 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE. We bring you the best guests that we can find. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at 590 Madison Avenue. This is IBM's big flash ahead announcement. They've announced a billion dollar investment in flash. I believe that includes the TMS acquisition. We'll ask Steve Mills that. Also, IBM's announcing a number of competency centers to help customers adopt flash and make the most use of it and of course they've rebranded the Texas memory systems, the flash system to fit into the IBM blue branding. We're here with Bob Bruce of Vion Corporation. Vion is a company that sells into the government and some of the more interesting use cases in the world. Bob, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you. So let's talk a little bit more about how your clients are transforming their storage infrastructure, their IT infrastructure and specifically how they're using flash. Most of our current customers of flash are in the intelligence community and are looking for technology enablers to help them process more data faster to do their job, basically. Yeah, so tell me a little bit more about Vion. What's the unique value that you bring to the marketplace and how do you guys differentiate? We are a mid-level systems integrator with no ties. We're a trusted advisor to the government. We're not tied to a particular vendor or manufacturer for disk products, server products, network products, et cetera. We tend to focus on the enterprise, the larger systems environment, the intelligence community being one of them. So we don't bring any biases to providing solutions to the government. And I think that's a differentiator where most of our competitors are really reselling one brand and one brand only. Okay, so you truly are independent. We are. From your standpoint, you don't care. You just want to bring in the best solution for the customer. Do your clients sometimes drag you into solutions or do they not care? Oh, sure. In fact, our relationship with Texas Memory was founded upon a conversation one of our very good customers had with the Texas Memory Wrap at a conference. And he subsequently came, he was having an issue with Oracle Performance. He came back to Vion. Our customer did with Texas Memory and said, I'm gonna buy this from Vion and Vion's going to maintain this system for me. And that's how it all started in 2004. And we've sold a lot of Texas Memory into various applications, most of them because of performance issues with normal storage. So your response to that request was, okay. Sure, we're customer first. That's what we're all about. You mentioned a customer has a problem with Oracle Performance. A lot of people do, I mean, a lot of people have any database, not picking on Oracle, even though sometimes I love to pick on Oracle, but it's database, right? And so we saw Steve Mills present some data today and I loved it, not only because it was Wikibon data, but because it just showed the impact of flash because most databases are priced to cores. So if you can optimize the entire infrastructure and balance it out, you actually need less cores. Which means you need less, fewer database licenses. Are you seeing that in the field? Yes, we present that with Texas Memory prior to now as a reason to look at Texas Memory as alleviating performance pressure primarily, but also the cost benefit of it. Right, so we also, last night at dinner, we were talking a little bit about big data analytics. I mean, to me, Google and the government kind of really got us in to that whole world. And we see the potential, and I wonder if you can sort of share your thoughts on this, the potential to bringing sort of transaction systems, structured data and a lot of analytical systems together. And flash seems to be an enabler to do that because of the performance characteristics. Are you seeing that? Is that happening today? Or is that more of the future? Predominantly, the performance is driving them towards flash. And the more data you can put into your analytics, if you're basing your analytics on a sampling of 100 transactions as opposed to a million transactions, your answer is going to be much different, but you need speed on that. Time to market is an actionability of data is going to be very important in that. Yeah, so this is actually a really important point you're making is the world, we've lived in a world of sampling when it gets into statistics, right? And so as a result, the variance of accuracy is, there's some variance, there's some confidence interval. As you are able to load more data into the system, two things happen, I guess, we're sampling sort of, either it gets much, much bigger or even dies because you can operate the entire dataset and then the accuracy of your information. It's much better. Much, much better, so talk about that. And quicker, and it really came out as catching bad guys and having information that is current because people tend to move around. What's happened now is you look at Medicare and Medicaid fraud. It's another huge example of using big data analytics to find out where the fraudulent checks are going and who's behind it, and then tracking them down and closing them down. I mean, that's happening every day. Obviously, you work in the single most security conscious business or industry in the world. How does Flash play into, and even big data, play into improved security? Well, there's two types of security. One, you talk about physical security, which is to catch bad guys and track down bad guys. And then the other security, which is cyber security, things like that, there's no secret that the numbers of attacks that the bad guys are trying are going up exponentially, and people are tracking all that data and trying to find the source of it. The more samplings you get, the better you are at finding the source. Yeah, so Flash enabled you to put more data. More data, yeah, you could not do this with technology five years old. As well. So, I mean, as far as we've come as an industry, it just seems like the technology business just doesn't stop. So where do you see this going? Break out your binoculars for a minute and share with us your vision. It'll go from highly specialized pinpoint applications to more, everybody will have access to this capability. When you open your business as a small mom in a pop shop rather than spending millions of dollars on it, which people are having to do now when it's new technology and it'll create a whole new business of Flash specialists, Flash doctors, if they call them data doctors or whatever. Anyway, it'll create a whole new business of how best to use this technology and we haven't thought of how that's what that will be. So we're seeing government again, re-assert its lead and going after bad guys are really innovating in big data. Bob Bruce from Vion, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to meet you, keep it right there, we'll right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE.