 Welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE. This is part of our pre-VM world coverage, and happy to welcome back to the program, Doran Kempel, who is the CEO of SimpliVity, global company who happened to have its headquarters right down the road in Westboro, Massachusetts. Of course, we're here in Marlboro. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. All right, so we were talking, you know, hyperconvergence went from when SimpliVity came out of stealth. It was one of these terms. We didn't even know if it would stick. And today there's somewhere between, I don't know, two dozen and three dozen companies that kind of claim to be in this market. So what's new with SimpliVity? So first of all, let's touch upon that particular effect or impact where so many companies are saying that they're in the hyperconvergence category. That is great. And it's great because basically it helps the crossing of the chasm, so to speak, of the category, a so to speak inflection point. And I think that what we're seeing is a movement from early fascination or curiosity. People talk about this very long-term hyperconvergence to a state of relevance. People start deploying and perhaps deploying in volumes to the third phase, which is where you really cross the chasm and that is the phase of understanding. And what I mean by understanding is understanding that not all hyperconvergence offerings are created equal. And if you think about it, in the 1980s we had mainframes and storage was kept within the mainframes or other closed systems. And then when storage let itself out, the open systems revolutions, for a while all storage was created equal, but then there is significant segmentation and there's very significant clarity in terms of the Y axis, which is how far up the critical set of applications can a given storage device goes. Think about it, the Y axis has to do with how far up market you can go. This is typically associated with foundation capabilities such as performance, resiliency, and also serviceability. In another dimension, think about it as the X axis has to do with the functional scope. So as we move, as we cross the chasm in hyperconvergence we're now at the state of relevance. That means that when everybody looks at hyperconvergence they understand that everybody's in. Everybody needs to say we have a hyperconvergence offering, but it's not really clear what the difference is. And basically the analysts and the media measure everybody based on their revenue, which means that if you have a lot of revenue that means that you're technologically sound. But what's gonna happen in the next year or two is gonna be very clear where people or where vendors are situated in terms of their availability in terms of their ability to address the high end of the market or just the mid market and types of applications. And very importantly the scope of functionality. In hyperconvergence there are some who just offer rudimentary storage. Let's assume that they go halfway through the X axis and then there's some offer the data protection, the deduplication compression optimization, the ability to manage remote sites on a per virtual machine basis and so forth. So I think we're at that phase where everybody says we're in the game, which is great, it creates awareness. And what comes to mind is an email that I got from a general manager of the data center business of a five billion dollar system integrator. And in his email he says, Doran we're convinced that hyperconvergence is no longer a niche I'm quoting. It is on any and every CIO's agenda. We need to engage with you. By the way he sent me that email after I shared with him a very significant set of wins that we had at the very high end of the Y axis basically global 100, 200 companies. Yeah, so this is great. Lot of great points there. Of course part of our job, you know, my job that the analysts had on is to try to dissect that because as you said, there's a lot of nuance built in there. When we wrote our first piece, what we called ServerSan, we talked about both that X and Y axis because first of all, there's a general maturity on the marketplace. I know you'll talk about how long SimpliVity spent on building the software stack that you had. And you know, that matters. Functionality matters. And then there's the whole diffusion of innovation. So how long does it take for customers to be ready for it? VMworld is a show that you'll go and there's lots of those companies. You know, we're going to have many of them on our video program theCUBE and they're talking about it and absolutely it's funny. When I talk to end users, they don't have a convergence problem, but convergence and hyperconvergence is absolutely a solution that they're all looking at. It kind of fits in, you know, cloud, convergence, you know, some of those items that people are looking for. So one of the challenges we all have is we'd like to boil it down and we'd like to make it simple. So revenue is an easy one. Number of users is an easy one. So what were things with simplicity from a customer adoption and momentum standpoint? So we continue to grow about two X year over year. We're very happy about that. Consistently growing outside the United States, which is more challenging. It's much easier to open another territory in the West Coast or in New York than to open territories or new offices in South Africa or Turkey or Singapore or Thailand or Indonesia, et cetera. But 40% of our sales still come from outside the United States. I want to get into the details because the marketing team told me that this is something