 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at AWS re-invent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Amazon and Trend Micro. Welcome back to theCUBE. Live inside the Venetian Convention Center in Las Vegas, AWS re-invent 2014. Third year of the show, our second year here with theCUBE, wall-to-wall coverage, 13,500 people in attendance, lots of activity going on here in the Expo floor. Joining me for this segment is Rick Brattie, who is the president and CEO of SoftNAS. Rick, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. It's great to be here. All right, so there's so much announcement, so much going on in the ecosystem. Rick, you're obviously from the storage side of the house there. Can you give our audience a chance to show us your first time on, a little bit of background on who SoftNAS is and how Amazon fits into your business model? Sure, yeah. Well, SoftNAS is a NAS filer for the cloud. We're one of the leaders in this space. We got in early last year in the Amazon cloud. We support other platforms, but this is our best selling platform for sure on Amazon, and it's just been an incredible ride for us being on AWS. Yeah, so can you give us a little bit of a profile of the company? How long has the company been around? Sure. How many employees? What's the funding? Yeah, we are an angel-funded company. We've been in business since 2012, late 2012, about two years. And, yeah, we're about 12 employees. We have a lot of contractors. Everything we do is in the cloud. All of our operating development, everything's done through the cloud. Angel-funded out of Houston is where we started. And, man, we've just been growing like crazy. This cloud is a tremendous market. Yeah, it's interesting. The storage market is one of those that's just a highly fragmented and rather entrenched market. Think about the number one player only has 25% of the market. How has cloud changed the way that we think of storage? I mean, obviously, you're not built in any hardware, so what do you see in the storage market? Well, I mean, we see that customers are moving their most business-critical, mission-critical applications now to the cloud. I mean, we put web servers and those sorts of things in the cloud, for a long time, but now we're moving our mainstream, most mission-critical applications. And, of course, when you move the apps, the data follows the apps. So, it's moving to cloud, too. All right, Rick, you said mission-critical application. Can you talk to us about what use cases, what applications are you seeing, what's going in the cloud, what's not going in the cloud? Absolutely, yeah. So, we see a couple of two or three different use cases. Obviously, born-in-the-cloud-type companies like SaaS companies, they start out in the cloud. We see a lot of enterprises that are starting to move major B2B applications and B2C applications into the cloud. And I would say that we're seeing an increase in medium-sized corporations going all-in into the cloud. They're moving everything out of their own data center, powering down the old expensive storage arrays and just turning off their data centers and going pure cloud. All right, so you guys partnered with more than just Amazon. Can you talk a little bit about the ecosystem you play in with the other cloud providers? Sure, we work cross-platform. We operate as a virtual appliance. So, we run everywhere. We run on AWS, Azure, we even support VCloud Air, ESXi, VMware, and Hyper-V. And we've got more in the pipeline, as you might imagine. So, can you explain to us a little bit how does your pricing model work, then, is the software from you, what services, say, from Amazon, do I need to buy to be able to spin up an instance? Sure. Well, we're sold through the AWS Marketplace today. We're one of the leading products in the storage and backup category. And we're sold hourly. We have different size products. We have an express edition, up to one terabyte, a standard edition, up to 20 terabytes. And then our enterprise edition goes up to 16 petabytes. And so, they're all hourly based. There are options to purchase annually, as well. All right, so the storage world is a lot of times talking about how many cents per gigabyte I have to spend. Do you have similar metrics for that? Yeah, we really don't. We sit on top of the elastic block storage. We don't charge extra for the storage itself. That's just pure Amazon storage. And we also, I think, one of the unique things we do is we take Amazon's S3 backbone, which is highly durable, redundant. And we treat it like a block device. And then we actually turn that into NFS, SIFS, and iSCSI shared storage, built on top of S3, actually, with all the NAS filer features that you'd get on top of S3. Okay, so, but, I guess, how do you guys price your model then on top of that? I understand you're... So we charge every hour based on the incident size. Okay. To answer your question. All right, so you do an EBS, you're doing S3, do I need to do anything from the compute side on Amazon to be able to deploy your solution? Sure, you would mount the storage, the NAS filer storage via NFS, SIFS, SNB, or iSCSI, I