 Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at the Flash Memory Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center. As you know, we like to go out to the events to track the signal from the noise, find some people that we can find the smartest people in the room we can talk to and get them on camera. So I'm here with Eric Herzog, the CMO of Violin Memory Systems. Eric, welcome. Great. Well, thank you very much. I always appreciate talking to theCube. It's a great event. I'm going to be speaking a couple times at the show. We're talking today, this morning, at 8.30, about how some of our end users actually used it in real-world deployment. So we're not going to talk technology. We're not going to talk, if you will, the Nerdburger talk. We're going to talk real use case, real workload, real application. Both of the three companies are actually in the Global Fortune 500, so 500 largest companies in the planet. And then the other one is a $7 billion company locally about how they use Flash, why they use it, what they did with it, and how it actually is transforming their business, which is the most important aspect. In short, Flash isn't expensive. It's about changing the business model of your company. Yeah, absolutely. And are you going to give some names out or are you just going to keep it at the Global 500 for the presentation? We're just going to keep it at that for the presentation. And then we're talking tomorrow. It should be an interesting panel. There's a multiple different ways to deploy Flash. This is a more technical session. And so basically we use raw Flash. Some Cust companies use what are called SSD, basically, if you think of Flash, basically in a configuration similar to a hard drive, but obviously much faster. And then some people use host-based in the server side. So they're having three panelists each talk about it. And it'll be interesting to see, I think they're hoping for little fireworks at the event, about which is the best and why. So, you know, there's a lot of talk in Flash's early days about just really using it only for applications that really couldn't deal with latency, really high-speed applications. But I think more and more people are now kind of getting it, that it's really an opportunity to rethink applications, to have Flash, you know, native applications, if you will. Are people getting that? Are they seeing the opportunity to kind of rethink the way they can build apps and deliver apps using the capabilities of Flash? Well, I think that that's a very astute observation. I think that people don't realize that Flash is an outstanding medium. And because it's an outstanding medium, you don't have the limits on your application infrastructure. So whether that be SQL, 14's, Hecaton configuration, SAP Han, are examples of people that can leverage Flash technology. There's other applications that are better being done and worked on. The other thing that people don't really understand is that Flash is at a tipping point. So if you go back into late 70s and early 80s, all data centers primarily take disk drives, obviously had been out, people started creating disk subsystems, IBM, some of the mainframe shops, and obviously eventually had guys like EMC. And what happened is people in the data center realized that even though tape was less expensive for primary applications, the overall economics of the data center, even though hard drives cost more per megabyte than obviously today we talk gig and terabyte, but then it was all megabytes. While disk drives were more expensive, the overall economics of everything that disk drive touched, while the individual disk drive cost more, the economics of the data center were radically changed by the introduction of disk drive subsystems and tape became, of course, backup and archive. And it's still used, of course, today for that use case. Flash is at the exact same tipping point. So now Flash allows you to dramatically change the economics of data center. And one of the customers I'm going to talk about in a little while is a company who took all of their hard drives, except for backup and archive and those type of off the floor. They went from 12 racks running a $7 billion company to five violin arrays. Every application accounts payable, accounts receivable, all their finance apps, HR, sales, marketing, inventory, manufacturing. The whole $7 billion company runs on Flash and that company saves over $2.5 million a year in operating expenses alone by making that shift. Yet Flash drives on a standalone basis do cost more than disk drive. When you look at your holistic data center, that's not true at all. Just like hard drives did with tape in the late 70s and 80s. Now Flash is doing that to hard drives now in 2014 and moving on into the second half of the teens in this century. Thanks for giving us a few minutes of your time. Eric is going to be presenting I think in about 10 minutes. So we we grabbed them out of the green room to get them to come on out and tell you what's going on here at Flash Memory Summit. I'm Jeff Prick with Eric Herzog. We'll be back shortly. Thanks for watching. Thank you.