 Okay, we're here at AT&T Park. This is Dave Vellante in SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2012. We're here at the NetApp customer event with David Flynn, friend of the Cube, CEO of Fusion IO. David, welcome back. Well, thank you. Glad to be back. Good to see you. What do you think of this venue? It's unbelievable, isn't it? Ah, this is great. Boots great, too. Are you a baseball fan? You know, haven't really gotten into baseball a lot. Well, it's not really out your way, is it? Yeah, and being so busy. Yeah, well, so I've only been to this park once. It was years and years ago, but it's a great venue. So see what you have to look forward to. Your public company, all you have to do is double every year for the next five years, right? You know that story about NetApp? It's an amazing, amazing growth story. So, yeah, when they were $50 million for those of you don't know, Dave Hitz had this great idea. He's a technical guy, and he said, all you got to do is double every year for the next five years. It will be a billion-dollar company. Of course, the sales guy, Tom Mendoza, said, you're out of your mind, you know. So there's aspirations for you. Yeah, well, we did 82% last year. And 222 compound annual over the past four. So well on our way. Yeah, the numbers kind of match there, right? You're a little over 50 million. Yeah, yeah. Quite a bit. So, you guys just announced a big relationship with NetApp. They're very excited about it. I know you are. I mean, essentially, if you think about Fusion I.O., I mean, you've been the last year. You've all been about expanding your TAM and gaining share. So you've expanded your product line, you've expanded your relationships. Where does NetApp fit into that? As you provide more performance in delivering data to processors, it generates a lot more data that needs to be managed. So there's a big synergy between the performance tier and the capacity and data management tier. So you've never had an aspiration to get into the spinning disc business, right? So you're partnering with the guys that have that in Stalbase. Yeah, they're good at it. Where do you see those two worlds dovetailing? You know, there's synergies on both fronts. On the technology side, the NetApp waffle file system, because how it serializes writes is perfect for taking the data that isn't fitting in the cache in the server and being able to write it very quickly. It's rather ironic that the performance storage arrays, these sands, don't get that same benefit because they're trying to still do random writes. So it's really a neat synergy from a technology point of view with a cache in the server out front and the disc in the back ingesting data sequentially because that's what this can do very well. That's just on the technology front. Then you go on the business front, the compatibility in the marketplace with the sales team and the ability to address the market as best of breeds in our respective areas where we're not trying to hoist on customers a proprietary single vendor locked thing coupled all the way out to the server. People don't want to be told that they have to put a specific storage vendor in the server, so this gives us that flexibility. NetApp's very partner-friendly right now, aren't they? Because they don't have a big services business and so the resellers really love that and like you said they're open to working with a lot of different companies and they're big independent storage companies, so that has to be attractive from your standpoint. It is. That pure play focus, like Fusion I.O. is a pure play on flash performance in the enterprise. They're a pure play on the disk-based systems and that makes it very compatible. What's your point of view on, speaking of continuing this pure play theme, you see a lot of consolidation in the industry and there seems to be this move toward these integrated systems, but for two decades now pure plays have always beaten the integrated play. Is that changing or do you see flash as being so unique in delivering such new business value that it can maintain that pure play independent mojo? Well, I think markets when they mature, they absolutely go to more layered, not more integrated. It's a fluid kind of thing and there's give and take to some extent, but the market demands options and demands choice on things and now that choice is simply moving to the cloud, right? Your choice isn't necessarily about what vendor you use in your own infrastructure is who do you use in the cloud, so you're seeing it shift up to where there's an additional layer of the cloud-based services on top and so that's why we're catering our technologies to cloud providers, the software as a service folks like Salesforce.com, like the Facebooks and Apples of the world that are providing services in the cloud for consumers. What's your perspective? I mean you're selling to these guys that are very advanced, they're building these amazing data centers, many of them are highly homogeneous, definitely best to breed data centers, they've got a lead on the traditional IT shop, they've got an advantage, they don't have all this legacy infrastructure and thousands of applications, but do you see a lot of those ideas, those best practices spilling into the traditional data center? We talked about this before, Facebook not being an outlier, is that happening? Well, there's some barriers to using the scale out technology in the traditional IT world. Those barriers is that in the scale out world, people have a priority to scale above and beyond data management and they're at a scale that they can afford to do their own management and build their own systems for it. In traditional IT space, you can't do that, so to get good data management, to get the data reliability, data integrity, that's not necessary often in that scale out web world, so what we see as an interesting opportunity is kind of the combination of using Flash to now miniaturize the data management and the data reliability, the transactional consistency, so you can put that into the scale out infrastructure and have that layered with disks behind it that are also best in breed and how they manage the data. We're going to see hybrid systems like that that support scale out on the front end and scale up capacity tier on the back end. Yes, so you guys have been working hard, as I mentioned at the top of the spot to really expand your product line. Talk about that and talk about just your vision and your long-term growth strategy. So, you know, our product started with the first piece that you had to have, Flash as a memory, rethink it from scratch, architect it in to get the maximum benefit from it, instead of putting it through storage controller, all the stuff that slows it down, put it in as a memory device and virtualize it using a software subsystem in the OS, our VSL, very much like virtualizing your memory subsystem. That's the start and it allows us to address a certain market, folks who can use local storage and at the application layer get the services they need. So, the scale out world that works well, Oracle, MySQL, those very mature applications do a lot of the data management and can deal with local storage, but the rest of the world needs the convenience of shared storage or the full-blown data management that they're used to today. So, we took the product that started as Flash as storage local to the server and augmented it with the software for that Flash to be able to act as a cache in front of your traditional storage and data management systems such as the NetApp. So, you can have the best of both of those. Accelerate the data, but keep your same data management. And the third is with our ION product, where you can take an off the shelf server with Flash locally attached and this software gives it the personality to act as a high speed storage array. So, you get your shared storage from within your server. So, those are really the three models. Flash in the server, Flash in the server is a cache in front of your traditional storage and Flash in a server sharing it as if it were a sand. So, the last four or five years have been incredibly productive for you personally and you guys have obviously spent a lot of time and effort. Did you even remotely envision where you would be at this point four or five years ago? You know, if anything, the answer to that is simply no. Never would have imagined it and it's largely because we didn't even comprehend the size of the pain point. The fact that processors in the last 50 years are like 40 million times faster and storage isn't any much faster than it was. Yeah, about the same. Right, it's only so fast you can spin a platter and move a needle. So, you know, it's moving atoms versus moving electrons. Moving electrons win every time. Sorry. And that pain point, that gap has left a system starved for being able to get data supplied quickly. Yet you still have to solve the capacity problem because being able to deliver the data quickly into the processor is only going to create more of it that you have to store and that's why it's so complimentary to have the capacity and the performance. David, it's always such a pleasure talking to you. I learned something every time I see you. Thanks very much for your time. Congratulations on everything and enjoy the rest of the event and keep it right there. We'll be right back.