 able to snare John Mansfield, senior vice president, really knows the product. So John, thanks very much for taking some time and coming on theCUBE, welcome. You're welcome, Dave. Thanks for having me. So the reason why we wanted to have you on is I think you have one of the best perspectives of Hitachi. You've seen the real transformation. You've been here since the early days of the virtualization platform and you've seen the new management team really drive innovations from the field into back to Japan and the engineering team. So talk a little bit about the VSP announcement and where it came from. It's not just a pie in the sky, fell out of the sky type of announcement. This is a foundation that you guys have been building on for the past six, seven, eight years. So talk a little bit about that. Correct, thanks, Dave. Well, the VSP is a revolutionary product in a lot of ways, but it's also an extension of our legacy of where we've always been an innovator and at a core, we are an engineering company. One of the differentiators for us in the market is Hitachi is known as an engineering company. We have now become in the last five, six years an engineering company that has close linkages with its customers and really understands what our customers are looking to achieve from both the business perspective so we can turn that into a technology advantage for us. So I think the VSP is kind of the crescendo of all the work we've done on the management software to the extension of the virtualization to the refinement of the hardware platform. So how does it work? I've known Hitachi back before it was HDS and it used to be Japan would throw the product over the pond and HDS would go sell it or NES would go sell it, right? It's different today, isn't it? That's very different. So my team, it's called the Global Strategy Solutions Development Organization, but it's fundamentally a product planning and product engineering team. We have integrated American, Japanese engineering teams, we have software development being done in Redmond, Washington, software development being done in now at Waltham, Massachusetts, software development being done in Santa Clara, California. We have product planning groups that have Hitachi, Japan individuals living in the United States working on my team, working with customers, as well as I have engineers that are American working in Japan, working directly with the engineering teams there. So it's a very integrated collaborative organization. I think Hitachi has learned to listen to its customers better today than it's ever done in its past and I think this is a true advantage for us. So when you think about the VSP and its predecessor, the USPV, I really see a three horse race. My friends at three par don't like when I say this, but I think they're doing some great progress, happy form and everything else, but it's really IBM, EMC and Hitachi at the high end. And so my question to you is, why for the customers out there, why should they consider Hitachi? Why do you win? We win for, we've always, when we win and we usually win wherever we compete, our biggest issue has traditionally been if we're not in an account and customers don't know us, they'll buy a bigger brand name. IBM and EMC have much more marketing dollars to spend, they have brand recognition. But when they compare product to product, we almost always win the technology and the value proposition. So I think some of this is very compelling to our customers is that things we told them we were going to do three, five years ago, we delivered upon. We don't come out with messages that aren't sustainable. We don't come out with product lines that flare up. I was talking to Brian about some of our competitors out there and all of a sudden I go, what happened to that? Well, they talked about it for six months and it went away. That is not Hitachi. When we align on a strategy, we execute flawless. We don't execute flawlessly against it. We execute persistently against it. And I think it comes down to that, the three of us at the high end, two of us have a significant market share and I think we've absolutely positive that we have both our hardware and software advantage in the market today. Yeah, and EMC and Hitachi both do serious platform R&D. IBM's made some enhancements but it hasn't really overhauled the platform the way that those other two companies I mentioned had. Talk a little bit about the content piece. That's new. That's different. You don't usually think about, you think about Hitachi and USPV and now VSP, you think OLTP and but we heard a lot of messages around content, the content cloud. That's new. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so we've, we bought a company about four years ago. That team, that's a team that's working in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Hitachi content platform is what we call, it's basically a distributed object store. So you think of, and this goes back 15 years ago when we were talking object-based storage versus typical Oracle SQL server sort of storage. What did all that be turned into? We really see an opportunity in the market to manage the unstructured data side of things. The VSP will scale out a huge amount of block-based capacity and volume but you need something on the front end to actually ingest it, index it and apply a lot of services that are really targeted toward unstructured data. We have some customer wins, there were like multi-petabytes of the block storage behind our content platform. So we really see these very synergistic product lines for our customers to use. It's unique in the industry. I mean, NetApp certainly has a great unified storage but not at this scale. I don't know of anybody else who's doing that. That's a bold vision. It is a bold vision and I think one of the reasons we've been successful is we only have really one product group inside HDS so we force collaboration between the management tools. Management tools have to work across the entire product line. I don't have my NAS guys competing with my content guys or I don't have two different divisions of hardware platforms competing with each other internally so we force that collaboration. I think that adds a lot of value to our customers. So I just look at the object-based storage and all the services we can deliver there to be, it's almost like a higher level in the protocol stack of how you deal with information. It's an interesting point you're making. I mean, a lot of times mundane things like the way an organization or a company is organized makes a big difference in terms of the goals that are able to be set and executed on different P&Ls and people fighting and you're saying you've basically broken down those stovepipes which is what your customers are asking you for. So John Mansfield, I appreciate you stopping by the Cube and I know you're on the run and so always a pleasure, great perspectives. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.