 Okay, we're back here inside the CUBE SiliconANGLE.tv's exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. We're here with Scott Generow, a longtime friend and CUBE alum. Last saw you at NAB. Welcome back to the CUBE. Great to see you. Always a pleasure. And HP Discover, we can't get enough of these events, I guess. But it's good, it's a good show. All the customers are here. So tell us, NAB, different type of vibe, right? This is really the enterprise customer, kind of your sweet spot, right? What's going on here at the show for you? No, it's actually a good show for us. We are part of HP's cloud agile program and as part of that, we partner with HP to provide our solution with HP technology underneath it. So kind of the MSA servers, those types of functionality networking switches. For a total solution for enterprise cloud customers. So how's that work with cloud agile? I mean, I'm familiar with the program because I remember it back when 3PAR launched, it was a great marketing program, now they've extended it in HP. Where do you fit in that? Well, I think the key is, is that, I mean if you listen to, and I've sat and listened to Dave Scott and Tom Joyce and the guys who run the business unit for storage and there's clearly a spot that they're very focused in on, right? It's that 3PAR space, the data deduplication products they have. You know, but there's clearly areas and you'll call it outside in that white space area that they don't have solutions for, to be frank. I'm not sure if they really are focused on it today, right? And I think in the cloud agile program, what we do is that we fill that void for them, for enterprise tier three, tier four type data in the enterprise space for cloud. Okay, so we're here at HP and I have to say, so it's been interesting to listen to, so they have the converge cloud, we talk about that a lot and they've got a public cloud component of that and I'm hearing a dissonance in that, you know, we've talked about this a lot, Scott. I mean one of the value propositions that you bring to the table is, if I want better SLAs than I can get from the public cloud, let's say for instance from Amazon and Amazon's great, love Amazon, great innovations, but you know, they are what they are. These are the terms, if you don't like it, you can email us and we might respond, but good luck. So you guys are trying to fill that void for enterprises and I think you've done a good job there. HP is really talking a lot about OpenStack in its public cloud, so they're using Swift as an object store, which is really, in my mind, somewhat lower end than S3. But so the dissonance I see is HP's enterprise customer trying to provide better SLAs than S3, but then OpenStack might not be ready for primetime. I don't think it's ready for primetime, we've written that. So what's your take on all that? What do you see as shaking up? Am I getting it right in terms of where you fit in the whole spectrum? Yeah, I think so. There's always marketing reality about it all and I really believe that when you look at people who are using Swift technology today, it's just not enterprise ready. That doesn't mean by the way you can't use that technology for development, lower end, not a lot of functionality type environments. There's always a space for that. I mean the data space is a huge space, right? So there is a space for that. We kind of look at the Swift technology a lot of times and say it's more of commercial, more than enterprise. It's individuals using it, putting data out there. SLAs actually tend to probably be less, but some of that's how you support it and what you do. We all know Amazon doesn't do a lot of support. It's all go to the website and go see A, B, and C. So maybe, I don't know, maybe HP's going to do more around support that's going to make that a little more SLA friendly compared to how Amazon does it. But from a technology point of view, Swift technology today doesn't have a lot of features and function capabilities that an enterprise, large enterprise customer would use it for like what we have. So it still has a long way to go. And as I've always said, it's something we watch, it's something we look at. If you believe, there's a reason why, by the way, when you look at it today, all the major vendors have partnerships with us. They all say they have cloud offerings and they all have partners with us. And there has to be a reason why. And the reason why, obviously, is there's things that we do or the capabilities that we do today that they just don't have somewhere else and we're filling the gap. So you used to sell Big Iron, very successful career doing that. When you go and sell today, are those Big Iron companies even bidding on this stuff? Well, it's actually interesting. People ask me all the time, who's our competition? We don't lose against other cloud companies. We very rarely see Amazon in the Fortune 500. Very rarely. It doesn't mean someone might not bring up their name, but if they're lucky to get a phone call back, and I joke about that, but I got to tell you, I've heard that a lot from customers. They, we don't seem a lot. People ask me about Google and they ask me about Microsoft. Well, Google and Microsoft are really focused on trying to drive their apps into the cloud. It's not really what we do. Once again, very different. So we typically are competing against box vendors, trying to buy traditional boxes. And so in that scenario, it's really interesting. The company we probably compete with the most is EMC, which is not unusual because of their install base and what they do. The