 Live, VMworld, 2012, I'm John Furrier, just talking about the CEO round table we're watching right now with Pat Gelsinger. Hold in court because of his excellent cube experience. So, we're going to get that out on the record that he looks polished, smooth, right on messaging, cloud mobile and social. We heard Shadow IT, Dave. Great job by Pat Gelsinger. This is VMworld 2012, this is John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We are here live, Dave, final segment of the day. How do you feel? Oh, it's great where we got a repeat guest, BJ Jenkins, president of EMC's BRS division, suffering Red Sox fan with me, West Coast now. I guess that helps. It's been getting worse and worse now. It never goes away. Never goes away. Football season's coming. Yeah, exactly. So, welcome back to theCUBE. It was great to see you. Thanks for having me, guys. Great to see you. Thanks, it's great to see you. So, the question is, obviously VMworld, what are you seeing out there? Obviously you got a lot going on. We're hearing backup and recovery. We had MLB on earlier, Major League Baseball, speaking of baseball, TV operation. And they're, you know, backup and recovery is part of their, big part of their operations now. They're trying to figure it out in a new way, right? So we've been talking about this modern era of computing with data infrastructure being kind of the new theme that's changed, converged infrastructure, building on the shoulders of converged infrastructure. One of those areas is backup and recovery. And it's not going away. It's never going away. There is, it just doesn't go away. In fact, it is more important when you think about the new virtualization and new cloud. So what is your lens show you on this show? Well, you know, I think it's something that's a continuation of what we've always, you know, talked about as most data protection infrastructures were set up, you know, for tape and for a legacy type of environment. And, you know, you see this at VMworld. Every time we come, the world's completely moved away from that and whether it's, you know, mobile and social, like we were just talking about, everything's on, everything, you need access and availability always. And that's a big driver for data protection. If you have an issue, no matter what it's at, whether, you know, it's an application or data on a personal device, that user now expects instant recovery. And you can't do that with legacy infrastructure. You can't do it with tape. You have to do it dis-based. And you've got to find a way to, you know, capacity optimize, which is where deduplications had a big play in this environment, but be able to put it on desk and get it back very quickly. So give us a quick update since VMworld. What's happened with you guys? EMCworld. I mean, EMCworld, put it, hey, since EMCworld, give us the update. We're talking real time. Yeah, what's the update since this morning when you got up? That's exactly. Since EMCworld, when you were on, any new updates to share? We've had a tremendous amount of product launches since EMCworld. At EMCworld, we had refreshed the high-end data domain in Avamar. And in July, Networker 80 came out. It was the 22nd anniversary of Networker. And that was a big announcement for us. But I think, you know, the thing that we're really excited about here is VMware selected and worked with VMC to, you know, build VDP into vSphere. And that's a real big announcement for us. Yeah, so for those of you who don't know, VDR was VMware's basically a backup appliance, a free backup appliance with vSphere 5, now with vSphere 5.1. VDP is replacing the previous product. It's a free offering for the customers. It's based on Avamar technology. That's correct. Which has always had a very strong presence in the VMware world. In any virtualized environment. For the very nature of its technology. Dealing with, you know, reducing IO traffic, right, at the source. So congratulations on that deal. That's a big announcement for us. I read Chad's blog this morning. It looks like it was a pretty significant undertaking to actually do that integration. Yeah, it was, I have to say this, I have to go off topic and it's probably not good for this audience, but I just went to the bathroom and you know how they have the small stalls and the big stalls? The small stall has a sign that says reserve for Chad Sack, which I just thought was hilarious. So that everybody in the- He'll be in the queue tomorrow. We'll definitely let him know. Yeah, so you can let him know. But this has been a two year effort for us. You know, we put, besides our Avamar engineering team, which is over, you know, 400 engineers. We actually put 60 dedicated engineers to this to build on top of the Flex framework that VMware has and it looks, it is a VMware product. This is offered through vSphere and you can use it within that framework, which I think is powerful. You get all the power of Avamar, you know, in the VMware framework, which is great for us. So I don't know if you had a chance to read Chad's blog. He basically said, you know, there were two analysts, you know, news reactions, right? One was, this is, you know, tremendous confirmation of Avamar technology, which he totally agreed. And the other one was, this marks a change in the whole, you know, VMware relationship, et cetera, et cetera. So everybody's saying it's an inside deal, but tell us sort of, I mean, VMware's not just going to, you know, throw it's, you know, a future away just because it's a sister company. So how did you actually win that deal and take us through kind of, you know, how that happened? Why Avamar is the back end? Yeah, and I think, you know, first of all, Avamar, we believe is the leading technology for virtual environments in the enterprise and