 I'm really excited to be here and I want to welcome all of the Justin TV folks out there watching, okay? And we have Jerome LaCotte here, is here from Scality. So we have another executive here from the show floor, Scality, welcome to the Cube. Hi. I'm the CEO of Scality. Do you have a card actually so we can give it to our folks to- I gave it to- No, Ricky's all set. It's all set. We got it. Jerome, so tell us how are things and what's up with Scality? What are you doing here? Tell us about the company. Still healthy on the third day of the show. Obviously didn't have any moment for lunch. Start having a smile. Do you have a camera here? Where's the camera? Hi, camera. Hi, everyone. Doing well. Okay. What can I answer? So tell us about Scality. So Scality is a storage system. We're a company doing an organic object-based cloud-style storage system for a very large deployment of unstructured objects. It's a growing market. Unstructured objects is the largest part of the storage growth, 70% growth a year according to IDC. And we're a real company with real customers, not just a slideware. I'd like to mention this because some of us, you know, they come up with new stuff. They hype up their stuff and don't have anything to deliver. They don't really exist. So you can actually meet our customers and they'll talk about what they do. So you get an object and I get cloud-style. We can talk more about what do you mean by organic? Organic, yeah. It's an interesting term. It has connotations associated with it. So what do you mean by organic? Well, actually I'm referring to this connotation. So it's obviously a metaphor that refers to the way living animals and humans are made out of organs, which themselves are made out of cells. And what's really interesting when you think about an organ in the living realm is that the organ will continue functioning and will function over years when the lifetime of the cell is actually a few months or a few years, but not as long. And what happens is the organ is not affected at all by cell attrition. So if there's a cell that died, it doesn't matter because the new cells are... Rejuvenate. Yeah, rejuvenate all the time. Also, after a few months, the complete organ has been changed, although it's still been functioning and it's a new cell, but it's the same organ. Okay, so the same way we're doing a storage system where it's distributed over many different components, typically x86 servers, very standard. And the way it's built, if any server dies or if any disk dies, it really doesn't matter. It's not going to impact the functioning of the system. Over a few years, you're going to have a complete technology refresh without having to go through any kind of migration. So it makes it much easier to deploy a system over a 10, 20 years lifespan without having to do heavy maintenance. So the business value of this organicity is no rip and replace ever, right? No disruption to the application ever. Yeah, we deployed our first customer in June 2010. So that's about nine months ago now. There's been absolutely no stop of the service, okay? And it's been really easy to maintain. Nothing really, I mean, it's not that the system maintains its integrity all the time. And through this time, since June 2010, we've done software upgrade. We've actually completely changed the architecture, the way we mounted the hard drive. Initially it was RAID 6. Now it's J-Bard. And all this with no service disruption, not even a scheduled maintenance. Interesting. All right, so Scality, tell us more about the company. The company was started, the project was started in 2008 when we went to see our customers of the time in a different company and asked them what they would like us to build and they basically said a new type of storage system that would be good for what people want to store, like their stuff, whether it's their email, their video files, their media files. So 2008 is the beginning of the development period. It was spun off out of a previous company, which was called Bizonga in February 2010 and it's an independent company since then. Okay, so when you spun out that provided the essentially the capital? The Scality. Yeah. So did you do a raise? Yeah, we raised $6 million at the time. We've raised another $7 million last month, so a total of $13 million. We still have the $7 million in the bank. We're pretty efficient on capital. We've got 18 months ahead of us and looking good. CEO, that's, you know, the C stands for, right? Cheap, cheap executive officer. Yeah, when you're a startup, you've got to be lean. You can't overspend. But they say the secret of business is to don't run out of money, right? Yeah. It's really simple when you boil it down to that, isn't it? No one died out of little sales. People died of being out of cash. Yeah, exactly. So tell us what's the innovation going on right now in your mind about this show? Can you share with the folks out there kind of what you're seeing in the trends, independent of your company, just the mega trends that support your growth? Well, you know, obviously there's this whole hype about cloud. But if I look beyond the hype, beyond the word cloud, what it is, I see two things. I see enterprise users expecting to have the same kind of IT in the enterprises they have at home. You know, at home they have their iPad and their iPhone and everything works very well together. And it's just easy to go on Facebook. It's easy now to drive your TV from your iPhone. I mean, all this just works really well. And then they go to their enterprise and they still have pretty old software in terms of design. And it's just not easy. So that's