 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program. Two guests we've had on a few times. Randy Arsenault, the CMO of Infinidat, and Brian Carpety who's the CTO at Infinidat. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Let's do what's going on. Good to be here. All right, so it's VMworld time again. Lot going on. We said kind of the vibe of the show already. It's about the same attendance as last year, but the vibes feels good. Pat is actually hitting the stride on the keynote, talking about Amazon, talking about momentum that they have. You guys have had some announcements recently. Randy, when you start us off, tell us about the update of Infinidat, how many customers you've got, what can you share? So thanks Stu, thanks for having us again. It's great to be back on theCUBE. So yeah, we've over the last few years, three and a half years that we've been shipping a product. We've been able to sustain a really good, consistent cadence of growth, and that's continued into this year. So a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, we announced our most recent performance, financial performance. We're continuing to more than double each quarter year over year. We are profitable from a gap revenue perspective, which is kind of unheard of in our industry. So we think we're breaking the trend of a lot of the storage startups and even some established storage players that are having a really difficult time making their financial and business model and go to market work. Ours is clearly working. We're generating revenue, we're growing our customer base. We now have over two exabytes of storage and service worldwide. We figured out about 80% plus or minus a couple of percentage points of that is running VMware. So we think this is kind of an obvious place for us to be in terms of the affinities of our customer base. And about 50% of our systems are actually dedicated to VMware. So they're running huge VMware farms. So the financial performance has continued to be really solid. We're bucking the trend in the industry in terms of being profitable and continuing to grow the business at a really aggressive rate. Because the solution works. I mean, it's not rocket science, right? We have the product. I hear you have trouble raising money if you're profitable. Well, that's challenging. Yeah, and congratulations on the momentum. The joke a few years ago had been VMworld became storage world. And we spent years talking about it. Oh, it's flashes there and then the software defined data center. The only mention of like storage that I really heard in the keynote this morning was Pat talking about, oh, they've got about 10,000 customers running VSAN. So Brian, a lot of waves going on. We've had a number of conversations about where you fit. Bring us up to speed as to, you know, what are the conversations you're having with customers? You know, what are the important trends to them? And where your technology, how do you position yourselves there? Oh, sure. So I mean, I think from customer's perspectives, it's all just storage. They're all data stores and the different architectures and the different delivery models are, they don't really matter at the end of the day. What your CIO, what she cares about is what is the acquisition cost? What's the operational cost? What's the performance that it delivers? The latency and throughput and what's the availability of the data store? And you know, what we're seeing, especially with the software defined storage systems and VSANs is they work, but they work for small capacities. When you try to scale them, what every customer without exception sees is that they add $3 in server cost for every dollar in storage array cost avoidance. So, you know, these projects tend to not be very, they tend to be career limiting. You know, and that's why what we're hearing, especially at Wall Street, is that it's VSCAM, not VSAN. Wow. Yeah. But for small workloads where, and environments where you're looking to get a, you have a single person who needs to do storage and manage the hypervisors, it absolutely works. I think it's a killer robo and small business solution. Yeah, it's interesting because there's this growth of solutions that use storage, but they are in position to storage and VSAN and a lot of hyperconverses like that. I like the virtualization admin, I've got some app, I just want to management. I don't have to want to, you know, God, that storage stuff's hard. You know, so they'll kind of do that pieces versus, you know, real storage. Right. Go as Pat, go as Pat with the average size of those customers are like my grandmother is one of those customers, you know, she uses it. It's, but yeah. So I come from a heavy technology family though. Yes, exactly. She was the first VM certified person. No, so clearly the part of the market that we're going after is very different from that. Our systems start at, well, they get interesting at a petabyte of usable capacity or by far our most popular model is a petabyte and a half of effective capacity. Our largest system scales up to 10 petabytes in a single system image, in a single rack. So these are big monster cloud scale VMware environments. That's where, you know, our customers are having awesome success. And you know, it's not just limited to VMware though. You know, you can take the same system, the same SKU and you can use it to replace data domain systems for backup to disk. The largest splunk installation in the world is running at one of the US, big US telecoms and is running the same SKU that our customers are using for their big petabyte scale VMware environments. Analytics, which is probably the biggest growing thing in an area that Randy is working pretty heavily in. Yeah, it's absolutely exploding. Which is cool in a sense because we've been, you know, and I kind of use the tongue and cheek term accidental tourists. I mean, we sell this system into an incredibly wide range of workload environments and enterprise environments, which is why we have a really strong presence in every vertical. I mean, we're strong in healthcare and life sciences. We're strong in financial services. We're strong in retail and manufacturing. We're strong in utilities. We're strong in cloud providers. And it's exactly because of the fact that the system is designed and architected expressly to be very flexible and very adaptable. So we never shy away from the concept of general purpose storage. I mean, that became very unfashionable about five or six years ago when everything had to be hyper specialized and fit for purpose. But when we can walk into an environment and as Brian said, most of our customers tend to be fairly, you know, mid-size and large enterprises, they don't have one particular type or class of workload. They've got a hundred and they're running a hundred different storage systems. So we can go in as a consolidation play and say, look, let's take all of that VMware environment, all of that, you know, take your data domain and your backup protection environment, your analytic workload environments and move them off of these disparate platforms onto this one, you know, very capable, very flexible system. They all peacefully coexist. They all perform phenomenally. Well, it's immensely easy. We have a customer presentation that's going to be talking about exactly how easy it is. We have another CUBE session where another one of our customers is going to share the beauty of integration and orchestration automation using our API. So we kind of have a large enterprise class, extremely flexible, fully composable storage system that you can really plug in anywhere. I mean, we've talked before about how in some environments there might be one or two little fringe applications somewhere that require some weird configuration of flash or, you know, in-memory database or something that's five terabytes that's running on some strange system and that's fine, like we're happy to leave that there. We will go after the other 95% of the workloads in your environment and we'll take them all and do so very happily. It's interesting. We tracked kind of that wave of big data and especially like Hadoop and I went to all of these shows and they'd be like, oh, you know, HDFS, don't put it on a storage array because it's too expensive and when you dug into it, it was a couple of servers sitting under somebody's desk. So it wasn't real storage, like you said, but it was cost and it was there but what I'm excited about is when I'm hearing about the new kind of analytics things when you start talking about AI and machine learning and everything like that, you've got real storage issues and how are you attacking the price and how are you architecting to be ready for those types of applications? And to Brian's point, the telcos, we've got the one running the largest Splunk environment in the world, we've got another that's running a huge elk environment. The architect presented at Elasticon this year, that's all running on Infinibox. So again, we haven't specifically architected the solution necessarily for those but our customers, God bless them, bring it in, plug it in, try it because it's so simple. There's really no downside to experimenting with it and they discover, wow, this actually works exceptionally well. Yeah, and I think if you kind of step back from specific workloads, analytics or VMware or whatever, what customers for the next decade are asking for is pretty consistent and it's pretty easy to understand. They want to be able to do sub millisecond response times. They want to do very high multi gigabyte per second throughput. They want to do it over petabyte scale datasets and they want to do it at a vastly lower cost per gigabyte than the kind of traditional enterprise storage products. And if you build that, they will come and I think that's what we did and I think it's a huge part of the success that our customers are having and the momentum that kind of our company has right now is just doing all of those things simultaneously. All right, so from a price standpoint, I mean, price and simplicity kind of been the things that we've been beating on for the storage industry. How do you position that? What is kind of the killer thing that makes the customers come to you and say, wow, you guys are different and that's going to solve. So we, unabashedly, in every business school, whatever, they tell you don't sell on price, sell on value. And we have kind of been doing the opposite of that since day one, since day one. The first communication to a potential customer is we put a number out there. That number will be a 10th on a cost per gig basis of what they're paying today and it's something that nobody can say no to. It's a demonstration that we're really serious about what we're capable of doing. So then, that only works if you back it up then when the customer does an evaluation and the bake-offs and the competitive stuff, you have to absolutely destroy everything else out there or else you get pigeon-to-hold as a tier two, a tier three. And I think a lot of the newer companies are kind of falling into that where they have traction but they're really not getting into enterprise accounts, they're not getting life safety and mission-critical workloads put on them. So we unabashedly lead with price and at the end of the day, every time you instantiate a cost-function reduction in storage, it makes new types of computing possible. You put that storage in the hands of developers and they tell their management teams, here's what we can do with this. We are trying to make storage less expensive. Although you're not supposed to sell on price, you