mid-market. And really this is a, I think VMware saw that, the capabilities that Avamar brings to that customer base that they serve. And, you know, they looked across the market and wanted to partner with the leading provider. I think, you know, that's why we got chosen. Within that framework, though, of what they offer, it doesn't change their platform approach. And certainly they have their APIs and the other third-party vendors are still going to continue to optimize for VMware and try and, you know, provide to that environment. So I, you know, I think people are looking at the EMC jam this down VMware's road. It was inside here. Yeah, it was evaluate the technology landscape. They have a, you know, they're trying to make their platform pervasive and partner with a group that has the resources and the commitment in that market. And, you know, today we have, in our division, over 4,000 people focused on backup every day. We, you know, from a patent approach and what Avamar can do from a technology standpoint for the customers, I think they looked at and said, this is what we want VMware to do in the backup space. Yeah, I've always been a big fan of Avamar and especially in virtualized environments. And I've always encouraged customers to sort of, you know, if you're going to virtualize, you better rethink your backup. You know, make sure that, you know, you plan that out. And the Avamar customers that we, you know, helped through that transition have always been very, very pleased with it. It was a rip and replace in a lot of examples, which slowed the market down for a while, which is, we all know the story of Data Domain. It was not a rip and replace, and, you know, they got 2.5 billion confirmation readings. That's right. Good for them. It was fantastic to watch that whole dynamic, but this is, we always sort of knew that the adoption of that type of technology was going to take longer. So this is a big win for Avamar and one that's going to, I think, have a lot of legs in the marketplace, especially because this is kind of the, you know, second or third rev of VMware's backup strategy. You know, they've struggled with backup. You know, it's like Microsoft first rev, yeah, not so good, and then they get it right eventually. Yeah, and I think, you know, VMware probably looked at that effort to get it right and looked at some of the other challenges on their plate and the, you know, the, you know, time to market and doing that. And again, I think that's why Avamar was validated based on what it was doing for customers. And, you know, we were talking earlier about converged infrastructure and, you know, along with VMware, how that's changing customers' IT infrastructure is one of the things that breaks right away when you start putting in converged infrastructure is that whole protection, you know, backup process layer. And this is where something like Avamar comes in and reduces resource contention, improves, you know, capacity optimization, you know, reduces the amount of storage space you need for backups. And then I think most importantly, and the thing we talk a lot about with this announcement is, you know, the ability to, you know, file level restore, use the APIs for change block tracking, you know, be very, very efficient in how you're protecting that data is something you need in a virtualized and a converged infrastructure environment. B.J., Dave and I sat down in January in the Wikibon offices in Malboro and we're looking at over the year. And, you know, at the end of last year, we obviously went through all the different cube events and, you know, through the market. Converged infrastructure, we were totally convinced. David Floyd was doing some cutting words around IO-centric infrastructure. The flash thing was hitting the street pretty hard. We all knew it was happening. You guys announced project lightning. But one of the things that Dave and I looked at was, converged infrastructure is an old definition, right? In other words, it's kind of like it was defined when people saw the vision and it kind of played out, but one thing that really took a shape that no one kind of saw coming in that equation was flash in solid state. So having a data-centric infrastructure okay, and obviously when you talk about recovery, I totally see that, but we're trying to explore out. We've decided that we're now going to kick off this new agenda called data infrastructure where everyone we talked to, it's a different modern era of a concept. And it's pretty simple, it's the data. And you see Amazon with Glacier. It's like, you know, we're going to put it in ice and then get five days to get your data back. That's one concept. The other one's the normal tape. But really now the data centers are being re-architected with new kinds of flash, whether it's sit in front of sands and do all kinds of new stuff. One, do you agree that this data infrastructure is a little bit different than conversion in the fact that it needs to be more revolutionary versus evolutionary? And two, what is a modern era data infrastructure relative to really important stuff like backup and recovery and disaster recovery? I actually think on the first one, this idea of data-centricity or data-centric approach is happening. And, you know, Glacier is one manifestation of that which is there is a set of data. You know, archive's a big space for us where we're going into it. But their idea is there's a set of that data that very rarely gets accessed. And if a customer could understand in their archive pools what subset of data that was, here's a good place to go put it. So that idea of understanding the value of that information and assigning a policy around it has been around for a while. But I think this idea of applying all layers of the stack and