 This is theCUBE, siliconangle.com, siliconangle.tv's flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. NAB is disrupting media business and storage is one of the hot topics being discussed about among other things. I'm joined, I'm John Furrier, the founder of Siliconangle.com. I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and John. We have a longtime CUBE guest, the CUBE alum, Tom Joyce, who's the VP of marketing and strategy and operations for HB Storage. Tom, welcome back. Thank you. We were talking at the top of the segment here about how the media and entertainment business, it's a different animal for the storage industry, you know? I mean, it's not like your banking and your insurance and so we're going to talk about that a little bit. Well, I mean, the storage world here in the broadcast and the film business is interesting because on the front end, they got to be sexy, appealing and relevant. And like financial services, it's the same thing, but they actually have to do transactions and make money, so storage is primary. But you know, the broadcast is, their IT environments are lame. You know, that's my word, I'm saying that, but you're running tape, they're running old disks because they didn't have to, they just had to store it and get it whenever. You know, it's an interesting thing. It's an interesting experience because I think you kind of see two kinds of customers. It's almost like there's two complete camps. One is very sexy front end and really archaic storage technology in the back end. And then you have some folks that are really pushing the envelope to the extent that we have folks in this industry that are doing things, or we're doing things three years ago that we're just now starting to roll out in the financial community and call big data. You know, a lot of that technology that is hot in the general purpose IT market, DreamWorks and folks like that, we're using three, four years ago. They didn't call it that, but that's, it's really kind of- It was big data. It's always been big data. Right, exactly. It doesn't get much bigger than this, right? No, it doesn't. And you know, they push the envelope on file sizes, on performance, on expectations and on ease of use. Because you've got to build it in such a way that people that maybe are not expert in kind of classic enterprise storage can implement this stuff and use it. So from my standpoint, it's kind of a crucible for figuring out a lot of the things that we're going to do in a general purpose storage market next. So I mean, obviously we've covered HP for a long time and three parts exploding. We've documented that really well. What's the difference here? Talk about that a little bit, you know, Tom, you've got long history in the storage industry, strong background. What do you see is different in this industry and how does HP sort of go to market in this space? Well, I think, you know, as John said, there are some things that are very much like what we want to do in the rest of the industry, but there are some things that are different. You still see an awful lot of interest in modular storage. So whereas in the general purpose IT business, you'll see folks want to consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. Here, you have a lot less predictability on how you're going to grow. So you see a lot of modular. So we tend to see, you know, very sophisticated file system implementations with a whole lot of MSA storage behind it. You know, cheap blocks that just work. Now, we're starting to see some of those folks say, look, I've got 50 of these, I want to consolidate it down to one three part and things like that. But you tend to see approaches that are a little different because of the lack of predictability that they've got in their business. The other thing you see is, you know, we've had a long history of tape here and we're seeing tape grow in this business in a way that it's, you know, it's not growing in other parts of the market just because of the sheer cost of keeping everything. So I think in a prior segment, you were talking about solid state disc. That's obviously an area that we're, we're investing a ton of money. It is the wave of the future and kind of every industry we talk about. But in this industry, you see kind of combinations of a lot of solid state on the front end and a lot of tape on the back end. And so they're trying to get a mix of cost and capacity and performance. That is, you know, we might see that show up in some of the enterprise stuff or the cloud stuff a couple of years from now where, hey, I'm not going to have maybe as much spinning disc and a lot of flash and a lot of solid state. And maybe I'm going to have a lot of really, really cheap back end storage. And you talk about file systems and tape. Two things that drag along a lot of processes with them that have been around for a long time and people just don't want to rip and replace those. Do they? Well, you know, I think that's the other key thing is if you think about this industry, they have processes or as they call them workflows for whether it's file editing or play out. And you know, the tricky part is if you're going to do this properly and you do it at the scale that we're trying to do it at, you can't go change their process. You can't go change their workflow. We've got to adapt our products to their workflow and learn how to behave in their world. So how about cloud? I mean, the enterprise is pretty clear. You