 old partner friend, colleague, John W. Thompson, very famous, John, old guys like us when Paul Moritz talks about a software mainframe, it actually means something to us, doesn't it? And, yeah, that's right, so welcome. John W. Thompson, legendary IBMer, CEO of Symantec, and now CEO of Virtual Instrument. Great to have you on theCUBE. First time, CUBE member, my colleague, John Furrier. Nice to meet you. John, nice to meet you. Heard a lot about you. Followed you for years, actually worked at IBM for a short time, the 80s, and then HP, so followed your work. Well, I was there 27 years, nine months, and 13 days, but no one paid any attention. Who's counting? So, my first question when I saw you on the list was, I really wanted to ask you because you're very familiar with VMware. I mean, going back to the day when VMware was the old VMware, you knew Diane Greene, you had a relationship with them. I heard you had a look at them at one point, a look to buy them, things like that. So, you know, what's changed in VMware virtualization over the years, and from your perspective, how is it changed, and what caused it to change, and where do you see it going? Well, I think what's clear is that the economics around virtualization are proving to be true. And while VMware was certainly a leader into space in the x86 environment, the virtualization phenomena is spreading across all the layers of the stack. So, the storage layers being virtualized, the switch layers being virtualized, as well as the server layer. And while the concept of virtualization isn't new, having it applied to all of those tiers is in fact a new phenomena, and it gives customers not just better economics, but it also poses some new challenges for them to deal with, particularly around performance and availability management. So, Virtual Instrument is a very interesting company. We've talked to a number of VI customers, and a lot of people may not be familiar with them, but essentially what these guys do is they go deep probes into fiber channel infrastructure and find ways to consolidate, save money. Ports are a very expensive resource. I'll let you, John, explain in more detail what you guys do, but it's a very impressive capability that you have, one that's sometimes a little hard to understand for the average IT guy, but the results have been amazing from the guys we've talked to, and essentially you guys develop tons and tons of data from which you can actually respond and delivers real ROI. So why don't you take us through what Virtual Instruments does and talk a little bit about the value proposition, and then we'll get into what you're doing here at the event. Sure. Well, our heritage is as a sand optimization company. We were carved out of Finisar in 2008 by a small group of investors, which quite frankly, I was a part of that, and never had the vision at the time that I would be the operator, if you will, at the company. But what we do is focus on monitoring the end-to-end transaction performance of a given set of IO activities from a virtual server through the switch fabric to the array and back. And as you obfuscate that environment with more virtualization, the need for deep level performance monitoring capability becomes even more important. Think about it this way. If I'm just have a server and a storage array and a single application, I can probably manage performance pretty easily there. And the simple answer, life to date, has been just add more switch fabric or just add more storage capacity. Well, as you virtualize the environment and create this notion of self-service provisioning, it becomes much, much more difficult to determine workloads and therefore much more difficult to predict what the performance of that new workload might be. Our technology peers in very deeply and gives you granular latency level performance insight that no other vendor in the industry provides. And that's what makes us unique. And that's why very large transactions sensitive companies have turned to BI as the solution for their environments. Yeah, now I can verify that. I've talked to a number of your customers and there's really nothing out there like it. It's probably really hard to do, which is probably part of the reason. But there are a lot of tools out there that give you maybe a 50,000 foot view. You guys go right down into the weeds and pull out a lot of data. Can you talk about some of your customers and how they're doing with the technology? Yeah, sure. Perhaps one of the most impressive deployments of our technology is at PayPal. Obviously a very performance and uptime sensitive environment. If a customer decides that they can't get access to PayPal, there is an alternative payment mechanism so they can translate availability or availability challenges into real revenue problems for the company. And they started out as a simple assessment of their sand environment. And they move now to the point where they will deploy our technology across every port in the environment to make sure that they can monitor not just performance, but ensure availability. The head of the storage infrastructure there would say that prior to VI, they would have one to two outages a year. Since VI, they've had virtually no outages at all. And that's attributable to the insight that we give them on where problems might be looming that they can take corrective actions on before they become an outage. So with this product, which by the way is great, great capabilities, the talk in the world here has been automation, configuration management. Cell search provisioning is great, but what about automation? We are a monitoring company. We don't do configuration management. We don't do capacity planning. There are other tools out there from either device-specific manufacturers or people who are in the SRM business, like Symantec, that really do provide that. And our tools complement what customers already have. I don't envision that as time goes on, we will move into those spaces. We think where we are focused is an acute and growing pain problem for customers. So why dilute our focus to