company that's probably getting hurt the most in sense of the data that we're taking out of the install base is NetApp. So I've been talking about OpenStack for a long time and following it since this really started with Rackspace and it's always been clear that they've always wanted the developer and the developer has been a target. So it's clear that HP is essentially, I wouldn't say dissing the enterprise, but they're not really enterprise ready. It's public cloud. However, I've also been saying, and talking to other folks who have started like Loud Cloud and other companies in the past, this platform as a service, infrastructure as a service is a race to zero. And so there's really always been those two schools of thoughts, race to zero kind of the hosting model and then the differentiation with software SLA. So you have that dynamic. And we've debated it and it's been no contest really. Everyone acknowledges that if you're going in and doing just basic stuff, it's a race to zero. If you come in and add value with like software on top of it, it's something a little bit different. So I think what they're doing here is with Swift is obviously saying, hey, we really care more about the developer and not really pushing any real features. So I think that's why you guys are at the table with HP but I wanted to ask you, given that this race to zero value conversation, the differentiation, how do you guys approach that? Because obviously you have successful deployments in the petabyte scale, it's not a race to zero. You have to be bulletproof. You got to have the value. Yeah, you know, it's funny. And there's kind of table stake value, we call it. And then there's true, true value. And you know, some of the table stakes is just a mere fact that you can use deduplication into the cloud. You can encrypt into the cloud. We just, we're competing today in a transaction against Isilon. There's no encryption. There's no encryption capability in some of those products. If you really want to basically put data into the cloud, encryption is table stakes. You got to be able to encrypt. You'd be shocked how many storage, traditional storage products don't have encryption. They got to go buy a third party product to go do it, which is really expensive. So there's a lot of basic stuff you just got to have built in to be able to do that. I personally think what you're going to see, and by the way, let's be fair, this is a big space. I mean, I tell people all the time, people just go, oh my God, how are you going to compete against the big gorilla Amazon? Well, when I was at Atachi, we said, how are you ever going to compete against IBM? How are you ever going to compete against EMC when EMC became EMC? I mean, geez, NetApp, we used to joke that NetApp was a little company until they overtook us as a company, and we were a big company. So, and that's not even talking about the three parts, the components. So there's a lot of room here for different competitors, but to your point, I think it's exactly that. What's your value proposition, right? We truly believe that in the next 18 to 24 months, you're going to see more and more companies do data analytics in the cloud. There's a lot of data analytics, there's a lot of big data conversations, but a lot of that's still being done on a customer's floor. It's really not being done in a cloud per se. Transcoding, we get a lot of customers asking for that. We have that capability today. A lot of the rich media companies like to use it. So, more and more, I think, as comfortable customers get more comfortable about putting their data in the cloud and security, you're going to see, once you own that data, the functionality and services above and beyond that you can offer for that are going to be pretty big. But you're winning some big deals. Eight petabytes of USC, I've talked to them. I've talked to Cerner, I think they were doing two petabytes. And NBC has got three petabytes. So, you're winning some big deals and you're saying you're displacing NetApp, so it's file-based services. And you're running into Atmos at EMC? Well, that's kind of an interesting question. I mean, EMC's solutions are all over the place and they've got some great technology. It's just dispersed technology that doesn't communicate with each other. They've bought a lot of companies that don't talk. So, right now, their flavor of the month is they pitch everything is ice long. And they say ice line has a global namespace. Well, ice line has a global namespace within a cluster. That's not what we talk about when we talk about global namespace. What do you mean by that? Talk about what's different. Yeah, global names, I mean, right now, if you're anywhere in the world and you can put your data anywhere in the world into our cloud and you can access it anywhere in the world in the cloud, right? You know, in a ice line type product, you know, they're global namespace so when you can access it, it's all within a cluster. And a cluster tends to be in a data center. You can do that within a data center. You can't go across the world. Yeah, exactly. It's very different, right? And so, there's a lot of these terms that people use, you know, interchangeably, and they're not actually the same how people implement them and what they do. So, very, very different. But I will tell you, I mean, we haven't publicly announced it yet, but we actually have one of very, very large customer that makes USC, which is almost nine petabytes small. And we expect that customer to grow initially from 10 petabytes, probably close to 30 or 40 in the next 12 to 24 