that there's going to be an announcement about. But the company is growing very fast, but very importantly as to the marketing or the company is growing upmarket on that Y axis. So when we started, it was after a period of 43 months in which we developed the core technology, the foundation technologies. We launched the first version of the code or the first product in April, 2013. And since then we're now more than three years in the market. And with all the functionality that we offer, I'd like to suggest and momentarily I'm actually going to show you a slide that shows what we have done on behalf of one of the largest companies in the world that basically we've developed a technology that goes all the way on the Y axis. In other words, there isn't a payload that's virtualized that we cannot address with this particular technology. So on the Y axis all the way up and then in terms of the X axis, terms of the functionality, all of the functionality that is offered by anything that falls into the ITC $55 billion storage market. So basically if you connect these two dots, it's the upper right, so to speak. So I'll talk about that momentarily, but when we launched in 2013, we couldn't go to a Fortune 100 company and tell them run everything on SimpliVity. So we started in a mid-market and gradually graduated to the mid-enterprise and then late last year we started getting into very large enterprises. I'm not talking about large enterprises for VDI. I'm not talking about large enterprises for Robo. I'm talking about core applications in the main data centers and this is where we're growing and this is very healthy for the business because that gives you a lot of repeatability. Once you get into these very large companies and they like what you do, then you start basically expanding the value that you create for them. So very exciting phase for us. On one hand, connecting to your prior question, the market is reaching this inflection point and I think moving from relevance to understanding, what I mean by understanding is segmentation, understanding where the vendors are in terms of how far up the mission criticality path they can go and what type of functionality. So my answer to you is continuing to grow but it's beyond just the numbers also the type of use cases, the type of customers globally. Yeah, that's great. And just, you know, I know you're not going to share numbers but from our standpoint we look at hyperconvergence in 2015, order magnitude was about $1.5 billion according to our accounting. SimpliVity is in that first pack of companies that have gotten to around that magic kind of $100 million mark and a lot of growth in the space, a lot of excitement and you brought up some really good points though about kind of the size of the customer because the big companies were like, oh, well that's a robo thing. It's a little project in there, but two things. One is, I think you've got great proof points there. Secondly, you see the big companies, EMC, HPE, Cisco, all trying to target this market and they're not saying that this is some corner case environment. They're trying to try to hop on that wave that you were one of the early leaders on. So let me show you a slide that I think changes everything. It's a validation of what is possible with hyperconvergence. So if you look at this particular slide, first of all, let's talk about the customer. Can't name the customer, of course, but this is one of the 50 largest companies in the world. Of course, it's a multinational. It's in the financial services market so we know that their attention to details and their sensitivity to reliability and data protection is very high. This customer or that division of that very large customer has six data centers around the world, two in Asia, two in Europe, two in the US and the DR operations are intra-continent. We engage with them through a VAR. VAR introduces us to this particular customer last year and up until that point in time, they don't know about hyperconvergence. Imagine that with all the noise that we're making. They haven't heard about it and they've evaluated everything out there and now they're starting to evaluate hyperconvergence vendors and we are among the ones that they're evaluating. And then they start POCs in three corners of the globe. So they have now systems of ours in Asia, in Europe and in the US. And after you complete about a six months evaluation whereby they try to torture these systems, these clusters that we deploy, they choose SimpliVity. They choose SimpliVity over all the other storage products that are available. I wouldn't say that they tested all 100 but if you were to draw the list of the top 10 on the hyperconvergence and normal storage and backup and the duplication and when optimization, they have everything. And they decide to go all SimpliVity. That means that they're shutting down six data centers, dropping them or converting them into three data centers. One in Asia, one in the US, one in Europe. Active, active. So basically each one of those data centers is the DR for its corresponding data center. In these data centers, they're gonna have 125 SimpliVity systems. Replacing mounts of legacy stack of storage, send switches, blades by the way, backup applications, deduplication appliance for backup, deduplication appliance for the when, send switches, I think I already mentioned that, SSD arrays, the lots of it. All of that is dropped into these atomic IT building blocks and the applications that are running on those systems are their Oracle databases, their whole suite of Microsoft applications, their