understanding how to treat it is one that's gaining a lot of momentum. And certainly the things, you know, we are trying to build for that marketplace is how do you understand that data better? We have a lot of tools at EMC that we look at and say it understands the data. You know, Green Plum, Net Witness, you know, there are a lot of, you know, some of ProSphere analytics understands that data. And if you do that, you can apply policies. So you're saying, let me just catch what you're saying, because in the modern era as we, that's our work is we just had baseball guys and I'm going to talk about the modern era of back up here. No doping, no steroids, I think at Glacier you can freeze them out. No, but in the modern era, you're saying you got to have the ability to essentially dynamically put policy on data, which requires some big data. Anything else you see in this modern era, infrastructure requirements? The table stakes, like we got to nail this now, the industry is moving clearly in this direction. Can you name any other? Well, I, you know, I think it's easy to say to do that. It's a really hard thing to do that. And then, you know, I think the big part for us from data protection is how do you automate some of that and take, you know, the user variability out of it. And we talked, I think, at EMC World a little bit about some of the projects in this area. You know, we're looking at how you directly connect into primary storage and use tools like FAST. You know, FAST will understand access patterns on it and place it on a tier, like data domain or, you know, like Avamar, when it's the right time to be there. So, automating, understanding the information first, automating a lot of those policies on it. So it just happens for the user is, you know, an area I think we're investing a lot to make that happen. And I think, you know, one of the premises that John's talking about data infrastructure, we talked a lot about flash and metadata. Right. Control at the server level. I actually think, you know, you talk about FAST, that whole archiving, you know, the FAST seems to me to be really well suited for the whole spinning disk and down. Yeah. And you guys have mentioned Glacier before, you guys do decent tape integration. Actually, tape is not dead, despite your attempts to kill it over the years. I'll keep trying, I'll keep trying, but it's going to be there for a while. When you look at Glacier, you say, if I'm a CIO, I'm not so sure. I'm going to put my data in Glacier. I'd rather have it on tape personally. Well, you know, the other trend that I think fits in here that we see, and it really is very applicable to the types of things VMware is saying, is this idea of user control, you know, or user tools, but still have some IT management and control over that. So when we think about data protection, we would love it. The world we see as a database administrator can use the tools they're used to, Oracle RMAN or Microsoft tools, and have self-protection work in that world. A VMware administrator with VDP or the follow-on that we do with that can self-protect and use the tools they're used to. A storage administrator can snap and replicate and use those tools. But behind that, give IT the ability to manage it, report out, let the General Counsel, let the CEO know that you are protected, you can recover while these users use their own tools. And for us, very similar to what VMware is doing with Project Horizon, give the users the ability to use their own device, but give IT some ability to manage and control that. We think that's where the future is. And if you think about data centricity, you need to do that. You need to give users the ability to manage and control some things, but still have that central IT capability to know that it's secure and you know you're doing what you're supposed to do. At EMC World, BJ, your CTO, Steven Manley laid out a vision, you mentioned snapshots before, really trying to put forth the future of data protection where essentially you're attacking the backup window problem in a different way. How is that evolving? Can you give us an update on that vision? Yeah, and I think you guys may have Steven tomorrow with our new head of engineering guy, Church Ward. And I'll tell you, that's like Gavin Costello, you'll have a good community tomorrow. But we're moving along and I think where we look again at backup infrastructure today, our customers have an enormous amount of dollars invested in things like media servers. And all of that to understand catalog and then move data again, we'd like to get to a world where that goes away where the primary storage device where the data's house can communicate directly with your capacity optimized platform, eliminate a lot of that infrastructure. And for our customers, they get real excited about it again because it goes to this world where through metadata or through the understanding of data, I move it where it needs to go. It's automated, it happens, I'm protected, and I don't need to add a whole bunch of infrastructure to assure me that that's going to happen. BJ, talk about the mindset of the market right now. Honestly, we said earlier, obviously it's not going to go away, but obviously there's a shift going on. Joe was just talking about it up there, we're watching the horizontal's shorter, vertical's getting steeper, disruption's faster. What do you guys see in terms of this new disruption? And what are you worried about? What are you working on that you say, hey, we really got to nail that one piece of this market? Is it cloud backup? Is it the integration? Is it the software all the above? Can you just lend some insight into how your mind's thinking about this? I think it's kind of a race with, they always give you the car analogy or the