months. So, you know, and these are big name companies. So, more and more customers are looking at doing it. A lot of it has to do with the fact that in addition to our functionality and our SLAs and our capabilities that we've built into it, the other thing that's really in there though is, and I think you can't diminish this and people are starting to separate this, the mere fact that we do public and hybrids and privates, and it's the same file system for all of it, meaning that you can communicate by putting something on a customer's floor and burst it out to the public cloud. And because we manage the whole thing, we manage SLAs, there's no finger pointing, we make sure that it all communicates, it's all on the same maintenance levels, tech refresh, all that stuff we do and manage, is very, very important because customers want to do both. They want to put something on a customer's floor and they want to be of the capability of public capability. And a lot of the box vendors are, you know, saying, oh, we've got a public cloud, but I don't have a hybrid or a private solution. So then the question is, so what do you do? So you've basically created another island of cloud, that doesn't work. Or what you have is the opposite, which is okay, I can do private and hybrids, but I don't have a public cloud or I do, you can use one of my partners, but then how do you control as a customer, there's another body involved, it becomes complex, that's not what customers want, they want someone to manage this, deal with it and guarantee me SLAs and go do it. So you can drop your node into a private cloud situation. So Stu was just at Supernap and saw one of your nodes there. What's going on with those guys? Yeah, so we just opened up Supernap, we're real excited about that relationship. If you've never been there, it's one of the most impressive locations ever. Of course, when I first walked in and, you know, they had, I think, one of the guys that was an armed guard, I was like, geez, what's in here at Fort Knox? But there's a lot of big companies in there, it's a who's who's list, it's really a state of the art location and the great thing about them for us is a lot of those companies now are wanting to just cross-connect into our location from that location, right? So imagine, you know, you talk about latency issues, the latency issues go away because basically it's a, you know, it's a dedicated link directly into our cloud from those locations. You guys are doing well, congratulations. The notable deals Dave mentioned. Also, you guys just raised $25 million in fresh, fat financing and you're growing from coastal ventures, right? So Vanode Coastal, who was that son? And some people on Silicon Valley where I live are saying that what he said is that if sun was around today, it'd look like nirvanics. I mean, what do you think about that? Is he, did he get it right? I mean, is that how you look at it too? Sun's very successful. No, they are, they are. And, you know, I think the early days of sun, you know, they were very, there's one thing you guys say about sun is they had a lot of interesting technology, right? I mean, they were very innovative of what they did. And I think that's how come they grew so fast of what they did. But if you go back and look at some of the histories, I mean, NFS, you know, was really kind of a sun creation. You know, if you look at trying to create a global file system back then, that was on sun's roadmap to go do that kind of stuff. Think clients, right? You know, it was another idea that sun, you know, was really ahead of the curve on right there. And cloud, the network is the computer. Well, you're right. So you kind of look at that and go back, you know, 10 years of what they were talking about. That realization now does look a lot more like today and they never got there. So there's no question, the analogy of saying, hey, you know, be interesting if they were creating a company today, you know, some of the technology that we're using, and to be fair, maybe some of the stuff people are doing in cloud compute would look a lot more like that as a company. So I don't disagree. I think you guys are focusing on a good area around the enterprise with the SLAs continue to do that. My question is, who else is operating at this kind of petabyte scale? Because I was at an event and I asked some salespeople from a big partner, probably a partner of yours, how many customers are doing cloud storage? And not a lot of hands went up in the air. So like you said, it's a big market. They're probably not talking to the right customers. And by the way, they didn't even know what DevOps was. So again, you have kind of a new classic customer. Can you talk about that? One, that dynamic of new classic customer and two, the scale level. I mean, you don't hear a lot of that petabyte scale. Is there a lot of other people doing that? Yeah, actually there really isn't. You know, it's funny, I go to a lot of shows and I get to go in and watch people present and you know, it's the one customer or you look at and go, okay, that's a great customer but it's not an impressive logo across the board and they use it every time they present and talk about. One of the things that I drive our team on very aggressively is every quarter to announce a new group of people using our technology. And it's part of our contract. We want to get it out there. We want to talk about it and we want to drive that. Because we want the industry to know that there are a lot of companies out there that have hundreds of terabytes and petabytes of data in the