own proprietary applications for trading and management of funds, down to VDI, down to web, down to DevTest, etc. Basically everything is going to run on SimpliVity. Going back to the Y axis, basically this is as far up as you can go. In terms of the X axis, there are no third-party storage products at all, no third-party storage products. So the whole environment globally, running on x86 servers from our very good partner Cisco, with 10 gig E connecting all those systems managed from one pane of glass from which one operator can see all the virtual machines, all 4,000 of them by the way, in Asia, in Europe, and in the US. Now let's look at the slides because they say that a photo or picture is worth a thousand words. In this particular case it's also reflective of a $55 billion market. So if you look at the before, this is basically one of the data centers. And what you see here is basically one of two and a half rows of gear. And let's look at the gear. We dimmed it a little bit. We want to be very sensitive to the other vendors. The point here is not who are the vendors, but rather the concept. So if you see here this row that stretches all the way to the wall, there are two and a half such rows. And in these rows there are 34 racks of gear. Primary storage, sense storage, NAS storage, blades from some of the best companies out there, sense switches from two different vendors, deduplication for backup, deduplication for when, everything that we've discussed. Now look at these two and a half rows and imagine before we're showing the second half of the slide, what is this going to look like on a SimpliVity hyperconvergence technology? What of this is going to be displaced? And now let's see the after. 24, excuse me, 34 racks of gear are down to just three racks, 61 systems. Think about the tremendous simplification and economics that's associated with that. First of all, the acquisition cost. Instead of buying all the gear that we see here on the left, how much are you saving by buying these excellent Cisco X86 DAZ servers with our software, probably three, four, five X. By the way, the customer wouldn't tell us, of course. Secondly, just look at the space. Just in this data center, 11 to one space reduction, 11 to one, 34 down to three. Think about the power savings. Now that all depends on what you pay for power. In some parts of the world, it's very expensive and others less expensive. But this particular customer is going to save almost $1 million per year just on power. Now let's go to labor. Just think about the amount of people hour that are now freed from doing run operations to innovation, to expansion, to transformation, et cetera. Now let's look at this slide and ask ourselves, what if? What if this is true? What if this is not some post-production? If there really are such customers that are deploying everything in this particular fashion, what happens when all the CAOs in the world learn of this? I would say that every responsible CAO now has a proof point that the SimpliVity version of hyperconvergence applies to all the applications. We're going to be very responsible, so we're going to still test that with you and offers all the functionality. If there are some gaps, there's no problem. You can run our systems next to any other products and still manage everything from vCenter, from UCS Director, you choose it. So I think that this particular customer and this particular phase in the market is at the eve of the inflection point and with the help of this particular interview. And by the way, I call on everybody who's listening to this interview and is taking notes. What is our responsibility as IT professionals? Is it not to share the information? So I challenge all of us. If you're listening to this, take this particular slide and just tweet it. Share it with everybody that you know. Why not make them more efficient just like this customer? According to this customer, they're going to save about $100 million over the next five years. They're reducing the total cost of ownership by about 4x. Why not make sure that there is no CIO out there who doesn't know about this and let her or let him do their homework and figure out if there's a fit? So if it's not clear, we're very excited about this particular point. We think it's a validation of the company, of the vision, of the technology, the 43 months that we spend developing our own file system, our own object store in order for us to be able to be at the top of the y-axis and the end of the x-axis. And I believe that there are no hyperconvergence offerings in the market today that can deliver these capabilities for these types of customers. Yeah, so, so many good things there. It's one of the reasons why when we post some of our research journalists will say things like it's the death of the storage array going forward. For those people in the storage world, you guys have tackled some pretty gnarly challenges. The one that, you know, want you to talk a little bit about your technology differentiation compared to those couple dozen of other competitors out there. The two things that have stuck out to me since I've known SimpliVity is, from day one, you guys supported replication. Now replication is one of the things. I worked on storage replication solutions for like a decade and it's tough. Sales people don't know how to do it. Implementations are challenging. It's baked in and included in your product. And the second one that we've been railing about for, you know, longer than I've been in the industry is backup. Because backup is challenging. Backup is broken. We need a