one mega trend. It's the change on the demand from the IT user. Not necessarily the IT department yet, but this is going to push the IT department to change. Unhappy people. So essentially, yeah. It's complex. It's a crappy environment basically. A drive for simplicity. Yeah. Really basically. And this is going to drive a real shift in the way application are designed. You're going to see more and more business applications that look like Facebook. You know, they're not going to be consumer application. They're going to be business application. But they'll look like this. And then the second thing is what I just alluded to earlier is just the immense growth of unstructured data. You know, more and more in businesses, people scan documents and store the scan or they produce PDF images of their bills and they don't ever send an actual paper bill to their consumers. You know, it's now considered not environmentally heavy to send paper bills. So people to comply with what consumers demand. They just give up on paper bills. And this drives a growth for more and more multimedia files being stored in enterprise world. And that's a complete revolution. It's just a very different problem to solve for storage companies. Yeah. And video. Absolutely. We know this problem. Yes. We have a scale problem. And soon you're going to be HD and then 3D HD. We did HD. We stopped doing it because the video files were too big. Well, okay. You can store them all. And also some of the internet connections at the places, although it's a good one. Maybe we should talk about business. I'm doing a barter deal. Okay. Some space for some promotion. In your world right now, okay, true or false? People are going to make a lot of money with cloud. True. Okay. True or false? Oracle's evil. False. True. True. Okay. Good answer. What CEO is going to say? We love Oracle. Except for EMC. Oracle will continue paying high price for companies. They have a good M&A department. They do evil, but they're not evil. They're not evil. They're not evil. Yeah. It's a Google joke. Don't do evil. So we talk a lot about Oracle. But the role of databases. Can you comment about databases? Sure. We talk about that all week long. Database are going to change. Okay. And Oracle will change as well, by the way. You know, the concept of relational database was invented about 30, 40 years ago now. It's a great concept. Okay. We'll learn this at school. It's a great concept. The more people deploy database, the more they realized, okay, relational is great. But if you really apply it strictly, it has some limitation. It's really complex. Like tables. And just the join and how many tables you need to join before you really have your vision. Good for what it did. For what, you know. Again, you know, invented 30, 40 years ago, did a great job. Some people will continue using this. But there are many applications who need something much more simple. They essentially need an Excel spreadsheet. They need multiple columns, multiple rows. They need to be able to add a full row, which is not always obvious with every node SQL database out there. Okay. So they still, most people, they don't want just one column. They want multiple column and to be able to add a full row. Okay. And we're actually going to introduce a distributed database technology on top of our storage technology by the end of this year. And what's the exciting part about that? The change in databases, especially the node SQL area. Because there's been a lot of debate around which approaches should be going there. I'll see. People talk about structure to unstructured. That's clear. But what's going on in the unstructured world? It's kind of like a silent little cold war going on. So. The head dupe wars are kicking up. You're seeing a lot more, you know, stuff happening. So terms are really funny. Okay. So people talk about unstructured data and they talk about no SQL database. Okay. First, the real problem about storing unstructured data is that there needs to be structure to the storage. Okay. If you have no structure, you have garbage. Okay. So the term unstructured data, I mean, I use it because this is the way everyone calls it. It's like big data. It's a hype term. But it's a categorical term. Really. I mean, when we think about our software, when we think about development and, you know, long term, it's all a question. How do you achieve efficient structure for what people want to do? And database are not the efficient structure for a larger amount of multimedia files. Okay. But you still need indexes. You still need functionalities like being able to do search through the whole data. I believe that in 10 years time, it's going to be normal to do a scene selection automatically in a video. I'll be able to go through your video file and say, bring me all the videos of Jerome Lacade and not, you know, looking at the fact that you tagged it well. But actually, the software will look at the video, do face recognition, bring me the pieces I want. We could use that technology yesterday. Yeah. It's not quite ready yet. That's the kind of thing we're building. We literally transcript our videos so that we have that capability. It's a very brute force, but it works. There's nothing else. We have no other choice. Yeah. So that would be a good bar to do. Have you tried doing voice recognition on the videos? Not yet. We are talking to a cool startup in San Francisco, though, about that. And we've used voice recognition for the transcription. Okay. So, indirectly. Yeah. You know, these are the tech challenges, like these new use cases are not necessarily new to the sense of how people have done