 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and we're here at the NetApp customer event at AT&T Park in San Francisco. We're at VMworld. We're here with Simon Aspinow, who's the CMO of Virtustream, a really interesting cloud service provider, a company that we've been tracking at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. Simon, welcome. Welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, thank you for taking some time out. This is really an amazing event. I mean, NetApp is just doing it up right. They put this together on pretty short notice. Over a thousand people here, it's quite impressive. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people here. And over 20,000 at the show today. So really busy. Yeah, so VMworld has become the premier enterprise event. It's the premier cloud event. It's the event where all the customers are. What are your thoughts on the show so far? Great show. Virtualization, cloud are really changing IT and we're seeing so much evolution in the industry. And it's reflected by the interest of the people. How many customers are here? It's great. Talk a little bit about Virtustream. Everybody's a cloud service provider today, right? But you guys are unique and bring some differences and advantages to customers. I want to probe that a little bit. Yeah, we've always been focused on enterprise customers. What does the enterprise guy need to move to the cloud? How do you make it secure? How do you make it compliant? How do you make sure it works? How do you run your mission-critical apps in the cloud? So we focus a lot of our efforts on getting that right and we do it in a hybrid model so you can do it private on-site or public off-site and any combination in between. We're very pleased. It's getting a lot of interest. A lot of customers. Yeah, so you know Amazon got it all started years and years and years ago. You guys hopped in with the strategy specifically to focus on the enterprise. Talk about what the differences are a little bit. So cloud started off really with best efforts, clouds, great for test dev, but really not good if you want to put a really important application or data into the cloud. We really designed for mission-critical, really tough legacy applications, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft. Any of those critical business apps, that's what you want to move up and across. Are you able to deliver a quality of service for those apps? And are you able to provide, you know, get value for that? Can you charge for that? Absolutely. And that's what the customers really want. We offer commercial SLAs around the performance of those applications in the cloud, so you can have confidence it'll run better, faster, even cheaper in the cloud, but at the same time your business can rely on it. And people are willing to pay an additional premium for that kind of capability. Why do people want to put their mission-critical applications in the cloud? Isn't that, doesn't that scare people? What's the impetus? Fundamentally, there's an economic benefit and a business benefit that's incredibly powerful. This is about 40% cheaper, plus you get all the benefits that's scalable, on demand, when you require it, and literally back up disaster recovery that can be global. Can you talk about some of your customers? Absolutely. Customers for us are Fortune 1000 customers. We have businesses like FCC, which is a big sugar sweetener provider. We have some government agencies. We have gaming companies. Everyone who's got a variable demand in their business really benefits from moving to the cloud. Now, what's your relationship with NetApp? What's that all about? NetApp's a critical supplier for us. Their storage capabilities are really at the heart of our cloud offer. The ability to make it run very efficiently, to do that very economically, and to be able to secure and ensure the backup and the disaster recovery capabilities a matter for us. We've implemented NetApp, C-Mode, cluster capability. These are the elements that really give us the performance that we need to be able to make those enterprise-class clouds run well. NetApp's going for it. They bet the farm on VMware and virtualization. Now they're betting the farm on the clustering capability. Talk a little bit more about what that does for your business. Fundamentally, the capability around clustering allows us to be way more efficient with the storage, which is a fundamentally very expensive part. It's a key capability. We found that storage was the main limitation in application performance. The NetApp capabilities allow us to deliver that cloud experience that people are looking for. It's incredibly powerful. You're seeing a whole new set of IO architectures come in, and flash is coming in, and they're really changing the way in which applications are being designed. Potentially, storage is no longer going to be the bottleneck. We're just going to move to the networking. Are you seeing how sooner are we going to really see these applications that will be able to deliver a changeable and measurable business impact, productivity impact, not just cost saving? We're seeing that today, and we've implemented that for a number of customers today. Because ultimately, when you move it into the cloud, you can scale it up or scale it down whenever it's required. Most businesses vary periodically, regularly, certain days, certain weeks, certain months. That variability all translates as business efficiency. When you pair that up with the cloud's ability to make it on-demand and scalable, that means customers can pick the services whenever they require. You move them in or out of the cloud as necessary, so it's a very powerful combination. We're seeing that today. People are redesigning their business to take advantage of what the cloud gives them. You were talking about the hybrid cloud before. Let's drill into that a little bit. What are people doing with the hybrid cloud? How are you guys supporting them? We're doing business IT, complex, heterogeneous, lots of apps, lots of data. In reality, people want to be able to move and mix and match where they put those apps and data. Certain core apps you want to keep on-site, running your own private cloud. Other apps you may wish to move off to a virtual private or a public cloud. In reality, you probably want to mix between the two. We've really designed a hybrid solution that lets the enterprise run exactly that way. You can choose and tailor where they put things and even move them back and forth at any time, so they get a lot of flexibility. Instead of having to build your own data center for your peak demand, you build for your average demand and use a public or a virtual private cloud for the excess. It's a very powerful model. What's the secret sauce that enables you to make sure that that is reliable and secure? Is it a great deal of homogeneity? You guys designed that in? Talk about that a little bit. Well, we really learned from doing this ourselves. We've been a managed service and cloud provider ourselves for nine or four years now. I reckon we probably broke every piece of hardware, every piece of software that we brought in. We learned from that experience of how you design the intelligence into the cloud to run. We've really got a set of patented technologies. We use an approach we call microVM that lets us guarantee the resources, the availability, the performance. That's really the secret sauce in what lets us do enterprise-class clouds. Talk about the business a little bit. What can you share with us in terms of its growth, its headcount? Give us some mechs or some idea of what's happening. It's a phenomenal growth business at the moment. We just finished growing 100% year on year. We are looking at phenomenal growth next quarter. Not allowed to give you numbers, but literally, we're going to roll out one major customer press release every week for the next three months. Literally, customers are coming on so fast now. We're having to expand rapidly just to keep up. It's great. Fantastic. All right, Simon. Well, congratulations. Really appreciate you spending some time with us. Have a good rest of the event. Thank you. All right, everybody. Keep it right there. We'll be back with more from the NetApp customer event at AT&T Park in San Francisco at VMworld 2012. Thanks. Right back.