 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante in Silicon Angles, continuous coverage of EMC. We're back with Dave Cahill. We had to take a break to interview Sanjay Merchandani. And Dave, thanks for letting us call an audible there. We were talking about SolidFire, a unique focus on cloud service providers. You're the only all-flash array company focusing exclusively on cloud service providers. You were talking about how you're in beta, you're working it hard, you get a lot of good feedback. Bring us back to that and give us a quick update on that program. Yeah, so we are, like I said before, we're in early access with a select group of cloud provider customers. We'll continue to beat on the products with them over the course of the next few months. And then towards the end of the year, we'll go full GA to the broader market. You know, and market focus from our standpoint is large-scale, multi-tenant clouds. And where that's most prevalent today is public clouds, large-scale virtual private clouds and private cloud providers. Yeah, so we've seen a lot of action in this space, obviously, across the entire hierarchy. And we saw EMC, we're here at EMC World, they just made a big acquisition. I don't know how big, actually. There's a lot of rumors about the number. I had Rich Napolitano on earlier, the acquisition's going to be part of his group. And he said, we never announced the number. You don't know the number. I said I called 400. But the globe did. I called 400 the globe. The globe? That's not all the facts. Would they say 420? Was there a number? 430, yeah. 430, I had called 400. But I mean, you know, yeah, the market's frothy, but it's a huge market. It's got to be 20 plus billion of total available market. And you guys got to be excited about that. On the one hand, it's validation. On the other hand, it might be like, uh-oh, yeah, now we got to move. Yeah, you know, when you're at the intersection of flash and cloud, your life's noisy to begin with, right? And so, in some ways, EMC doesn't do us any favors by paying 430 million for extreme IO. But at the end of the day, it's an incredible validation of the opportunity. And the opportunity here isn't flash. EMC did not pay 430 million for flash. They paid for a next-gen architecture capable of scaling out on a new medium. And that's the difference. I mean, you can look at this market, and it is so noisy, and everyone's raising their hand and throwing IOps in a box and saying, I'm in business. But the trick is, you know, when you're architecting for scale, it's a totally different set of design constraints. And I think what you saw with EMC is they're so close to the flash market that they were able to see that, hey, you know what, we cannot retrofit an existing architecture into this problem. We need to go get our own. You know, extreme IO, slot it in. They grab it early enough. They can influence development. They can spread it across their lineup. I mean, I think it's a great move, but for us, it's an incredible validation of the challenge that we're trying to solve every day, which is scale out. Next-gen scale out storage systems with flashes of means to an end, but flash is just the beginning of the story. Otherwise, you're dead in this space. So you're saying that the EMC move to acquire extreme IO was an admission that the traditional controller-based architectures aren't going to cut it in this market space. And so they had that piece with the enterprise flash drives and they had a PCI, you know, cut out with VF Cash, and it was a big opportunity in between that they were missing. Well, I mean, you know, now they have a whole portfolio, right? They called it Baskin Robbins. You could take, you take VF Cash. You take Thunder, whenever it comes out. You take extreme IO, and then you take their legacy. And then you let, you know, the EMC sales force, as long as you position it accordingly, have at it. But the trick is, you know, when do those flavors start dripping into each other? Right? And as long as you segment them based on workload or customer set appropriately, that's fine. Is it the key, Dave, the software and the management capabilities around that infrastructure? I mean, that's, you know, listen, the flash is a commodity component of the architecture. You know, and to me, it is just the beginning of the innovation. You take this hardware without the ability to scale, without efficiency, without performance control, without complete automation. You can't drive the economics necessary to take this flash and, you know, let's go with two or three percent of the market today with super high performance IOPS. To open up the rest of that market, you need software. And you got to crack the code on the economics of efficiency, automation, performance control to open up that market much wider than just that two to three percent of the workloads that need screaming fast IOPS. You know, last year at VMworld, we talked to some of your early customers. And one of the things that we uncovered in those discussions was they're different from the traditional enterprise guys, right? They're thinking about running a business. We were just talking to Sanjay Merchandani about transforming IT, doing IT as a service. And I'll tell you, he's way ahead of the average IT shop. Most IT shops are just starting to think about this transformation. Whereas cloud service providers, that's their business. And so one of the things they said to us was, look, we're looking, we're interested in the capability that companies like SolidFire bring because we can add value on top of that or we can sell that value to our customers. So it's not a cost plus model. It's a, hey, this is something you need and you'll pay through the nose for because it's quality of service around applications. Is that bearing out to be true in your early beta trials? I mean, the cloud provider market is survival of the fittest, right? The biggest difference at the highest level is, you know, you've got guys, traditional enterprises where IT is a cost center. For this cloud service provider set, IT is a profit center, right? And these guys look at it in terms of quality of service, cost of service or breadth of service. And if they're not improving or differentiating relative to the gorillas in the space on, you know, quality of service, cost of service or breadth of service, then they're going to be out of business. And then that's the mandate that they have. And so it is totally about delivering a service to their end customers, not just turning a bunch of knobs to a captive user base, which is what traditional enterprise IT is about. Okay, so I'll give you the last word. You know, what's next? What should we be looking for from SolidFire over the next six months? Yeah, so from a SolidFire perspective, I think the most interesting thing for us is just heads down in development right now. So over the next six months, we're going to continue to push forward with the early access customers, let them prove out the solution and let them start to charge to market with their respective services. And also I think you're going to see the market develop as well, where cloud providers realize that it's not just about hosting data, they need to host applications, they need to compete on breadth of services relative to Amazon. And for that, that requires different mindsets and requires different architectures. You think we're going to see emerge this year a new definition of what was traditionally known as tier one storage, you know, the EMC VMAX, the IBM DS8000, HDS, I mean those guys are the only tier one players. You think we're going to see a new definition there that's around multi-tenant, around supporting horizontal applications across the portfolio? So I don't as much look at it in terms of tiers. I always break the market into either workloads or customer sets. And I think more than anything else, you're going to see this customer set continue to emerge that cares about large scale, multi-tenant cloud environments. Yeah, when I say tiering, I don't mean tiering. I confuse you with that. I mean the upper class versus module. Yeah, okay. All right, yeah, in that sense, I do think that yes, there is a new class of guys going at that performance tier. I mean that's another thing that EMC did with ExtremeIO is, you know, look at the profit pool that was at risk. Where is EMC, you know, that sim is flowering on market, right? It's a cheap hedge. End of the day, 430 million is nothing, relative to the opportunity there. All right, Dave Cahill, hey, thanks very much. Great to see you, man. All right, as always. Have a good trip back. Keep it right there, we'll be right back.