airplane analogy where you've got to do a bunch of things and keep it moving. We have to refresh our products constantly, that's table stakes to be in this business. For us, the two real hands we feel like we have to play are, you know, understand a completely virtual world and bring data protection policies to it. And the second is integration, the ability to simplify data protection for our customers, we think is essential. So, all of our investment, there's a base level investment that goes into refreshing the products, but we are pouring enormous amount of money into things like VDP and being seamless data protection in a virtual world. And then integrating that with the set of tools that EMC has and others have to eliminate a lot of that infrastructure. Okay, so let me try to be more specific in my question since I can't get it out of you. What are you going to be looking at on your M&A map? So, in terms of refreshing the product, okay, that's cool, we're going to tweak the product. But some areas, you've got to go out and buy some merging tech. And you guys are writing some checks, EMC's aggressive, Joe's clearly showed that EMC has really nailed the core competency and Gouldin was on the cube at EMC World, talking about, hey, we'd like to acquire and we integrate well. And you live that world with it. I did. You're an acquisition. So, you've got to have some suspects. Can you share with us your vision? You know, in the backup space, we've done one acquisition and it was a mainframe acquisition for Buzztech to do mainframe backup. So, to say we were out there on the, you know, leading edges, you know, we went backwards to go forwards and mainframe backup, by the way, is very important to us. It's a- It's a big market still, I mean- There's a lot of tape. You know, I think that things we're looking at, the categories are really, we believe in the SMB market and the continued development of VDP and expanding that is important to us. But I think there's this area and it really rests around backup as a service and, you know, how data moves to clouds and between clouds and whether, you know, you see the emergence today of cloud gateways, you know, moving that data a lot. You know, today backup as a service is essentially make a local copy and then replicate that into a cloud. And that's really DR. Not many people direct backup into a cloud and recover because the recoverability is so difficult out of the cloud. And I think that's the space we'll continue to look at and try and exploit is, how do you control the movement of data from on-premise to- There's also a blurring category too that you're playing in, like we just covered on SiliconANGLE, Nervonics cloud storage company, although they don't build it as backup, just signed a deal with Fox, pretty big media company. It's not glacier-like backup, but it's, I mean, it's, so what is backup? I mean, it's with cloud storage, that's, in a way, you're putting it out there and bringing it back. That's the space that is, we have to continue to do more and be more aggressive and understand that movement of the data between a customer's premise and a cloud. What are you using it for? It hasn't taken off yet. And so there's been some inhibitors and a lot of that is the, I don't think the industry quite has it right yet. And of course customers don't trust it. It's evolving and that's why, you want to know who I'm going to buy. We're just saying, we're looking at that, trying to understand that. EMC has got the checkbook out for cloud gateways and storage backup, B.J. Jenkins, president of BRS. That's, those are my putting words on your mouth. I have $20 with you right now, if anybody's willing to sell for that. So we got the speakers back, so I just want to say, yeah, B.J. Jenkins, president of the EMC backup and recovery group, BRS. So backup is not just nutritional meat and potatoes, backup, it's pretty disruptive right now in the sense that there's a lot going on with Flash that we talked about and obviously emerging markets like cloud. Again, just share with us your agenda for the next 12 months. Product refresh, a little bit of M&A categorical. Look at a few things. What else is on your 12 month agenda? I think if you look at just the penetration of DDoop, there's still a lot of headroom in the market in all segments, but if you want to know the next 12 months, we're thinking about it. It's that conversation we just had. How is data backup as a service? Recovery as a service? How is data moving from a customer premise into a service provider or cloud? You can certainly see companies like Amazon with Glacier being more aggressive, trying to get more data into their cloud. That's something Microsoft would like. I just showed you, that's Roche Motel, but I mean it's got an upgrade path. But it's a signal, it's a signal. Amazon's, you know, signal a number of trends before, so they're... Dave, as the analyst, you've been covering this market. I want to ask, because you're deeper than I am on some of the historical paths, as well as the trajectory of, we've talked in the future about data infrastructure, what's your take? I mean, you've seen this market move and mature and change. What's your take on the backup and recovery market? Well, I think the notion of backup or data, I use the term data protection as a service, is the right one. I think historically, backup's been a one-size-fits-all. Regardless of your RPO, your RTO, your business value, here's the backup level that you get. Here's the level of data protection that you get and if you can afford SRDF, go for it. And that just doesn't cut it. You got to be able to dial down and dial up your... So intelligence. Your service level. But it's like you were talking before, it's policy-based and it's being able to offer