business in the past. Just from a technology standpoint, these things need to be cataloged because there's need for the new data types. We call them unstructured. We call them, you know, web app, needs email address and pandal, which might be one major data source they need, versus the old model, which was tabular, you know, my secret databases, relational. And, you know, what keeps me motivated every morning is the fact that we can bring this to the industry. What else is going on in your world? So tell us, you know, what's happening from the company standpoint? I mean, how many employees do you guys have? Oh, from a company standpoint, sorry. I was still thinking industry standpoint. Okay. I'm getting those slows into the day. We've been two days hours of interviews. We've got Rob Pegler coming on and Rob is like rapid fire. Oh, okay. No, I actually don't. So how many employees do you have? What's going on with the company? We were 20 at the beginning of the year. We're 30 now. We're going to be 40 at the end of the year. So it's a fast-paced growing company. We've just opened an office in New York for U.S. sales. We have recruited people for customer services based on the East Coast as well. So we've essentially staffed off the U.S. West Coast? East Coast. Anything out here? Yeah, absolutely. I'm here. CEO is here. And we run the finance and marketing from here. So the company is really run from here. Originally, we put the U.S. sales here in San Francisco. And we realized that our guys were on plane absolutely every week because most are customers on the East Coast. So we've just moved the office over there. So it's in New York. We also have R&D in Paris, offices in Germany for the German market. And we cover the European market from Paris and Germany. And we have a master distributor in Japan. So still relatively small but very global business. Very global for that size. And that's the nature of the world today. It's a global business. How many customers do you have? We have a dozen customers. They're all service providers. So a very large contract for each customer. Another very large number of customers. We're focusing solely on service providers for this year because they are higher maturity. And essentially what that means is they have higher pain. And they've got some money. They've got a business to run. Enterprise has money too. But enterprise basically can still get by with San and NAS technology. Service providers are getting to a point where it's not profitable for them to run some of their services. When you see the whole object piece is really being adopted and the service providers first, they're sort of demanding it. More so than the enterprises, right? The enterprises are not screaming for object storage, right? It's not as urgent. It's not as painful. So they can still get by. They will get there. They will have to get there just because the same laws of the amount of object in the store will happen. I mean, the problem when you reach about a billion objects, any kind of fast system technology becomes very cumbersome to manage. You need to associate volumes to some number of objects or you need to have some global namespace technology. Anyway, it's cumbersome to manage. We bring simplicity to that world. What do you think? I mean, let's talk about the object store landscape for a minute. Sure. You've got EMC Atmos. Okay. Any thoughts there? You've got Cleversafe. It's an interesting job. You've got Neronix in the cloud. Mm-hmm. You've got Bycast, now part of NetApp. Yep. You've sort of got a bunch of public cloud guys. I'm sure I'm missing a few prominent ones. Okay. So we need to differentiate here those who provide the service like Neronix Yeah. and those who provide technology like Atmos. Yes. So let's talk about the technology because that's really what you guys do. That's what we do exactly. I mean, our customers provide service. Yeah. So on the technology side, Atmos doesn't seem to have so much steam in the market. And all I can say about Atmos is that we have never run into a scenario where we have to compete against Atmos. Really? So they seem to be selling, but I don't know where. Yeah, they have more than 12 customers. I mean, but they're EMC, so they better have more than 12 customers. So that's about Atmos. About Cleversafe and OptiData, we think that these are awesome technologies. They're really great for long-term storage of large piece of data. And they're great. Okay. They're not good for primary storage, especially if you have a mixed match of small piece of data and big piece of data. So we're actually considering partnering with them for the long-term storage, because they really have some very nice features. Yeah, they really do. But as a primary storage, which is where we... Chris is really smart. Chris Glenn. Absolutely. And he's been in this industry for like seven years. He's a legend. He knows it inside out. And seriously, their software, their design is super good. No question asked. It's just a different focus. Yeah, you're right. I mean, they're not a performance-oriented store. We can guarantee that, in average, we bring object back in 40 milliseconds. Yeah, okay. That's not their deal. Their deal is longer-term archiving. And of course, the way in which they've built inherent security is quite interesting. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, okay, good. So that's a partnership opportunity. So that helps us clarify sort of where you guys fit. That's good. All right, Jerome. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure learning about scalability. And I appreciate you being on here. Thank you very much