. The next five, seven years is all about how we get there from here. >> All right, and Ron, as people look at your company what should we be expecting kind of throughout the rest of this year as we look at you growing your future? >> It's all about making it easier to adopt the cloud. You're going to see higher levels of integration with our cloud partners, Google in particular. We do a lot of work with Google. You're going to see big steps as we move forward and make that integration better. >> You're working with the other cloud players, yes this is a Google show, but we want to talk about the environment. Lots of companies I talk to are like, "Look, yes Google's a player," but I talk to plenty of companies that, "Look, 3/4 of my customers are all on Amazon," and that's where a lot of the market is today. So, what's the breadth of the offering that you have to that? >> It is. We support all the three big cloud players, we support Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. What I will say is the Google team is very much focused on the enterprise, just like Avere is. And that actually helps us a lot. It's really helping us knock down customers and really helping get customers moved into the cloud. >> All right, Ron, I'll give you the final word. Takeaways for the week, anything else you want to share before we wrap. >> You know, it's exactly what you said. The cloud is coming, now it's just a matter of how we get there and watching the big momentum shift. >> I think Eric Schmidt said last year we were like kind of meet you were we are. This year it's, come on. It's, now's the time, we need to go. I think we understand how big cloud is going to be, it's one of the generational shifts that we're all going to be watching, and we're in the thick of it. So, thank you, Ron, for joining us, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here. We've got call-ins and people at the show itself doing dial-ins, pulling people in. Really broad community at this event, so stay tuned for lots more coverage, and you're watching The Cube. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)