new way to do backup. Both of those offerings are kind of in your full stack. And most companies, when they come out of stealth, it's like, oh, that's something I'll add later or I'll figure out or I'll partner. So, you know, those two I'd start with and tell our audience why you believe you've got, you know, a stack that's unparalleled in the industry. Thank you, Stuart. And that is very insightful. And typically people who didn't work on these types of technologies think that the promise of the engineer is when they deliver version 1.0. Oh, no problem. We will add replication soon after. And then we will offer cluster soon after. These soon afters in the normal startup world could be two or three years. And if you just look at some of the storage companies that have mushroomed in the past five years, just check how much time from first release until replication, cluster, et cetera. It's a very good point. Let me address it as follows. When we started the company, the vision from day one was to deliver a complete IT infrastructure stack, focus on the data issue. I'm gonna get back to that in a minute. And have it applied to the highest and most demanding workloads that are virtualized. And across those workloads deliver all the functionality that today we need to buy as IT professionals five, six, seven different products. The primary array, the flash array, the backup applications of various source, whether for DR replication backup, and then the deduplication devices for backup, for WAN, the cloud gateway, and variety of other products. What we wanted to do is offer all of this capability. And we basically drew a very long list of enterprise capabilities, and there are eight among them that I think are pivotal. Number one is predictable performance. If you're running tier one applications, the performance needs to be predictable. The death of storage in a tier one environment is that you can't count on it. Think about most of the hyper convergence players. They're running the storage on the same CPU that handle the applications. So inherently you have this problem of dual responsibility of the resources towards the storage and towards the application. That's number one. Number two is of course peak performance. Number three is resiliency. You might say resiliency is basic. I'll say it's basic, but most of the hyper convergence vendors that I know need three copies of the data, therefore in three separate servers and nodes, therefore they need to switch. In order to give you the resiliency that we in the industry in tier one applications, we call HA, high availability. We do that as you know with RAID and RAIN. So with two systems, low cost, you get high availability anywhere in the world. Next, you have data protection. You touched upon that. It's a very complicated world. And as you know, my prior company, Diligent, was offering data duplication compression in the backup world. So I got a taste of that. That also points to the fact that the data efficiencies in each one I'm gonna get to momentarily. Next, what we have is scalability in a single site. Then you have scalability in multiple sites. But when I talk about scalability in multiple sites, I'm not talking about the fact that you can say that you have a large file system and you can connect a lot of sites. I'm referring to the ability of a single operator to see all the sites globally on a per virtual machine basis and manage all of them, take action in order to protect them and mobilize them. Now, mobility of the data is critically important, not only for protection. If you speak with that global 50 company that I referenced earlier, they talk about the notion of data everywhere. They say with simplicity, I can mobilize my VMs and my data across the oceans, not only for protection, but when I decide that certain applications are of given level of importance, I can decide that they no longer belong in Asia, I move them to Europe or to the US. And that movement is a matter of, and I'm not exaggerating, seconds, minutes, not hours. Because once you've performed one backup, basically you have all the data and the next backup can come 10 minutes later and only the new data moves. So now we move from multiple offices, scalability across sites, to data efficiency. And this is a critical issue because there are so many devices and products today that need to compress the data in one phase of its life cycle, be that in the flash, or read cache, or in primary storage, or in backup, or in when, or in archive, or in its way to the cloud. So think about all these series of dehydration, rehydration when the data leaves data domain, great company leader in its space, and goes to Riverbed, another great company leader in its space. All of those companies condense the data in one phase and then rehydrate it. And all of this eats a lot of cycles. What we've decided to do is basically dedupe, compress, and optimize all the data at inception, use technologies that will allow us to not introduce latency, but to reduce latency because we basically write less data, and keep the data dedupe compressed and optimized throughout its life cycle once and forever. So we only touch the data once, and from that point on, we're gonna get to the how we do it. You have one set of efficient data that you're moving globally. And lastly, everything needs to be managed on a per virtual machine, or per container in the future basis. So this is the set of enterprise capabilities we needed to address. So the question was, why not do what everybody else does? Let's go take open source file systems. For example, there's