 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's special presentation of EMC World 2015. We're live in Las Vegas for day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. theCUBE, our flagship program. When we go out to the events, thanks for the signal and the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante, next guest is, you hit Rokosh, general manager, co-founder of Stream.io. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to be here, thank you. So, success is happening. It is. You saw this all coming. What's going on with you right now? I see great product, performance is there. What's, are you feeling like this was what you saw and what level of impact surprised you? Right. So, what's happening is we are taking the market by storm. I think we did hope for this to happen. We did expect success. In reality, it might be somewhat better than even expected, I would say, faster. The adoption has been amazingly fast, extremely successful. We have a ramp that's faster than anything seen before. And so, this is true rocket ship. So, EMC behind you, great sales, motion with the company, great technology, perfect market conditions for disruption and innovation. What surprised you in terms of the deployment of the solution and the product and its impact to not only EMC's portfolio, but to the customers. Right, so I think what we are seeing is the ability to create real transformation for customers. It's not only, you know, maybe two, three years ago if you were asking me, oh, so where is this going? Yeah, we are going to critical applications where speed is important. It's much more than that today. We are witnessing customers transforming their business by leveraging Extreme I.O. It's speed is absolutely an important element there. Our ability to scale speed with scale out architecture of Extreme I.O. But the range of services, efficiency, simplicity, copy management, we call all of this together agility. Allowing customers to do things faster, easier, much more efficiently than before. And we hear again and again the feedback from our customers that they feel their infrastructure is transforming and their business is transforming thanks to that. We call it the locomotive in the earlier segment, the locomotive of the disruption and innovation. Can you share what use cases that you're seeing out there right now that are driving more and more faster change? And specifically workloads, that's been the buzzword. Right. Workloads, all in the cloud, on-prem, dataset, hybrid cloud, workloads are the centerpiece of that. What workloads are perfect for Extreme I.O. And which workloads are you going into as a locomotive and creating great value? So I think the, I don't know if there is an ideal or ideal workload for Extreme I.O. But that's exactly the point. The perfect workload is consolidated, mixed workloads that all of them go on Extreme I.O. And join data reduction with deduplication and compression that makes an important case of the economic side and leveraging the performance density that we offer that's always there to allow larger pools of storage, self-service in terms of simplicity of allocating storage. You don't need to tune anything. You don't need to think about how and where do I place data? You have a mix of workloads, typically with a lot of copies on some of the data, a virtual machine collection that goes all on Extreme I.O. And a great tool for simplicity and speed. I wonder if we could, you know, the entrepreneur of me wants to tell the story or learn more about the story that is Extreme I.O. You're a very small company. You had not a lot of market presence, if any, prior to getting acquired. I don't know, how many people were you when you got acquired by? About 40. 40 people? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this company comes in and says, okay, we're going to pay a bunch of money and bring you in. Obviously, you had to seriously consider that. You did. You come in. What was that like? I mean, you essentially didn't have a shipping product at the time. Right, right. Which is just amazing. And you got these guys coming in, kicking the tires. Who knows, they may be trying to steal your ideas, right? But you have to take the chance. What was it like back then? Take us through that now that it's sort of a couple years on. I think that the big decision for us to join forces with EMC had really the purpose of maximizing our chance to win and lead in the market. I think as entrepreneurs, the number one thing we want to do is win. And we knew we have the best technology. We knew we have a great architecture. And we knew that EMC is not only the number one player in storage, but also a great company in terms of going through acquisitions. And so I think we expected this to be successful and it proved itself. We got the support and backing from EMC, not only the financial means, but the support of the field organization and support organizations around it. And we got the freedom and independence to run quickly, leverage what we need, run independently where this is better, and deliver, and indeed we delivered. So you come into this company, they acquire you, and then all of a sudden you have all these resources. But a lot of times, if you apply too many resources to a problem, you mess it up, right? You think of a small agile development team. So how did that all work? You had the autonomy to continue to develop the product. At the same time, if you're going to ship a product to EMC customers, they're going to really make sure it's bulletproof. So you had a lot of work to do and it took a while. So how did that go? Take us through that sort of sequence. So yeah, absolutely. And this is the reason why it took a little bit more than a year between the time of acquisition and when we went to the market and then even a few more months before we defined this to be generally available. Which is still pretty fast actually. It's pretty fast, but very uncommon in terms of the phase of being acquired, right? Pre-products. Right. And I think we continued and still continue to work aggressively the type of work you would expect from a startup, but leveraging the resources and the support organizations of the big EMC in a very productive way. And so this period of time was continuing the startup mode of operation with more resources, doing more and setting the bar very high on reliability and future ability, serviceability, training of the EMC field teams and so on. Was that a culture shift for you? You obviously know what it takes to hit that bar. So was it, okay, this is the bar we have to hit, what do you need to hit it? And then what resources are required and then go? Was it that simple or was it, were there