 Winston Edmonton here with Studio B, IBM Edge 2013. I've got Stan Waisaki with Mark III Systems. Stan, I understand that you were recognized by IBM today. Yeah absolutely, we got a choice reward for the work that we've been doing in the pure space and it's really nice to be recognized in front of all of your peers. That is impressive, that really is. Now I was just down where they have the pure setup. Yeah. A lot of customers over there. Oh absolutely. So tell me a little bit about what you do. So you know we're a regional business partner. We're based in Houston, Texas and you know we service Houston, Austin, San Antonio. We've been in pretty much an IBM only partner for 18 years so we have a very large customer base and with pure I think you know there's a lot of partners here that deserve this award. There's a lot of people doing great things in pure. I think one thing that separates us, a couple things that separate us is we've had some early success. So we closed quite a few large deals last year which is nice and we've also closed several competitive deals competing against UCS, HP takeouts and so forth and we focused mainly more on the BladeCenter 2.0 kind of message right which is follow on to the BladeCenter and selling the value of a product at the beginning of the life cycle. Massive IO capabilities to handle different changes in IT paradigms and the message that we're delivering to our customers and our prospects is working. So one of the other things that we've been doing is we've been freely sharing how we're selling it to the rest of the pure team and you know I mean from my perspective if IBM increases their market share in pure it's going to help me sell in my territory. Well tell me about that because you've got a lot of organizations that understand they need to make some changes but they drag their feet you know they try to hold off as long as they can sometimes longer than they really should. What is the message that you're giving that is helping them understand the value of you know jumping in and getting this done now? Well I mean I think you said the exact thing so people like to hold on to their technology right but if you hold on to a server right or even a blade for five six years at the end of that life cycle it's not doing nearly what you need right it's it's it's slow your your workloads have changed from when you bought it and that is the exact value that we're selling with pure that you can buy it today and have the same infrastructure ten years down the road and who knows what you're going to be doing ten years from now and it has enough horsepower and flexibility to handle whatever you're doing for ten years so that's a that's a that's a really strong message that I think was missing from IBM's initial message that they were sending out. It's it's investing in their it's not investing in their now it's investing in their future. Absolutely. Interesting now you've been a partner for 18 years very impressive what excites you as far as IBM the future and the trends that you see what what are you excited about? You know what seems like for the last ten years or so every year I say you know it's never been better to be an IBM business partner and and I can absolutely say that today you know we have a being IBM only you know we have fewer tools in our toolkit to go to our customers right so what we do is we take the best that IBM has to offer at any given point in time and we bundle those into good solutions so that we can sell value to our customers right now we can sell XIV we can sell real-time compression we can sell pure systems other there's sand volume controller for storage virtualization there's so many great products that the competition can't touch and so so we we keep ourselves busy with just what we have you know on the plate right now and and it's working give me some case studies you know we've got folks that watch and sometimes for some reason they just don't think that what we're talking about applies to them sure give me some case studies and I think sometimes when people hear that they realize you know what that I fit that mold I could I could I could take advantage of that absolutely so so yesterday up on stage I had a customer with me from the Rowan companies their their base in Houston they they have 30 some odd oil rigs throughout the world right they're an HP shop with Cisco for their core network and Cisco was pushing UCS very hard and they needed to refresh their data center but they hadn't yet invested in Nexus right so so the solution for UCS involved of a massive upgrade to their core infrastructure and they were hesitant to do that additionally it would require EMC storage they already had some but they would have had to upgrade it and that was a another major change for them right so we came in with a with a pure solution in XIV and the XIV sold itself the easiest product to manage I mean he even says you know it feels like we have a full-time equivalent employee living inside of it that just takes care of it for him you know but but we were able to come in with a much simpler solution that that does everything that they need they didn't need to upgrade their core and then we also bundled SystemX servers and some DS3 500 storage for their oil rigs so the other thing that he said was very important to them was a single vendor solution right who do I go to for support yeah well UCS couldn't do that right there they're a they're a Cisco EMC solution and then you know on their oil rigs where they just needed a server or two what option do they have another UCS out there that was overkill times 34 oil rigs so we had an outstanding solution and I think if people take a step back look at their environment and look at the actual value that you get out of flex systems versus the the marketing glitz that IBM kind of tends to tends to push they'll see that it's a good fit and I'm still blown away by the 18-year relationship you have with IBM but tell me about 2013 IBM Edge how do you how do you compare this event with last year's event oh wow it's it's it's doubled in size right so last year was was storage only right I think it's very natural for them to include the pure and in the cloud in the overall message because it goes hand in hand I like the fact that not all of the speakers are IBMers that they're bringing under industry analysts I enjoy the I enjoy when they bring customers up on stage to to talk about the value that they get because like I said the value that a customer get doesn't necessarily match the message that IBM selling right so and and we have a bunch of our customers here as well so that already have a bunch of these IBM products right but you know they see how other customers are using triggers their imagination and you know and we're already having conversations about what we're going to sell them next that's great so the folks that are listening and now they understand that yeah this is applicable how can they get in touch with you what's the best way to to learn more about what you do oh thank you thank you for that yeah get us on the web mark III sys.com our website we're going to kind of going through a major redo so what you see tomorrow may not be what you what you see today but it's it's it's got our contact information we also have a toll-free number 888 MARK III it's not 1-1-1 because that gets you a bad company but mark III 888 MARK III perfect very good appreciate you coming out Winston thank you very much Winston Edmonton Studio be shining out