know, everybody's trying to catch up to cloud service providers, be more Amazon-like, swipe the credit card sort of thing. And so your answer, the industry's answer, okay, private cloud, we're going to help you get there. And there's been a lot of success stories there. What about cloud and media and entertainment? What's the angle there? You know, I think it is still emerging. There are places where we're seeing an awful lot of interest. You know, the kinds of clouds that, and again, I'm not deeply expert in some areas of this industry for sure, but a lot of the things that we see are different kinds of clouds. So we'll see the need to actually put large amounts of video data in certain geographical places so that it can be distributed. And the cost of distributing, you know, whether it's news or whether it's entertainment, the amount of data that needs to be moved from place to place is large. So the ability to put kind of regional clouds that allow you to kind of stop that data in the North, upper Midwestern market, the Northeast market, other parts of the world is something that we're seeing start to emerge. So in that particular case, you know, it's a different set of use cases and it's all about how do we distribute the data to the right place, you know, with the efficiency that we need so it's going to be sitting there when it's required. So maybe we could talk a little bit outside the meeting at Detainment Business, John, if it's okay for a minute, just because Tom, we had you on at the Project Voyager announcement. You guys had this big channel push. It was your partner conference. You went basically all new logos or service through the channel. Give us an update on that. How's that going? Is a big channel land grab going on in the industry? HP's trying to get its fair share. Give us an update. Yeah, you know, that went over extraordinarily well. It probably went over as well as anything that we've done and we're actually in the process of expanding that pretty significantly. I think if there's one thing that we have to get right, it's the relationship with the channel partners. And you know, as you said, it's a very competitive market out there right now for channel partners. And so we've had to basically say, look, we're going to make long-term commitments and things like saying, whole product lines, whole product categories are going to be channel exclusive. And I think that we've actually seen some other players that we compete against and start to respond to that just over the last couple of weeks. So that tells you, when the other big players say, oh, maybe we ought to do that too, you know, you hit it on the head. So that's been a very significant win for us. The other big trend that we've been tracking on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE is this notion of convergence where you're bringing together compute and networking and of course storage. And HP coined the term really, I mean, I coined it, but you certainly marketed it and maybe did coin it, converged infrastructure. Everybody's kind of using that term now. Tom, again, you've been in a variety of different companies. You were at EMC and it was a culture where you're very focused on the storage business only, but now the pendulum seems to be swinging back to that converged infrastructure. Talk about that a little bit and why is that, what you're seeing and what's HP bringing to the party? Well, you know, I think it's interesting. I think what we're seeing is that most of the customers we deal with want to have a couple of different kinds of converged infrastructure. They want to be able to buy all the parts integrated, fully, you know, as close to one SKU, one order as possible. And they also want to not have to do that, right? They also want to be able to say, I want to be able to pick and I want it to be seamless. So I think it comes down to trying to, you know, accomplish those things, you know, fluidly without a lot of confusion. And that's what we've been doing with things like cloud system where you can buy it effectively as a product. You can also buy as a reference architecture. I think what's happening now is, you know, we're starting to push out into some other particular markets and this one is one. So if you take, you know, the digital TV play out application or workflow as an example, you know, up until now you would have had to basically, if you were building that system as a customer, assemble parts from a variety of different vendors. And so what we're trying to do now is give you a converged infrastructure solution that's server network storage, software. Some of it's autonomy software, some of it's partner software is fully integrated and allows you to go almost turnkey it. And we're doing that in file editing. We're doing it in about five different parts of the workflow that customers in this space need. So, and I think that last point is a key one. Now it's not just infrastructure, it's also software. So now that we've got autonomy on board, it gives us an ability to say, you know, we're going to take that one more step into the software part of that infrastructure. I want to make sure I understand, as you're saying the convergence trend is hitting the media and entertainment business, but maybe for different reasons than the traditional commercial world is a lot of, you know, supporting cloud infrastructure. What are the drivers here? Well, I think the drivers here, again, if you look in the rack of a digital TV