a file system called EXT4. It's a Linux open source file system. It was born in 2006. But think about it. In 2006, Flash was not fashionable, nor was deduplication. So had we chosen that particular file system, I would not have been able to tell you today, or I would not have been able to share this slide with this particular customer. Because there's no way to accomplish these eight enterprise characteristics unless you do what I believe we've done, which is develop our own object store. That is not only large, most object stores are for archive. So they are slow and big. We develop our own object store, which is large and fast. And on top of that, there's our own file system that is purpose built in order to address these capabilities. And within that particular matrix, or foundation layer, we develop the acceleration or the data acceleration with the ability to decompress and optimize all the data that then lives in the object store and the data protection capabilities. So for day one, the architecture was around the ability to mobilize and protect virtual machines, which is, by the way, very interesting because according to statistics, 50% of our customers have turned off any other third party data protection application, 50% of them. 90% of our customers, this is all statistics from Q1. I'm not yet telling you about Q2 because marketing has forbidden me. 90% of our customers basically are using our data protection in some form. Now, we haven't yet closed the gap on all capabilities. There's still some law offices that need cataloging that are better than what we offer today, but we are gradually moving there. So data protection is this additional technological pillar. And the last one is the notion of data mobility. And all of those basically tie to some of the underlying technologies. The fact that the data is adduped, managed on a per virtual machine basis, and our ability to basically mobilize it. So the ability to mobilize the data is very powerful when you have a lot of remote offices, or even if you don't have remote offices that are small, but you have very large data centers, but you want the flexibility to mobilize. Let's now tie that to something that you said earlier. You said, I think in the conversation that we had earlier, well, a customer like this large one, they now have this very efficient private cloud. Why would they ever go to the public cloud? And that's a great question because you know that according to some analyses, the total cost of ownership of running your payload as a customer on SimpliVity as opposed to running it on Amazon. Per the Amazon prices in January this year is anywhere from 22% to 49% less expensive. So if you were to take 515 virtual machines, you can see this particular analysis on our website. Run it on Amazon. It's gonna cost you anywhere between 1.14 and 1.74 million dollars across three years. And that depends on the enterprise capabilities that you determine that you need in terms of guaranteed protection, RTO, RPO, performance, et cetera. If you were to run the same 515 virtual machines on two sites that you have now leased, that you're paying for the power, the space, you buy the gear, in other words, the servers that you run our software on, VMware licenses, whatever you pay SimpliVity and maintenance support and the labor, all inclusive, 22 to 49% less expensive, $885,000 over the same three years. So going back to this particular customer, this customer needs to decide whether it makes sense for them to go to Amazon. And very interestingly, we have customers who've actually come off of Amazon onto SimpliVity. Now, this is not to say that Amazon and Azure and Google and other public cloud providers are going to go out of business. I think that they're going to flourish. And I think that they're part of the threat to the legacy IT vendors. But for 10 years since the emergence of Amazon in 2006, there hasn't been a response. And what I'm saying now is there is a response. There is an alternative. And the alternative is for the end users, they can have a private cloud that is more efficient. But it also means that if you want to be a public cloud provider, you can use our technology and you now can compete. We can't teach you to buy the X86 servers for the same price that Amazon buys the X86 servers for. But just think about the economics of public cloud. They play the game of economies of scale. So they take the four layers of the cost structure, which is hardware, space, power, labor. And what they do is they squeeze the per unit price of each one of them. They buy their servers for less than you and I would buy them. And then they pay for the space a little bit less because they lease so much of it. And then they pay less for the power and less for the people. But if you think about these four cost factors, they're all commodities. So how much can you squeeze whoever is providing the X86, the space, the power and the labor? You can't squeeze too much. What does simplicity do on behalf of you, Mr. End User or you public cloud provider? We don't help you squeeze the margin on each one of the units. We cut the total amount of units by 67%. We don't trim it at the edge. We reduce it by 67%. Look back at this slide. We reduce the footprint from 34 to three. So just to complete that particular thought, so this technology allows the end users to now have their private cloud. It allows us to empower other people to be public clouds. And my view is that when customers, such as the one that we referenced, decides that they want to have a payload on the public cloud, they might ask the public