know. Okay. Talk to us a little bit about your customer adoption. Do you have any numbers that you can share to kind of momentum of the company? Yeah, well, we launched on the AWS marketplace about a year ago. I think we're early on, we've been around about six, eight months, and we probably had 15 customers. Since we launched on the marketplace, we've had about 1,900% growth in new customer acquisitions. Our revenue has grown. An average sustained growth of 45 plus percent per month. So it's been quite a ride. Yeah. Since you guys do a cross platform, Amazon, Microsoft, and on VMware, can you talk, how are customers seeing this? Can you give us some customer stories as to how they're embracing cloud solutions more versus thinking of storage as something that they have to own on site? Right. Well, I think for us, they treat storage just like they would treat a SQL database. It's another infrastructure component that they need to be highly available and protect their data and make sure there's no downtime. Like I said, they're either deploying all their apps or they're porting their entire legacy infrastructure for IT into the cloud, or they're putting a major B2B application in the cloud like Boeing that they use to build a supply chain for their airplanes. This is like super business critical stuff that they're doing in the cloud. All right. What do you see as kind of the largest impediment or customers just getting it? Obviously, at a show like this, I think we have people that are bought into the whole discussion of moving to the cloud. Do you have a specific market segment that you go into? SMB enterprise in between? Well, we're pretty horizontal. We work across all the different use cases, but we do see, I would say, large adoption and SaaS technology companies moving to the cloud. I like the street, for example. We see a lot in video, companies like Netflix and Stars, our customers. We see a lot of publishers, with a lot of video moving to the cloud as well. All right. Last year at the show, Amazon did a lot to update their storage portfolio to increase a lot of SSD deployments. Talk a little bit about how when Amazon changed their service offerings, how does that impact you guys? Right. What really helps, because customers need more IOPS. The ideal to have provisioned IOPS on elastic block storage just really helps a lot for performance. But the directly attached instances on each EC2 instance gives us a great way to do caching to even further improve the performance with each of our controllers. Because our controllers operate as an EC2 instance, they leverage that SSD. I wonder if you have any good customer stories that you can talk about as to what they can do different now using your solution in the cloud versus what they would be doing if they just own their storage on their own location. I guess one I like is the street. The street had their own data center. They had a pretty traditional VMware-based data center running, I think an EMC storage array. And the story they tell us is that they looked at their maintenance renewal cost of that storage array, plus what they were spending to manage their data center and they realized they weren't just renewing that storage bill, they were actually buying into their own data center for the next three to five years. That was really the decision. So they were able to move to the cloud for less than what it would have cost them to renew the storage bill. So I think, you know, just the price performance trade-offs that companies are seeing. As we heard from Andy earlier today, just the flexibility to burst and not have to pay for all that capacity is pretty tremendous business benefit for customers. So share with us a little bit about your experience partner with Amazon. What's it like to work with them? So many people kind of look at the Amazon ecosystem and say how much do they listen to you? Andy Jassy said that it's not a winter take-all. That their partners are going to be able to take their fair share. But what's your experience been working with Amazon? Especially the AWS Marketplace team, which is how we're going to market, been a great group to work with. They're very supportive. They definitely do listen and incorporate feedback as fast as they can given the development cycles and other priorities probably. But yeah, they're a great team to work with. It's a partnership for real because they're getting part of the revenue that we generate through the marketplace. So we're in it together. That's good. How about your go-to-market? Is it direct sales for if you work through a certain channel? Obviously the marketplace people can just go on and click it, but is that mostly how you're getting your business or how do you drive it? Well, we work with the AWS field. So we overlay as well. I like to think of it into the field. And then we also do demand generation. And we funnel all the leads or traffic from our site to our listings on the marketplace for conversion or e-commerce. So Rick, have you had a chance to look around the show? What's your vibe of the show? Have you been here previous years? It was here last year. What's