cloud. Our focus right now when you look at our development schedule it's not what do we need to build to go support a hundred terabyte or petabyte customers. We're now focused heavily on what do we have to do to support exabyte customers because that's where we think it'll go in the next three to four years is that that's the kind of data that you need to be able to scale to, drive to and the business issues of managing data like that is radically different. And I think I said this once before, if you ask IBM why they did an OEM agreement with us? Yeah, they loved our technology. They loved all the stuff we talk about, our global namespace, our data consistencies. But one of the things they also said was when we went out and looked at everybody we couldn't find anybody that had the scale of customers the large customers that you have. And one of the values we saw was you guys are thinking about things on your roadmap in technology and developing that other customers haven't even thought or other companies haven't even thought about because their customers' largest ones are 10, 20, 30 terabytes. And I think that's one of the values we have as a company. It's our focus, it's what we want to drive to and I think we're having some success at it. What about some of the guys you used to sell big iron to Minimum? Obviously you haven't a lot of success. I mean, for instance, USC and CERNA, the interesting thing about them is they're IT shops that are basically becoming service providers and very fascinating there. Like I said, you sold a lot of big iron in your day to banks, insurance companies. Are those guys starting to look at cloud storage? Yeah, I think this will be the year in the next 12 months that you're going to see a lot of financial institutions go to the cloud. So will you be able to announce that or are they going to be the typical financial institutions you can announce? We will be able to announce some of that. Yeah, so I mean that would be, if you can get your foothold there, you know what that's like. I agree. You've lived that for a long time. Can't say much more about it, but I will tell you that the tipping point in that area I think is starting. I was in New York last week. I was in front of almost every major Wall Street bank. I'm back there next week. They're, the interest at that level is huge. It's huge. And I think once again, when you hear about some of the new wins that we'll roll out over the next quarter or two, you're going to see why it's huge. Yeah, we had that conversation earlier with HP here with Nunez who runs marketing and talks about the definition of what tiering means. New tier one. And I think that what you guys are doing is pushing the whole category of what another tier of option or storage is. That's still mission critical, not just some backup farm. No question about it. And the other thing too is, we're looking inside our cloud to even tier within the cloud. I mean, we're talking about looking at, is there ways to tier within the cloud of having a, you know, when we talk about high performance, I'm not talking about tier one in the cloud, but I'm talking about a higher performance cloud down to a very low performance cloud. And we have customers asking us for, keeping data in the cloud, it's almost, you know, cold. You're never going to access it maybe once in 10, 20 years, right? And the type of technology and what you want to do there is very different than what you would do for a traditional cloud for tier three, tier four. So you'll see us coming out with different tiers too. So John, Larry Ellison, of course, is on Twitter now. He's got 21,000 followers and he's not following anybody. 21,000 only? Yeah, he came on like today or something. But so he's literally has, he's not following anybody because he doesn't really give a crap about what anybody has to say, but he's got one tweet out there. Says, Oracle's got 100 plus enterprise applications live in the cloud today. And then he trashes SAP, SAP's got nothing but success factors. What do you make of the Oracle public cloud? Well, yeah, so once again, very different market than what we're doing. What they're doing obviously is very similar to what Microsoft's trying to do and Google's trying to do. Apps. It's apps, they want, you know, it's a salesforce.com play of, you know, there's a different way to buy our stuff. We'll manage it for you in a location and you're buying, you know, users and you don't have to put it on the floor. I think that's the marketplace to go. I mean, you know, a year ago, Larry thought it wasn't even a place to go, right? We all heard, you know, the jokes he said about cloud. And now he acts like he invented it. Yeah, you know, which is fine. We all want to reinvent sometimes. But the point is on this that I think is important is the fact that, you know, it's the right direction for what they want to do. They don't have a cloud, you know, kind of infrastructure storage as a service type cloud that we do. So we don't look at them as a real competitor in that space. And what they're very focused on and probably rightfully so is very transactional, you know, high performance transactional type stuff. So, which by the way, to be fair, you know, it goes back to the three-part discussion here. You know, where three-part has done a really good job and I shouldn't call it, is it still called three-part? Yeah. Yeah, where three-part has done a really good job is being attached to cloud compute, you know, for that transactional, you know, cloud compute application. They've super good themselves for that. Yeah, and by