a set of services that are granular, that are application-based, tailored to the application. I mean, the thing we're talking about here, this will, over time, it's going to move to a service. Yeah, yeah. Right, it's all going to move to a service. Okay, so now just taking one step further to connect the dots, the big vision from Steve and we've been talking about with OpenFlow, but now here with Nacir as software-defined data center. That's obviously strategic imperative and it's obvious why it's an operating system. Software is, you can do all kinds of policy. How does that change, if any, or is it just the normal course for you guys? Well, I think if you look at VDP, that's, again, that's software, right? And I think you'll only see that grow from a data protection standpoint. Now, the reality of here and now, though, is when you're talking data protection, we design what we do as the storage of last resort. If we're not there, customers fail. And that's great, you can have software do that and there's a lot of people who design that from a software-based approach, but the reality is you gotta have some hardware understanding, because disk drives still fail, unfortunately. Tapes still fail. And if your software doesn't have a way to do data integrity and... Flash will fail. Flash will fail, so. Business value is the biggest trend here. I'm hearing at VMworld and tomorrow we're going to have Dave on. I haven't updated Dave, we're going to have Sean Douglas as well as the new head of EMC Ventures on to explore some of the things around software-defined networking, obviously they were involved in a variety of different transactions, but there are new use cases for business value-type apps that will sit in these environments we're going to hear from that. And mainly I see EMC Ventures as like the modern, in our modern era analogy is the new Intel Capital. Since... They got Scott Darling from Intel. They got Scott Darling from Intel. And they're aggressive. They were in software networking for, I know for years and then each Scott came in with Pat, they pulled the trigger on Nasir as well, some other ones that I can't disclose, although I could break some news right now, but I swore I would not share the other investments that they've made. We'll say that for tomorrow when I put them to the feet of the fire. Well, now you're in the valley now, so that's got to give you a whole new perspective on M&A, right? Is that true or is it? It's much different than the... It's got to be, it's a night and day. I mean, it's just really, that's my perspective anyway, point of view, but we live there now. So it's... Yeah, there's just the enormity of activity that goes on here in Capital that goes into companies in our space is far heavier than where our corporate headquarters are. So certainly there's more weight here around that. And I think just the talent management and movement part of that is, every day your employees choose where to show up for work. And if you're not on the cutting edge or pushing the limits. The speed at which decisions get made. It's fast, you've got to move fast. The risk tolerance is different. And I think, I'll speak from my own view. When you buy something at 2.4 billion and show up and you don't know the company, there's a lot of risk in that. There's a lot of risk. And fortunately EMC's had a core competency in making work, but that's a lot of risk. You'd much rather invest and know at 100 million or 200 million purchase price and make that gamble. You can make 20 of those for the $2 billion deal stream. Well, they're gonna stream my own, I mean, I don't. And I think that's the thought behind it. You'll probably hear that from Scott, but it's be on the front of these things rather than letting them get to that point last. Well, Coolden laid it out at EMC world. I mean, basically they have some investors, they make kind of headlight deals where they get in early and kind of get to understand that, but clearly they'd rather let the risk reduce and validate with an overpayment on a deal and then take the risk on the integration. So it's clearly that you guys are the poster corporate company in terms of the poster child of acquisitions. I mean, HP and others have just failed to acquire and integrate well and it's caused a lot of problems. So you guys got that down. That's a good core competency and you blend that with R&D. I think that ability to let the entrepreneur who's founded this and his entrepreneurial team, at least everyone I've met has a passion not just to sell their company, they have a passion to change, impact customers, change the world. And you got to give them that vehicle to do that. And that's the good EMC brings to the equation. We can show them ways to accelerate that impact and keep them on board. So if we can get them earlier in the cycle, that's a good thing for us. I mean, I think just in this modern era, you know, the future case studies, Harvard Business School case studies will be written up and I predict to a point to EMC as that seminal moment, that company that changed the dynamic of integrations. And I think they're going to watch a lot of the CUBE coverage today because we've documented it all for three years, watch an EMC kind of take their journey. So, PJ, thanks for coming back on the CUBE. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. Great to see you. Thanks very much. The CUBE, we'll be right back with a final wrap up with myself and Dave Vellante. Wrap up day one right after the short break. We'll be right back. The CUBE is this conceptual box, if you will. And we bring people inside of the CUBE and then we share ideas. The CUBE is a comfortable place. It's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world. And we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer. First time on the CUBE, baby. Rock and roll. Five or six times I've been on the CUBE now. Right, at first the guys are just fun to work with. Pat, welcome back. Hey, always a pleasure to be in the CUBE. Hey, I'm about to go on the CUBE. You never know what's going to happen. A three-time veteran of being on the CUBE. I hope many, many more. Chad Sackitz, Chad, welcome to the CUBE. Dave, John, it's great to be here, man. I keep coming back because great, insightful questions from John and from Dave. What face-melting action have you seen here at the event? And I know there's a lot of it. It's a great vehicle to communicate with a broad audience, a lot of folks watch. Great to have you back. Good job. All right, Craig Nunez, VPA Marketing at HPStore. Thanks very much for coming on the CUBE. When people mention the CUBE, they're like, oh my god, I saw you on the CUBE. And they're all excited about it. It's an experience. It's not just information. They experience kind of what's going on there. It's like real time. It's like they were there. That was like going to the gym. Boom, boom, boom. Legendary IBMer, CEO of Symantec, and now CEO of Virtual Instrument. Great to have you on the CUBE. So for CUBE to be here at a conference like this, it's got 15,000, 20,000 people and sharing that live around the world, that's consistent with the way the world is evolving. So it's a wonderful meeting, wonderful meeting. John and Dave are amazing. I don't know how they keep everything in their heads the way they do. It's a great format. And we're obviously seeing that this notion of real time coverage and a real conversation is what's driving us as a company. And I said very seriously when the questions and the comments that we hear from them and from all the different guests here are directly turned into the products that we build. Yeah, that was my first CUBE and I really enjoyed it. There was the rapid fire of questions. It made me think on my feet, but they were very thought provoking and really got me going on analyzing the greatness of Rista and the greatness of the CUBE as well. John and Dave, the reason their approach works, they're not just guys reading down the question list, right? Okay, next one, next one. It's a conversation, right? And it's, you know, they're going to challenge you. They're not going to settle for the marketing hype and the BS and all that stuff that the industry throws around. Come on, you got to hit them up on the HP question. A lot's changing HP, some turmoil at the top, obviously controversy. They're going to hold you down to the real facts, compare you to the choices our users have and have you respond to it on the spot, right? Thinking real time. And so that's real talk, not just kind of a paper interview. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and I'm here with Dave Vellante. We are inside the CUBE. The CUBE is our flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract all the signal from the noise and share that with you. And great guest lineups. We've got CEOs, CTOs all the top executives, bloggers, thought leaders, venture capitalists. I'm absolutely stunned because I know it demands 100% attention for these guys to be up there talking to people about a wide variety of technology topics. I can't believe these guys can make it so many days in a row. So I'm wondering how long they're going to go home and pass out for after this. But it was incredible. They just do a fantastic job. If you're not having a conversation, then you're very scripted. And if you're scripted, then you might be getting the right words, but you're often not getting the whole meaning and the whole depth of the conversation to the fullest extent. I think this is a heck of a lot more authentic. It comes straight from the heart and the brain. Sometimes you might forget to make some of your points if you're not a real-time thinker. But I think both from a participation and from a consuming point of view, it's much more real. Chris holds no punches. So I've been on a CUBE a number of times. And I think the interesting thing about being in that particular venue, in that format, they introduced me as, hey, half doesn't pull punches. Well, they don't either, right? They ask really difficult, uncomfortable questions sometimes. And you can tell people and the positions and where they are in terms of what they're able or desire to speak of, you can tell where they are on that borderline between kind of just, you know, honestly answering questions versus kind of glossing over them. And I enjoy being there because I, I don't want to say I'm outspoken, but I honestly answer questions with the full intent of being able to be respectful to the people that I bring solutions to, right? If I whitewash this crap, you're going to turn me off every single time you see me on any venue, let alone the CUBE. So I like being asked tough questions. I like answering them honestly. And that's a fantastic venue for doing it. Otherwise you get on panels and you got a bunch of talk and hands blabbing at each other and it's worthless. Now this was my first time on the CUBE and I really got a chance to get to know John and David and they're really amazing guys. I mean, the knowledge that they come with, the topics that they could talk about, the people that they know, and just bringing it all together in this live broadcasting forum is just fantastic. I mean, I just love it. I'm like, I feel like a groupie or something, you know? In this environment, you know, the social environment, the real-time environment we're in, right, people look through the marketing fluff very quickly. And if it's not authentic, right, you know, they don't trust it anymore. So in this environment, I think it's a growing trend. Yeah.