cloud vendors the following. They'll say, look, Mr. Cloud Provider A, B or C. These are my parameters. This is how I'm going to choose my public cloud provider. And one of my requirements is that you run the SimpliVity software on those servers. Such that when I move my virtual machines and the data from my data centers in the US, Europe or Asia to your data center, it runs on the SimpliVity format. And it sits in your site. And when I want to move it back to my data centers, it happens instantly. So I see a world where the technology that we've developed, and think about it, this is a data virtualization platform. What we've focused by now over seven years of R&D on is just creating this new framework of data that runs on x86 and allows you to be at the top of the x and at the end of the y. OK, so a lot there. When we actually, before we were talking about hyperconvergence, we've looked at what the large hyperscale guys are doing. And they don't buy storage arrays. They build a software layer. They leverage commodity components as you talked about. You see companies like IBM and Oracle are trying to build that. We'll give you both sides running the same kind of stack there. I wonder if the proper layer of integration is your full software if there's APIs that can support. We're looking at data mobility of applications between public clouds and on-prem. Definitely something to be sorted out over the next couple of years. But you also engage with, and you can do backup to the public clouds. And they're there. We always look at it as the public cloud is definitely an arrow in the quiver for the customer. And it depends on the customer. It depends on the use case. I'm sure if a customer came to you and said, hey, I need to spin up 10,000 servers and I need to run it for about a week. Should I deploy the OmniCube? You're probably going to say, that might be a better solution to turn to either a partner service provider or, yeah, turn to an Amazon or Google or a Microsoft for that. Exactly so. So if you're an end user and you say I need to spin 1,000 VMs for one week, what I would say, you're better off going to one of the public cloud providers that are running SimpliVity, run it there. They'll allow you this elasticity. Yeah. Today, to be clear, do you have service providers listed on your site that run your stack? And what about, I mean, the big three. You talk about Amazon, Azure, and Google. That's kind of a future thing that you're talking about, potentially, correct? Yeah, we have not sold systems to the big three, to Amazon, Azure, and Google. We have other companies, excuse me, we're service providers who are running SimpliVity. Most of them are actually in the business of also selling systems. So these are VARs or system integrators who have been selling SimpliVity gear and at the same time have their own cloud offering. It's very interesting because on one hand they can sell systems and they can say to the customer, you can back up to my site, you can DR to my site, basically think about it as backup or DR as a service. The answer is yes. That's great. We've been saying for years actually that there's transformation happening in the channel and often service providers can be that new channel. Let's do a quick run through some of the ecosystem. One word about the channel because I have a rule, never to miss an opportunity to say something about our channel. So we're 100% committed to our channel partners, VARs, system integrators, and I think that this is showing great fruit. So what we've seen happen in, I'd say, the turn of 2015 is that very large system integrators and VARs started inviting SimpliVity. I was referring to this email from one of them. He's probably listening. He knows what I'm referring to. But basically some very large players, I'm talking about $5 billion to $1 billion type of VARs or system integrators, are now signing up with SimpliVity and basically this is what we've been waiting for. So excellent partners, we're committed to them, and our strategy of transforming our business, basically, from selling the OmniCube to, since last year, selling our software, our OmniStack, with your choice of server, that is paying great dividends. OK, so that allows us to pivot. Let's run through real quick some of the ecosystem players. I think a channel, I think of the OmniStack offering that you have, Cisco, of course. I wrote a paper a year ago from a storage standpoint. Cisco did great at convergent infrastructure. They partnered with over 30 different storage players and you've had good success with them. They've now got their own OEM offering, the HyperFlex. How's the Cisco relationship and what do you see from Cisco in the coming year? So our most important partners are VMware and Cisco. And I expect this to continue to be the case. I think that people know that we're coming out with Hyper-V at some point in time. And that will embolden our relationship also with Microsoft, of course, just something that you need to do. But Cisco has their offering, VMware has their offering, and we respect that. Of course, everybody wants to be an only child until you fall in love with your brothers and sisters. And that's OK. So basically, we respect that. And when we need to compete, we compete. But our team competes and we compete in a very respectful manner. You're not going to find in our collateral anything damning or criticizing of these particular partners. Cisco is very important to us because they're such a great partner. They have such a great name. They have such great relationships with Avars, everything that we model