 its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. We're back, this is theCUBE and we're live from Moscone Center. We're in Moscone North this year. This is our sixth year doing VMworld. And you know, everybody's talking, Dave Floor and I have been here all week. Everybody's talking about, this is a storage show. It's really been largely a storage show. Other, certainly plenty of other things going on, but it's really our pleasure to have Nelson Nahum here. He's the CEO of Zadara Storage. And Nelson, I have to say personally, first of all, thanks for coming on theCUBE. But you know, you were one of the early, early contributors to the Wikibon community. You published some great stuff. You know, back when, you know, it was just an idea in the back of a napkin. So we really appreciate all the support and contributions you've made over the years. Hey, of course you're really busy now, building yet another company. So congratulations on all the success and the traction that you're having. So, you know, again, welcome and give us the update on Zadara and what's going on here at VMworld. Thank you, thank you for having me. No, we are busy working, getting customer traction head down with customer traction. We are quite unique in our offering. We offer storage as a service with the same quality and security and performance of enterprise storage arrays, but with the flexibility of the cloud and the economics of the cloud. You pay only for what you use, you need to create a specific storage, you go to the console and after a minute, it's up and running, you new array. So, and we do this on-premises as well in public cloud. So this is keeping us very busy because we have very unique offering. Actually, you mentioned that this is a storage show and there are many storage products. In the whole floor, we are the only one as a service. So that's an interesting point. You know, this is a very interesting, I met a gentleman on theCUBE about a year ago, Alan Nance was his name. He's essentially the infrastructure CIO at Philips. And he said, we will not consume any IT unless it's a service. This is a mandate from our CEO because he estimated that 85% of their IT spend was non-differentiated. So the mandate came down from high and now at that time, I got on my high, I heard that, I got on my high horse, I started publishing, it's interesting to note that the industry in general has not responded. So you saw an opportunity, maybe talk about that a little bit. It is a great opportunity as you say, there are many people that recognize that. It's not only that you have zero capex. First of all, it's a good thing. You have the money, you invest in your business instead of investing in storage boxes. It also reduced your optics because we manage the storage for the customer. We, in charge of the hardware infrastructure, firmware upgrades, if we need to retire equipment, we retire equipment and do the migration on the flight. This is a cloud system. So all this operation that require a lot of optics and a lot of time and a lot of people are completely gone. So zero capex reduction of optics. And the last thing that is not pretty obvious and actually I discovered this during the Zadara, is that the state of mind of the company is completely different when you sell a storage box for let's say $200,000. And if the customer after a few months is not very happy, you still sleep well, you solve the $200,000 box and maybe after three years you will not get the refresh. But you got your bonus. You get the bonus, exactly. In our business, we need to win the customer every day. In our business, a customer can go to the console and simply delete the entire storage in one minute. I'm done with you. I'm done with you. So this is another, first of all, make our company very, very customer oriented, I would say customer obsessive. I mean, I will always believe in customer support, but when you dependent the customer every day, it is really important. And at the end of the day, it forms with the customer partnerships. Basically, they understand that if we are doing well, they are doing well, if they are not doing well, we are not doing well. And it is a better bonding with the customer than to be a partner instead of a customer. So I come up to your booth at VMworld and I ask you, okay, what do you do? You tell me, would you do cloud storage, storage as a service? And then I imagine you get a lot of these questions from a small company, not everybody knows who you are. So, okay, they say, how does it work? Do I have to install hardware or what do I do? Yeah, so we, our secret source, we are software developers. So we developed a software that ran on standard x86 servers that form a cloud storage solution that is very scalable. And the main technology and the main patent actually that we have is that it is a multi tenant storage, but we do a very good job of separating the tenants. So every tenant has their own drives, their own networking, their own compute, their own management of the storage. And especially for enterprises, for example, in a multi tenant system, you have, let's say two companies, one need to be connected to their own network and active directory, the other to their own network. And they need to be isolated. They cannot connect their networks of two companies together. So this is the kind of thing that we do that is completely unique. And the customer feel that he has a storage array, like many of these storage that are here exposing with all the snapshots and replication and enterprise capabilities, but actually because it's multi tenant, they can go to the console and create on the fly a storage array. And just to finish your question, we deliver hardware and software all together at the customer data center or into multi tenant data centers like Equinix and others, and customer pay per use. So the customer don't need to buy the hardware, don't need to buy the software, you don't need to integrate anything, we ship everything together and just use the storage. So what are some of the major use cases that you're seeing and how does your service changing the way that the customer view storage uses storage? Can you talk about what's different from that point of view? Right, so again, from the technology standpoint, one of the main capabilities we have is the multi tenancy and the separation between tenants. And because of that, anybody that has some kind of different tenants or workloads or departments, it's fit very well. Nobody else is doing this kind of thing. So service provider, cloud providers, data center providers that by nature, they have multiple tenants in their own data centers, we fit perfectly well. We have a customer telecity that is a big data center in Europe. They are really good in multi tenancy and they have banks and financial institutions in their own data centers. They need to provide storage and service with the complete security for the customer. Software as a service companies, they are also kind of multi tenant, right? They have the multiple customers and at the same time, they need to provide the SLAs and seeing that that to a customer. So those are... So you're avoiding storage silos. Right, so again, because we can separate very well the workloads, in the same cloud, we can have SSD drives, SATA drives, and we can have a high performance block storage and we can have NAS with high capacity and they will not interfere with each other. That's different than traditional storage boxes that is kind of uniform and it's hard to get two different workloads on the same box. In our case, it is a cloud system and every workload is completely isolated and the customer can say, well, I want to provide a high performance storage for the database, go to the console. It's really soft to define storage. I don't like to use too much this