the way, it's a great product for that, right? But once again, that's not what we do. We go down into that tier three, tier four, where that type of solution is just too high performance, too expensive to do what we do. Well, I think Oracle, Microsoft, you mentioned, you know, big cloud place is great for you guys. Yeah. You know, Oracle's entering in the cloud. I mean, it helps legitimize it and it validates it. No question. People will say, okay, well, I need this object store. I need this, you know, place to go. There was proper hostory. And then they're going to see they don't have it. That's where you guys live. Well, one of the things we're starting to see a lot, which is kind of interesting is we're starting to see a lot of people do database dumps into our cloud. So even though you could argue that, you know, for what Oracle's focused on today, which is probably where they need to start focusing on because that's the right place. That's their sweet spot. But over time, you know, backing up databases into more of a traditional, what we do cloud is going to become more and more important. Well, and I think, you know, data is often, as you know, been viewed as this liability. You know, people are always saying, I get rid of the data. And now people are saying, well, wait a minute, maybe not get rid of it. Let's just put in the cloud somewhere because we might need it. Let's start analyzing it. What do you see as the big data opportunity in your space? Well, I mean, I think, but you brought up a good point. I mean, I think data, I think storage and cloud and it's gotten to a price point now where it just makes sense to keep everything, right? And then of course, everybody wants to do some sort of analytics or, you know, data mining or whatever you want to call it, you know, against that data. And I think that's important. I mean, you know, when I get on Yahoo or Google off on the right are the, you know, ads of me trying to buy something, which happens to be the stuff that I've been researching for the last week. You know, is that coincidental? No, they're data mining. They know exactly what I'm looking at and what I'm doing. And it's the same thing with all this commercial type data that customers want to do. Also lawsuits, I mean, data compliance issues, going back and doing that. But even banks, you know, what banks want to know is, how do they get more of your business, right? So if you have a bank account with these guys, why don't you have a mortgage and an auto loan and everything else? And the only way to do that is to look at this data, look at your patterns, who you're doing business with and go from there. You got to store that data somewhere. And the cloud's a great place to do that. So John mentioned the investment from Cozla Ventures. You know, I mean, obviously, if I say why Cozla, it's an obvious reason, but what are they bringing to the table for you guys? Are they bringing any new innovations and change for you in terms of the whole process? We're very, very, very excited that, you know, Cozla decided to invest in us. You know, we had, you know, multiple term sheets. You know, I went through it a lot. We did a pretty deep evaluation. Cozla's one of the top tier, you know, VCs in the world. So we're excited about having it. They're very much focused on technology. They're, you know, heavily focused on game-changing technologies, I'll tell you that. So we're pretty excited. We think they've really validated some of the stuff that we've been talking about and doing. You know, and the money what we're talking about is really focused in on, you know, investing more in our future technology. We're opening up a cloud competency center up in Boulder, Colorado. We looked at many locations. We chose Boulder to go do that. So we've already hired close to six to eight new, you know, solution architect engineers. Dave Barr, you know, who used to work for HP leads up that group. He's going to be, you know, continuing to hire for that. And then obviously we're going to continue to invest in sales and marketing and expand our business. But once again, very focused on where do we take this technology? Because we agree with the industry analysts and, you know, a lot of our OEM partners. We're probably anywhere from 18 to 24 months ahead of the competition. I just want to make sure in 18 to 24 months from now, we're still 18 to 24 months ahead of the competition. And I think, I think more importantly, I think you guys are a category creation opportunity, I think. So you're in a spot that's kind of interesting, right? You're, you have such great success in track record, but yet no real defined competition. Right. So to me, I think when you have these massive changes with big data, the economics are changing and use cases are changing. And I think you're driving that economics. So congratulations. Thank you. I mean, you know, we're here to build a business, right? You know, we're not here to do a quick turn. We're growing a business. We want to grow a business that's going to be big, focused in a space to go after that. And we think, you know, having Coastal is one of our investors is really going to allow us to go do that. Scott Jennero inside theCUBE again, theCUBE alumni, favorite guests always been on. Whenever we had theCUBE, we always didn't stop by any time as always. Great insight, game changing, opportunity to cloud storage, real enterprise cloud storage. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guests or a wrap up for the day. Dave and I will wrap up day two here at HP Discover right after the short break.