structural discussions of, okay, do you need us to fly over some of our engineers? Did that happen? How did that? No, no, I think no big company coming over. No Americans parachuting in. No, no, no, not really. Tell us what you need. That's good. Much more of tell us what you need. We trust you to take the right decisions, leverage what you can. And I can't say enough good things about the EMC culture, which initially, before we learned to know it intimately, is a little bit of a concern. This big company, startup company, clash, potential clash, proved extremely productive. EMC proved to be very open to new technologies, very open to disrupt itself when it makes sense. And I think this is what we see happening today. We are disrupting the market and EMC is not afraid of disrupting itself. So in that 12 to 14 month period, it couldn't have been all pretty. It must have been so tough. How did you handle those? Maybe, you know. It's almost all pretty, not easy, but pretty, yes. So many challenges, tons of work on the engineering side, on the market, go to market side, manufacturing services side, a lot of work, nothing is easy when you have a very high bar in terms of goals and expectations and quality. But I have to say, very cooperative, great teams on the EMC side working very closely with the extreme. But there was, it had to be hard because competition was making a lot of noise, the market was taken off. There must have been, Salesforce must have been chopping at the bit to get the product out. Come on, let's chip it, let's chip it, let's chip it. I think that's when you came up with this notion of, maybe not, directed availability was maybe before, but anyway, that must have been hard, not. Pressure, yes, absolutely. So what did that do? We didn't go, we weren't first to the market, right? We weren't last there, but we definitely weren't first. So you see the market starting to emerge and hey, we need this to GA, we need this to GA. But we are used to work under pressure. Maybe it even brings the best of us, I don't know. And it worked. And the power of the product, the architecture, what it can do, combined with the EMC field presence, got us to become number one player in 2014, verified just a few days ago by Gartner's numbers in our first year of GA. So it worked. What's next, product-wise? What's the next innovation? Because obviously you have success. Right. It's the wedge, first high performance, it's landing, expanding other areas. Right, right, right. Impacting architectures, other use cases, kind of the meat and potatoes. You mentioned you do have some backup and recovery. What's the next in the roadmap? So just this week, we made a big announcement. Xtreme iO 4.0 has tons of new features, capabilities, big ones around replication and online scaling in larger capacities and more capabilities. And a very long list of smaller features that are extremely important and together create an offering that has zero excuse in terms of why not deploy an all-flesh array. We have presented a set of capabilities that is really designed to allow an easy decision to go to the all-flesh agile data center. You had a lot of data passing through Xtreme iO, phone-back data, et cetera. What's surprised you, what's surprising you from the rapid success and all the data you're gathering? Any learnings? Absolutely, so there is a lot of data we collect from the field, real time, all the time, from our systems that are all calling home, of course. We analyze it, we draw a lot of conclusions on how customers are using the systems. We can obviously do proactive maintenance in case anything is needed. I think, I wouldn't say surprising, but encouraging and fun thing to witness through these systems is you look at, you see how much data goes on the Xtreme iO systems, how much performance these systems deliver each and every day, every second. And various aspects of the data we collect demonstrate the range of workloads and different ways customers are using Xtreme iO. Do you think that, I got to ask this question, we ask it all the time. Do you think that the upstarts in this business can achieve escape velocity, given that the EMC, HP, IBM have sort of made their bets, acquired companies seem to have viable strategies. You know, in the earlier virtualization days you had a three-par, an Isilon, a Compellent, a data domain, they achieved escape velocity. Maybe they got lucky with the economy, I don't know. But do you think the flash guys, a lot of them, will be able to achieve escape velocity? Right, so by now I think most will not be able to do so. Can there be an exception? Possibly, yes. You need a lot of investment and you need very strong differentiation if you are trying to compete with the big guys. And as you mentioned, EMC for one has very strong presence and a very strong offering. Other large players have some offerings as well. It's becoming more and more difficult. So most of these players, I think, will find it difficult. So EMC's the leader in storage. But at the same time, two-thirds of the customers don't buy from EMC. Do you expect that you can achieve a higher proportion of market with all flash than EMC has been able to with all of its storage? That's absolutely our goal. So I think we have reached more or less the EMC share in our first year. And we are looking to run faster and get further in 2015. And finish 15 with a market share in the all-flash market that's bigger than EMC's market share in the general storage. And it seems like, you talked before, you weren't the first to market, you weren't the last, but you've now seemed to leapfrog the market in many ways and you've got more momentum. What gives you confidence that you can sustain that lead? The best thing that gives me confidence is the feedback we get from our customers. Their repeat business, the amount of repeat business we are seeing and the momentum. That's at the end of the day, that's the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What I know also is what we have on the roadmap, what kind of innovations are coming, how much EMC is backing us, not afraid of disruption as I mentioned earlier, the combination of product, innovations, feedback from customers, repeat business and the EMC weight in the field on Xtreme I.O. This gives us the confidence that we are escaping and running ahead of competition. We appreciate your time on theCUBE. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you very much. Xtreme I.O. is continuing to dominate repeat customers, land and expand, more sales and again fastest growing product, congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have more coverage coming right back to this short break, stay tuned, we'll be right back.