ourselves after. So the business with Cisco is very healthy, continues to grow. I think that we announced not too long ago that just last year from the time we started shipping with them, I think within three quarters we got to about 1,000 systems shipped, over 200 customers. And that has continued to grow, and we're very happy with this particular business. The same thing with VMware, a very important partner. We basically run between VMware and Cisco, wherever we are. Wherever we are on VMware. So that's a very important relationship. We also have a relationship with Lenovo since last year. That's another important partner. And our business with Lenovo is going just to be clear, in none of these cases do we sell through these very important partners. The people who sell our technology to the end user are always the VARs and the system integrators. And what's in it for them is margin. So basically, we offer them directly a technology. The technology doesn't go through a few starter steps and then gets to the VAR and then gets to the end user. And they get to choose whatever server they prefer. And these are great server partners. And we'll continue to grow alongside them. Did I address your question? You did, great. And talking of server vendors, of course, Dell's made a big move. We're waiting for China to sign off on everything. Dell will then be the owner. Dell Technologies will have EMC. VMware's part of that whole family of technologies. And your OmniCube, what you sell through the channel when it's not Cisco, is a Dell-based architecture. So what does that whole mean of, heck, Nutanix is in the mix there, is an OEM. The V-SAN is gonna be packaged with EMC and Dell and everything there. So when you're talking about some of the family dynamics there, sometimes you get around the Thanksgiving table. There might be some arguments and discussion. But what does that Dell's big move mean to your overall relationship and some of those rippling effects? So when you think about the elements that are gonna make up the new Dell family, it includes VMware, which is a very important partner. And this is a very unique part of the infrastructure, different than the other parts. Then there are the Dell servers that are excellent servers. Had they not been excellent, we would not have been owing them in and selling them as an OmniCube. And of course, we'd like to keep both of those businesses alive. But critically, the relationship with VMware has no substitutes other than Hyper-V. So it's very important that VMware remains open and friendly to the rest of the industry. And my sense is that that is going to be the case. I don't have other indications. And EMC is a company that I respect greatly. I actually was an employee of EMC, as you know. And I think that if we partner, we partner. If we compete, we compete. But I don't see the change of them being part of that particular family, at least not initially. So of course, we wish everybody luck with this audacious move in and of itself. I like the move. It's a very, very significant move. Definitely highlights the fact that storage is pulled much closer to the server, which is a trend that you've been betting on since day one with SimpliVity. All right, last piece of the ecosystem discussion. By the way, and you can also buy the Dell servers by themselves and have them meet our software. So we invested in integration points around the world, such that as an end user, your experience does not change if we sell you the OmniCube, which is an appliance, or a case where our software meets the server of your choice, the spec that is correct for you, gets integrated, tested, because it's a tier one enterprise system, and you get your appliance. It just doesn't have the SimpliVity bezel on it. So same experience to the end user. That's a great point, because what you're doing is you're, you know, reducing the friction for the customer, as well as in the IT industry, it's been for so long. Oh, well, if I bought this server from here or from here, I could pay a lot more in the storage world. Depending on where you bought the disk, it could be eight times more expensive than if you bought it from somewhere else. So last player to talk about in the ecosystem of course is Nutanix. They've filed their S1. They've got an OEM relationship with Dell. They have a relationship with Lenovo. They're out there. We can read everything that they're doing these days. How do you see them in the marketplace? First of all, we're their second biggest cheerleaders. I can't say they were first because they're the first. But of course, we'd like them to have a very successful IPO and we'd like them to do the right thing and we'd like the public markets to realize that hyperconvergence is very different than storage. So if somebody tomorrow launches a new storage product, that doesn't make it a new paradigm. Just like if you and I tomorrow came up with a new mainframe, it's a new mainframe, but it's not a new paradigm. Hyperconvergence is a new paradigm. Nutanix has done great for this particular category and we have significant respect for them and we wish them great success. We'd like them to set the bar very high in terms of the value of hyperconvergence vendors. All right, so you came out of stealth a little over three years ago now. If you look at the size of the company, the growth reminds us that you're similar age to what VMware was when it was bought. From a revenue standpoint, you probably have more revenue because you've got hardware associated with a lot of it. I remember, you know, boy, VMware had come out with VMotion