become a management tool when there are more things to be monitored, particularly as the environment becomes more abstracted by more virtualization and more layers? I think the challenge, if I could talk about that a little bit that you guys face, is that you go into an account and you're targeting fiber channel applications that are the most mission critical. And these guys have been able to justify a lot of spend. And what they do is they throw too many resources at it that they don't need to. And so you guys come in and say, look, we can save a lot of money, but the PayPal example is interesting because it's an availability value prop. Talk a little bit about those challenges and how you're seeing uptake in the business. You talked a little off camera about your growth rates. Share some of those metrics with us. Yeah, in the early days of VI's existence in the marketplace, we were unabashedly ambulance chasers. If we would hear about a customer that had an outage, we would be all over it. As they say down south, like a chicken on a June buck. And we would make sure that we could in fact demonstrate to them how our technology could make uptime more possible. What has happened or evolved since then is as the market has become more aware of VI's technology, we now have a more proactive approach, which is let us do a sand assessment. Let us come in and see what the current state of your infrastructure is and give you a roadmap of how you get from the chaotic environment of oh my goodness, the sand is down, to I know exactly what it takes to improve performance, to improve uptime, to reduce OPEX, and over time take capital cost down as well. Is that a four-pay service? There are several services, the first of which is an SOS for sand, which is I'm in trouble, I need help. And then there are a range of assessment services that are available depending upon the size and complexity of your sand. I envision that at some point in the future, we'll deliver a managed service as well, where we will in fact monitor and manage that infrastructure remotely. Our latest offering, which we just announced this week, Virtual Wisdom 3.0 has a remote management capability built in, its initial capability will be focused on us delivering support for our products. But over time, because of the security and sophistication of that attachment capability, we will be able to use it to monitor the infrastructure and manage to the extent that customers want to do that. So take us through what you have going on this week at VMworld. So one of the things that our colleagues at VMware would say is that the next plateau for them is to move mission-critical applications into a virtualized environment. And we think that can happen and will happen as customers instrument their environments for performance and availability. It can't happen without that. Because the mission-critical applications, hence those that run on a fiber channel sand, have been the ones that people have been most reticent to move forward. So our announcement this week is all about our next generation software platform, Virtual Wisdom 3.0, and our next generation hardware platform, which is an eight gig fiber channel probe that attaches between the switch fabric and the storage array to give you real-time monitoring capability of what's going on, unlike anything else in the industry. And so if you are contemplating pushing the envelope on virtualization and moving more mission-critical apps, gone from 40% to 60% or higher virtualized environments, you can't do that, in our opinion, without deploying the deep level of insight that we provide. You need real time. So obviously the whole market's changing fast. So your market opportunity's big, but you're targeting the entry part of high end of the market. How do you see the middle fat part of the market developing? And you can talk about the dynamics around what you think the growth might look like in terms of timeframe, and then some of the issues around things like, are people even ready yet? Do they're staffed up and the service delivery? Yeah, good question. Well, first off, our focus is on the global 2000. And while we have customers like JPS Health or Mayo Clinic that you would not characterize as a global 2000 class account, they have one thing in common with those accounts. They are performance and uptime sensitive. Healthcare is a very, very important targeted market for us. But let's just back up. We think this market right now is about 1.7 to 1.8 billion dollars. That is the performance and availability sensitive market around the fiber channel environment. We have literally barely scratched the surface on that. While our revenues and bookings last year were up three and four X, that's a pimple in the scheme of things. We'll grow again this year 100% or better. And we think we'll be positioned as we exit this fiscal year, which would be June of 2012, on about a hundred million dollar run rate with an opportunity to be profitable within a quarter or two of that. And so this is a phenomenon that we think will only catch more wind in its sails as customers become more aware of our capability. And they see the opportunity to de-risk their move of mission critical applications into a virtualized environment using our platform as the underpinning. So thank you for sharing some of those metrics with us. And what are you at headcount today? I'm sorry? Headcount today? 140 people. 140 growing very rapidly. Wow, okay. Congratulations. Great to have you. You're a really impressive legend coming back into the operating role. Congratulations. Hopefully pass that off soon. I certainly had not anticipated that, to be honest. I was terrifically happy thinking about boards and investments and restoring a bunch of old cars. And I got involved in VI as an investor and that's turned into me becoming an owner. Hey, when you get lightning in a bottle. I'm sorry? When you get lightning in a bottle, you jump in. Yeah, it looks like you're having fun. Yeah, I am. Thanks very much. Thank you. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great content.