your take on the show kind of last year versus this year? It just seems like it's a lot more energy, a lot more people of all different types and types of businesses. People that are on Amazon, people that are trying to figure it out still. They're relatively new to the platform. But it's definitely a lot more happening thing. It's pretty incredible. For me personally, there was a lot of energy last year but it's just bigger this year. Some of the people I've talked to work in the booth here as they said when people come, last night there was a lot of traffic. Today, I think a lot of people are in sessions for the most part. But the people that show up are they're pre-qualified. Not they're just coming and saying is that been your experience? It is. The thing that amazes me is just the size companies and the brands. We're seeing, I believe, the mainstream adoption of the tornado kicking in here for the cloud. We're seeing companies of all sizes but brands that everybody's heard of are all moving to the cloud now. I'm curious. We've had a few more companies that are jumping on the ecosystem here and in storage space Zadara's been in for a while but NetApp is kind of a big move with the cloud on tap. Is that something that has impacted your business, something you're seeing in the marketplace yet? NetApp just announced and just posted their product today. So yeah, it just started. Hey, we have a lot of respect for Zadara and certainly NetApp. I mean, you have great company, great product technology. We just say, hey, welcome. Customer choice is a great thing. Welcome to our world. We've been here for a year and we think that NetApp showing up here is great. I mean, it validates the market for us and the rising tide of the cloud's going to float all boats so we're happy about it. Rick, I want to give you the opportunity. What are you guys showing off at the show? Do you have any recent announcements that you can share with our audience? We announced actually support for scale-out Docker so there's an increased example, Docker container type platform so we, I think, are one of the first storage vendors to embrace Docker and enable scale-out Docker capabilities so that's one new thing. We also have a new Express Edition so it's a really less expensive version, one terabyte ceiling on storage but it's very, very affordable from like 18 cents an hour and we've improved our high availability capabilities and just a number of improvements overall with the 3.2 product release. Rick, you have me at Docker. Can you talk a little bit more about this scale-out capabilities with Docker? I actually was talking to the cluster HQ guys earlier today with their Flocker initiative so storage is one of those things that we feel needs to be worked on a little bit for Docker so what's your experience been so far? Tell me a little bit about what customers are asking you for. We see a lot of customers interested in Docker and a lot of developers and of course it's great when you're in development but ultimately that's going to probably get put in production so we think that getting involved with Docker during the development cycle what we found is our infrastructure like a database like I said earlier gets designed into the IT stack so we want to make sure that we're involved early with the development teams and we have a free micro instance so developers can use our product for free but then ultimately our goal is to get into production obviously with the Docker apps as they go to production and in order to scale Docker out chances are if you've got files or data especially in video there's PHP, all kinds of files you're going to need to store it somewhere so shared storage is not going to go away it's going to just continue to grow in the cloud like it has on-premise. I'm curious do you see a point or are you going to be able to move your instances between different solutions that you offer because for Docker today I can move the application but I'm not usually bringing my data with it. We can, we actually are cross-platform we have a feature called Snap Replicate we can replicate between any platform to any platform so we have customers that will migrate data from on-premise into the cloud for example using our Snap Replicate capabilities Alright, Rick, last question I have for you is what's the coolest thing you've seen here at the show or anything customers have asked you about that really caught your eye so far? I've been so busy I haven't actually had time to walk the show for but there's a lot of cool stuff here just glancing around good question I'm not sure what's the most cool thing I think the most cool thing honestly is the new Amazon Echo that's not here at the show I'm shocked I've not seen one of those in the booth that would be the raffle that everyone would sign up I'm Braddy, president and CEO of Soft NAS thank you so much for coming glad to have you on as a CUBE alum now look forward to watching your progress along with the Amazon ecosystem this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org we will continue with wall-to-wall coverage from Amazon ReInvent 2014 right after the break