right around the time they were acquired. To be honest, from my insight, because I was actually at EMC when that acquisition happened, not sure they even knew exactly what they were getting there. But, you know, do you compare? Nor did anybody else at that time. Absolutely, if they had known there would have been a huge bidding war, so absolutely. So, you know, how do you see SimpliVity? You know, there's rumors every once in a while that maybe it'll be acquired, you know, when every competitor is going IPO. You know, how do you see yourselves going forward and, you know, vis-a-vis VMware? So that's a great question. So let's talk about VMware for a moment. VMware got acquired when they were six years old. SimpliVity is now seven years old. I think, based on the stats that I read, that SimpliVity is much larger in terms of its footprint and the amount of capital that it has raised and the total investment in R&D, probably about three times more dollars invested in R&D over the seven years than VMware has invested over the six years until it got acquired. Different era, by the way. These are not normative statements about what's good or bad. But here's the interesting point. VMware, in my mind, is the most important company to have emerged in IT infrastructure in the last 15 years. Now, at the time that VMware gets acquired, is it not clear to everybody else who's looking? Let's name them for a moment with great respect. Oracle Dell Sun was relevant then. HP, IBM, Microsoft, all the other, wasn't it clear to all these people that this is big and they would do well to have a similar technology? Of course. So we're clear on the fact that everybody would have wanted a technology such as VMware. So how come there's only VMware, Hyper-V, and maybe there's also KVM, and maybe there's something else? Maybe there's Zen. But at the end of the day, there are just two offerings, really. VMware and Microsoft. And it took Microsoft 10 years to deliver version 3.0 that the market says this is now relevant. Great respect for Microsoft. But think about it, mighty Microsoft. 10 years to deliver version 3.0. The issue is, and it's a lesson for all of us, that these very large companies that we've all worked for, that we have tremendous respect for, it's not that easy for them to close the gap on new technologies. VMware is a great example because it's clear that everybody had the incentive to develop their own VMware, but they didn't. It was too late. Six years in, it was too late. And I think that VMware got less attention back then than hyper-converges is getting today. Take another example, NAS. NetApp basically introduced the notion of NAS. How many serious NAS players are there? There's NetApp. And then EMC, back in the late 90s, acquired Solera from DEC. Build their NAS offerings around that, around the Symetrix line and later Midrange, et cetera. And basically there are two major NAS players. My point is to the market, to the VARs, to the end users, we have great respect to all the vendors. But it has yet to be proven that they can catch up with a six-year lead of complicated technologies. So we were seven years in and I have a lot of respect, but I think that we're very well positioned. Bringing that now to your second question is, VMware got acquired when they were six years old. No CEO is going to say, my company is not for sale. It's not my company. I don't know if Tucci could have said that the company is not for sale. Got acquired for $67 billion. My guess is that our shareholders would accept a $67 billion offer these days. Or even a LinkedIn type offer. Or even lower. But the point is that we've never built the company for sale. We think that there's a great opportunity. Hopefully you look at the SimpliVity family and we don't look tired to you or discouraged. So we think that the game is only now starting. So we're moving from early curiosity to relevance. And the next phase in the game, and this is a phase that SimpliVity has built itself towards, is this realization of segmentation within hyperconvergence. So if there are 30, 37 offerings within hyperconvergence, where do they all sit on this Y-axis? Are they for the low end? What type of applications in the low end? Mid-market, enterprise? Can they go all the way up? And what functionality do they offer? And I suggest that most of them just offer rudimentary storage, not the backup, not the deduplication, not the global data mobility, et cetera. And it doesn't really matter if they have that on their brochures. SimpliVity wins 80% mark that. 80% of all qualified opportunities against any vendor. So when we get our seat in front of the relevant people and we tell our story, everybody doubts it, but now they're over, can't say the numbers, marketing forbid me to. But there are a lot of customers that they can go to. We typically don't need to do POCs anymore. We just have prospects speak with customers. So very exciting time for us. And we didn't build the company in order to sell it. And there's a lot of capital out there. So we are looking forward to partnering, integrating ourselves into the ecosystems and continuing to offer value to the customers. And again, our responsibility as IT infrastructure professionals is let everybody know about it. Be skeptical, but share the doubt, let other people kick the tires. Duran Kempel, CEO of SimpliVity. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much for sharing with our audience the update here. And be sure to check out all of theCUBE's coverage from VMworld, go to siliconangle.tv to see the updates. And thank you for watching theCUBE.