sell on value, the problem is nobody buys on value so you still have to be price sensitive and you have to have a solution that is economically feasible and viable and attractive. So we've got a very, very attractive TCO structure and model that we've used in just about every of our major sales campaigns and we have demonstrably, significantly lower cost, not just of acquisition but of ongoing operation. So when you layer all those things together, you can sell to the pure technologists who love the robustness and the feature richness of the capability and where they can apply it and how they can apply it, but it also has a very attractive financial story. So when you're selling into the business owners and the other constituencies, it's a story that everybody likes. A lot of people in the storage industry, it's always that next thing. Flash was a way we wrote for a while. When I go talk to the storage geeks, it's, oh, NVMe over fabric, it's going to dramatically change everything. What's your take? Oh yeah, yeah, it's huge. It's huge. It's always a catch-up game between the network and the transport technologies and then the storage media. So NVMe over fabrics is huge, but you have to use it the right way. And I think that it's not being used correctly by the marketers who are running a lot of the storage companies. They're using it as a way to justify their pricing. They're using it as a way to make storage expensive. And it's kind of the, again, it's the opposite of our strategy. What every customer is demanding from their vendors is, I need my storage next quarter to be less expensive than it is. This quarter next year needs to be cheaper than this year. How are you going to do that for me? So advanced technologies like NVMe and NVMe over fabrics and Optane and 3D crosspoint, these things all have, they're incredibly strategic technologies, but you have to use them the right way. You have to always keep an eye on the bottom line and be very suspicious of technologists that are trying to make infrastructure more expensive rather than less. Yeah, and it's not just the technology, it's the application. And I think a lot of vendors in our space have a tendency to focus exclusively on the technology and how to build an architecture around it or repurpose an existing architecture more commonly without really thinking about the application of that technology. Where is it going to be used? How is it going to be used? What's the cost structure have to look like? What's the use case environment look like? What verticals am I going to sell it to? What's the channel ecosystem look like? They kind of tend to save that for the last. So they developed this whiz bang solution, which is again, typically an aging architecture that maybe has some new foundational layers of technology or media built into it without really thinking about the end game. So that's one of the many things that I think Moshe and I does better than anybody is he looks at the problem from the outside in. He meets with customers on a daily basis. I mean, he's kind of a maniac in terms of traveling around and meeting with customers. He has a phenomenal reputation for obvious reasons and he listens. He listens to their problems. He listens to what they confront and what they fight with every day to kind of make a solution that works for them. And then he adapts that to his design ethos. It's not the other way around. So we don't develop something and then go try to force fit it into a market or into an environment. Yeah, last thing I wanted to ask you is users coming to a show like this, they love to be able to hear from their peers. You've got a whole bunch of customers telling their stories. What are some of the key takeaways that peers talking to peers that they're going to be hearing this week at the show from your- Yeah, so it's a lot of the same things we've been talking about here. It's cost takeout, frankly. I mean, first and foremost, these are customers that are under tremendous cost pressure. They have used us as a consolidation platform to take cost out but deliver a higher quality of service. We have, so we have a breakfast we organize. We've got a bunch of our customers. The other thing I love about our customers is they have a tendency to be kind of groupies. And I use that term very favorably because they're immensely loyal to the system because it simply makes their life better and easier and allows them to focus on other tasks. So they're talking about cost reduction and consolidation. They're talking about delivering higher performance, very, very simply. They're talking about the ease of integration and orchestration and automation using our API. So plugging our system in and just, it becomes a magnet for workloads. They bring it in for a particular project and as other growth occurs in ancillary areas, it just gets moved on to the InfiniBox because it's incredibly easy and it's a painless, seamless, frictionless process. So. Brian, I want to give you a final word, takeaways for the show that you want people to have from Infinidot. Oh, I just, I really want everybody to have a great time. Come by, check out the booth. We have an espresso machine. We'll talk a little bit about some of the computer science behind the system and, but more than anything, we want everybody to have a really good time at the event. Well, great point everybody. VMworld, always a great community. Lots of great conversations. Everybody geeking out on the technology and get some caffeine to help them through what is a very long week. So we're at the beginning of three days of live coverage here, double set. Thank you, Randy Arsenault, Brian Carmadity. For joining us again. Thanks, Stu. If you chrome a key in my shirt, just be gentle. That's all I ask. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.