 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re-invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney, host of theCUBE, Amazon Web Services. 52,000 people here at their event re-invent, annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, compute, networking, part of the main infrastructure is evolving, changing very rapidly, spawning new use cases, new value propositions. It's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Eric Culver, who's the vice president of Infinidat, CUBE alumni, great to see you again. Nice to see you as well. Been on theCUBE multiple times. I think last time was at VMworld or in studio. And actually our product launch for the cloud storage solution as well. So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just for the folks that might not know Infinidat to explain what you guys do and your disruptive innovation. So, for Infinidat, we're all about tier one environments. And it's the data piece of that environment today, although that may not be forever. And it's consumed through a couple of different modalities. So, one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the Infinibox solution, which we've shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today. And broadening that to address the secondary storage market with Infinigard and Nutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an IaaS service in conjunction with other public clouds. Let's get to that in a second. I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions. Cloud storage is seeing pure storage had a big announcement of they no longer have a device now doing software in premise. Amazon is going to have a device on premise. They have software in the cloud. Like what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? How's the APIs, microservices? These are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity. There's still a challenge. You guys from the center, what's the market look like for you? Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data's at the middle of everything and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes or primarily sell boxes today are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments. And they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds. And the other is to build alongside and enable those major public clouds and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry with regards to public cloud. What's the role of storage here at re-invent? Because like I said, only trinity is of infrastructure is compute storage and networking. And as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with cloudified is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows and get things done quicker. We use less PhD type resources to get a problem solved. So, I think that category of solutions where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value or more value in the end application is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? Well, I think in general, if you look at the adoption patterns of their block file and object storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there outside of the traditional cloud native object architectures in the block and file arena which has largely been untapped by the native storage services and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. What is competition? What's like NetApp doing? I mean, obviously everyone's got to be on multiple clouds. Amazon clearly the leader. They're making the market. So unless a Kubernetes just intermediates their services, for the most part, that's the market leader. But you got to play in a lot of clouds because customers aren't going to have one cloud. They're going to be certainly hybrid on premise in the cloud, but certainly maybe multiple clouds. What's like NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? So what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest. What I see is they've got tight integration which is very impressive with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is when you want to cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. Like what? So you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure, let's say. If you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. New tricks, cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. So at a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility at Infinidad and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio. But specifically with regards to cloud storage, new tricks delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS of course. And it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA which we've talked about which we believe is best in class as well as enterprise grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve large scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. And what's the core problem that you solve with this product? It's you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities and even business guarantees, provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last let's say 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So that's what we're addressing, making it easier for a storage to accomplish that. You guys always have impressive customers always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. So our customers have fallen into two categories with regards to NutriX Cloud Adoption. The easy case and the most natural for many of them since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure in large scale today is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the NutriX Cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster recovery type target, things like that. And we think that there's value there, there's lots of companies which do DR as a service to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications and bringing in the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. We talked to all the cloud guys, so I'm going to put you on the spot here because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block file, all that good stuff. Now with the cloud and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie in with you guys is because storage is not necessarily just a magic quadrant like thing. Oh, backup and recovery, this and that. You start to see much more of a platform approach and successful platforms enable things to be successful. So it's not like I built it for this, purpose built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform and if so, what does that mean and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? I think you said it actually better than I did that ultimately we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a backup optimized environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all of those today and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single kind of data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. So are you looking at kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat and one of the things that I'm thinking of is how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, utilize it across multiple environments? So many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily and how ultimately they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the NutriX Cloud service. So we can have clients up and running in less than a day from initial contact to large scale adoption and it can be even faster than that as well. There's a lot of your relationship with Amazon. What's it like? What's the details of it? What's the values? What's the connection point? I think we all agree that Tier 1 applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure and so to the extent that NutriX Cloud enables those Tier 1 applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship. So we are absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them. There are certainly areas where we overlap but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strides. So who are your competitors that you're most kind of focused on? Like you, well you shouldn't be focused on your competitors. You should be focused on what you're doing but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? I would say others that people would lump in this space include NetApp solutions in the public cloud environments. We see a couple of small startups like Zodara for example from time to time but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services and customers have to think about, well I'm planning on re-platforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective? And often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environment. So that's when we come into the conversation and from that point forward generally if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. You know when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Dave and I always talk about Infinidat, you got a good pedigree in the team. Classic storage, you go up to the storage market, you guys take a different approach with this startup founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, as you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce? What's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidat, what are they buying? What are they really getting besides the product performance? What's the culture like? What's the company's view on the future world? Let's share some insight. I think there's several elements to that of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So Moshe and I who basically define the enterprise storage category overall back at EMC had a succession of teams that he's built over the years and he's really brought all of those key elements together, three generations of storage expertise. Successful by the way, three generations of exits. Absolutely, yeah, I'm building an organic business, selling a business and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some level. How's it going so far? How's business in general? Well, you know, we're private so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal. The adoption of our portfolio solutions in addition to just the core product has really put us on a position of very strong long-term independence. Portfolio in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving or both? It actually on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general into a lot of different use cases because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So that's, we go where the data is. What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What are you looking to do next? Well, we did just have a major product release so I'm glad that we've got that out there. We're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements and ultimately, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. All right, Eric, thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing the insights and the update. It's been a dead check of mouth. Successful exits, multiple times from the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great. Storage isn't going away. Either it's networking, either it's compute, it's only going to get better and stronger. As the cloud brings in more capability with machine learning and more use cases, new workloads, new capabilities, theCUBE bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.