 It's the Cube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon with a special presentation of the Cube here at the Infinidat ribbon cutting in Walthamass. Happy to have Craig Hibbet, who's an SE with Infinidat with me. Craig, thanks for joining me. Thank you, thank you, good to be here. All right, before we start, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, your background, what brought you to Infinidat? Sure, yeah, so I was with EMC with Moshe back in the heyday when that was the best technology around. Yeah, work with you. Yeah, myself and my sales executive, we went to XIV with Moshe, and we saw the transformation there of a self-healing, easy to manage kind of solution that didn't require the level of complexity that EMC did. We saw the success that was there. And then obviously when Moshe came back for round three in his legacy, how could you say no, particularly when you started to see what the box could do and the value to customers? All right, Craig, talk a little bit about the customers that you're talking to. You know, how does storage fit into their environment and what's the general gestalt of, you know, why Infinidat gets in there? Okay, so myself and my sales executive, Sean McNulty, we tackle the financials, mostly the enterprise customers. It's the overall compelling value. You've got, we're better, faster, cheaper. And today if you're not doing all three of those, then I think there's a void in your market strategy. So we come in there, we have a very tried and true process. We show them the value of the Infinibox, all the new advantages and technological features, a higher degree of modernity than what you see on 25 year old technology. And they quickly buy into that. And very quickly we move to a performance analysis. We collect the data off their environment they're running today. And then we come back with a massive consolidation plan of consolidating sometimes two VMAX 40s, you know, 18, 19, 23 inch cabinets into one 19 inch box. So from that point on, we sell it via the OPEX. The CAPEX is great, but the OPEX is what drives the value of Infinidad. The performance, the guarantees, we give them a guarantee. We've never had to give additional storage to match that guarantee. And the customers love it. It's just basically like, I use a military and acronym, fire and forget. You lock on target, you take a shot and the pilot can take evasive action. It doesn't have to worry about the missile. That's what our storage does. You put it in there, you don't have to tune it, manage it, manage contention hotspots. It just does what it's supposed to do. And Craig, who typically is the advocate internally for the customer for this? Is this, do you start out at the storage administrator? You're starting out at the C suite? So it's a good question. So we need both, right? Sometimes we'll have executive sponsorship. We believe the best way to sell is from the ground up. If you're trying to do it top down, sometimes that doesn't work. So we build a consortium within the company and we go to the executive chain together with a documented path of what we've done, what we've accomplished and why everybody feels it's the right solution. So we build the grounds well and we use that to our advantage in the account. And does that, I'm sure the term cloud comes up a bunch. How does this fit into kind of the overall cloud adoption with the customers you're working with? Great question. We do get a lot. So I say to customers, how can you go to the cloud with 25 year old architecture, right? When you're still using a service processor to transcend commands, you can't go to the cloud. The cloud's about liquidity. It's about motion. It's about fluidity. And so with those, we have an API structure that's very fast. It's how we do all our GUI calls within one command. I can do what ECC takes, you know, 45 minutes to do and various other products as well. Like OCI is a good product, but again, you're paying a lot of money to do that. So our cloud strategy is very much in the foundation of the product, the way it's built, it's dynamicism, it's redundancy, it's reliability, and then it's ease of use through the APIs. And we have some announcements that'll be coming out soon to demonstrate and support what I just said. Craig, last question I have for you. When a customer's deployed the Infinibox is, you know, what are you hearing from them? What is the game changer for them? Another great question. So we always undersell and overdeliver. So when they ask us, you know, what are they going to get from this? We'll say you can get four XIVs or two VMAXs in there. And they always find that they're getting close to double that. So it's a refreshing change for the customers to see that we are naturally delivering on what we said, but then again, you know, then some factor of X. And what they like to is that the no tuning and the fact that we have these host power tools, I'm not sure if you've covered those, they can provision from the host layer. So they don't have to open tickets to the storage team. So the storage team is freed up from all the ancillary and mundane requests to provision along here that the application group can do at the server team. And they can go on and start becoming proactive in the environment, which is something they need to do to get to cloud and some of the other things. Craig, really appreciate you sharing the voice of the customer as they're helping to transform their environment. You know, love that, helping to get out of some of the work they were doing in the past and be able to move their business forwards. We'll be back with more coverage here. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.