acronym because everybody's using, but the customer can go to a console, define block storage for database at high performance and they go to a console and say, I want storage for backup or for VDI and every storage has different, either interfaces or different price per gigabyte and things like that. And so you're in the Equinix data centers which is in the cloud data centers. So why, obviously Amazon has its own storage and selling a lot of that as well. What differentiates your storage then from Amazon storage? So Amazon has different storage offerings and most of them are basically the customer can decide which capacity they need and the customer doesn't have more visibility than that. In our case, what we provision to Amazon customer is a full storage array with dedicated drives, they get the controller full management, they can decide which type of rate levels, which type of replication if they want to replicate between East to West or between on-premise to Amazon. So there are multiple capabilities that we provide that cannot be done in Amazon. For example, we have a really good enterprise NAS capability for Windows and Active Directory integration that is not present in Amazon. We can do very large volumes, like 100 terabytes. Amazon is limited on the size of one volume. Clustering that need share storage, encryption where the customer has a key of encryption, storage that is replicated between East Coast and West Coast. There is a lot of the classical enterprise capabilities that we provide and Amazon doesn't provide to them. So maybe talk a little bit more about sort of what you're seeing with Amazon and Azure. Particularly I'm interested in the context of what you think about the future of VMware. I mean, they got vCloud Air and they pushed that but it's tiny compared to what you're seeing with Amazon and Azure. I wonder if you could talk about the progression there and what that all means to your business and then I'm interested in what your thoughts are about the future of VMware. So when we started back in 2011, we saw that most of the Amazon customers were internet companies like Pinterest and Heroku and these type of companies and over the time we see more and more enterprises doing things in Amazon and from all the sector of retail and manufacturing and everything. I mean, everything, the killer logo, so on, don't they? So they have been doing tremendous job in the cloud. I think Azure as well, it started a little bit later but they're catching up as well. And for us, it's very good because there aren't many places today that you can sell enterprise storage without competing with EMC. That is a good place to be. I always say that I prefer to compete with Amazon storage than EMC and the storage group. So what do you think about the future of VMware? You've been in this industry a while, you've seen the ascendancy of VMware and now they're at a crossroads. They're fighting multiple front, about multiple battles on many fronts. Cloud, they got OpenStack which they've embraced. They've got a lot of their ecosystem trying to figure out, okay, where do we put our bets, IBM and HP betting heavily on OpenStack. You've got now Docker coming in, the whole DevOps movement. What are your thoughts on the future of this industry? I think in general, if I would be at VMware, I would be okay. I would be okay. Tell me with that problem. Yeah. Exactly, if I would be the CEO, I would be fine. I mean, things are progressing but they're not changing. People are thinking. I think that VMware are very strong in the enterprise. The enterprise, we see many enterprises that want to keep their workloads on site, on premise and these are mostly VMware. This is one of the offering that we provide is storage on premise but consume as a service and most of them are VMware customers. I would say that the cloud is changing things but it's more of the addition type of workloads and not so much completely replacement. And then it's interesting, you hear the whole hyperscale movement or hyperconverged movement came out of the hyperscale. It's a hyperscale for the enterprise. You always hear about that. But it's interesting to note, as you said, you're the only company on the floor that's actually selling storage as a service. That's what the hyperscale guys do. They say everything's a service, whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or Amazon or Azure. I feel, when I go to the floor, I feel, oh, I am a stupid or I am a genius. Well, yeah, well, I wonder, you're the only guy sometimes that makes you nervous but you're not really the only guy. You're the only guy actually bringing it into the enterprise the way that everybody says they want it done. Why do you think that is? Is it too hard to do? Is it just too scary for most companies? So I think that to be as a service, there is a whole set of technologies that need to be developed that not necessarily come with the traditional storage. I mean, as a service, it's not just a financial model. It's a way to manage the customer storage. And you need to do remotely. I mean, today to manage storage, you need to have support people everywhere, in every city with their offices and things like that. We have a system where we don't travel to the customer. We have everything can be done remotely. And this has two big advantages to the customer. First of all, we don't need to have people in every city in the world to sell and we don't need to pay for that and actually the customer get the benefit for that. Second, we can solve a problem in minutes. We have a 24 by seven knock with top engineers and they can do everything in the storage. Because it is a cloud, we have always more resources so it's easy to replace. So we can provide the five to 15 minutes response time and fix the problem. We just got a couple of weeks ago, we had a drive failure in Sydney and our guy here in California got an email alert, went to the system, replaced the drive with another drive that is in the cloud. And after 15 minutes the system was... So when I buy an on-prem solution from you, what am I actually, what do I have to bring in to my shop? We, the minimum system is two storage nodes and switches and firewalls that we ship about 10U. And then the customer need to rack it, physical racking and at some point we take over via firewall of our environment, private environment. We do the software installation and day-to-day operations. And if there's a hardware failure on site, you're saying you replace that with a virtual... No, we will replace immediately with another company because we have enough redundancy. Yeah, with something in the cloud. And then whenever you get there. Inside the same data center. And then once in a while we will tell the customer, okay, we can blink the drives from remote and we say, okay, go ahead and take these ones that are blinking. You make it kindergarten proof. Yes, well actually we had a case, very rare case a few months ago in Amsterdam that they tried to blink the drive and the drive didn't blink. So it was dead that cannot blink anymore. So our guy was very smart and said, okay, we'll blink all the other drives, the one that is not blinking. So that's this kind of thing. So you say you staff that knock with really smart people. Now, company-wise, how many people are you now? We are 43. 43? Yeah. And where are you in funding? We had already two rounds, about 20 million dollars and we will be looking to do a round C pretty soon as well. Excellent, well Nelson, congratulations on all the success and the awesome idea that you have in bringing it to execution. So really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Very good, thank you very much David. Thank you. Okay, keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest right after. This is theCUBE or live from VMworld 2015, right back.