 Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit 2016. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in Santa Clara, California at the AWS Summit, Santa Clara, 4,000 people milling around to get the latest and greatest on Amazon. And even more than AWS, really the ecosystem is really well-represented. Trific keynote by Dr. Matt Wood this morning. It's just really reinforcing the relentless pace of innovation that Amazon just keeps moving the ball down the field. They don't waste a lot of time. They just keep innovating, innovating, innovating. And they've really changed the game because of that relentless pace of innovation that everybody sees in the retail side at Amazon the store and Amazon the retailer, but really at AWS on the enterprise infrastructure space. It is relentless. So we're excited to be back here. Lisa Martin, great to be sitting with you again, our latest QPost, really glad to have her on board. And our next guest, we'll jump into it, Nelson Nahum, the co-founder and CEO of Zadara Storage. Welcome back. Thank you, how are you? Absolutely terrific. Thank you for having me here. Oh, terrific. So why don't you give us an update for the folks that aren't familiar with Zadara? Yeah, exactly. So Zadara is a storage as a service company. We do enterprise class storage with the same capability, reliability, security, performance of what you would call a traditional storage, but with the business model of as a service, with the agility of multi-tenancy where every customer has their own dedicated storage box, let's say. Right. And it's the paper use, it's connected to Amazon. Any Amazon customer can use our storage either as a blog or file. As well as we do with other cloud providers, number two and number three, and also we do on-premise. Also as a service, we specialize in storage, we are really good in storage, and this is what we do. Excellent. So you've got a great perspective because one of the big cloud topics is hybrid cloud, right? Everybody's talking about hybrid and some people would say it's just the old legacy people trying to keep one foot in, you know, as you move everything to their public. But you see both. You've got customers that have hybrid clouds, you've got customers that are using Zidara as storage on-prem, you've got people using storage through the Amazon connection. What do you see, kind of how workloads are shifting in points of view within your customer base? Yeah, great question. So, yeah, we sell storage as a service to enterprises and enterprises have data centers, they have cloud, they have different clouds, and they are moving many of the workloads to the cloud, but still, I think that the movement is not a completely shift. In some cases, some people are going the opposite direction. I think that people want to have the flexibility to run whatever they need at the time that they will need in the best place. Right. So we have customers that either started on-premise and move to Amazon or copy to Amazon or do DR in Amazon, and the opposite as well. We started with Amazon and they said, well, now we have a data center that we want to be able to move data back and forth. There are many workloads that make sense to do in public cloud, things like require a lot of CPUs at the same time, and things like that make sense to do in Amazon, and there are other things that are on-premise. And again, I think that the movement is that people decide, depend on the project, where to run and having more options is actually better. That's one of the themes that we've heard from some of the guests on the show today is flexibility, what really is kind of the phenomenon behind what AWS offers. I wanted to kind of explore the enterprise space with you a little bit. They launched last year the Elastic File System, really a direct target against the incumbent storage vendors, with whom you compete. They talked a lot about the enterprise today. They've got big enterprise customers, Salesforce, for example. Talk to us about what's different with Zadara Storage as a service, in comparison to those traditional incumbent storage vendors. Storage vendors, yeah. So one thing that is different is the way that we charge customers is per use. So instead of having the capex to buy the storage boxes, you just go to the console and provision the storage. It provision instantaneously. It can be accessed from AWS, it can be on-premise, it can be on other clouds. So this is one difference. It still has the reliability performance, security data, traditional storage, but because it is provisioning instantaneously, we can do this completely as a service. So the customer don't need to deal with buying hardware, they don't need to deal with how to manage the storage, how to upgrade the firmware, all these kind of things that belong to the previous history, they are not longer needed and the customer can focus instead of managing storage boxes in their own business. It provides more agility when they need, they provision the storage that they need and if you need to expand, you're expanding instantaneously, if you need to shrink, you shrink and you don't need to have these storage boxes owning and managing. So cost probably being one of the biggest standout business drivers that your customers are facing and as we kind of talk about the algorithm of innovation that AWS has been exhibiting for a very long time, that's one of the biggest things easier to adapt, deploy, manage and lower cost. Yeah, so I tell you my view regarding AWS innovation that is fantastic, frankly. And one of the main things that they really do well is the partnership and ecosystem. We were a really small company five years ago and we pitched our story to AWS, we were only seven people and they say, well, this is cool, let's work together. Even though we offer storage and they also offer storage, so I think that this is what makes AWS a great company, they are willing to bring partners that are sometimes competitors in certain areas. We are really good in storage, so we can provide really good storage services for AWS customers, it's good for AWS. At the same time, I think that the storage team of AWS having competition is good in order for them to continue to innovate. So I think that this help with innovation, it help us as a company because AWS is moving fast and we need to move faster. And they move fast because of us and we move fast because of them and it is a different dynamic that used to be the more traditional enterprise storage that as you know, it was very monolithic and observative. Yeah, the whole concept of the elasticity is fascinating really, it's one of the fundamental tenets of cloud beyond just the price in economics but to be able to elastic, and as you said, elastic means getting bigger as well as getting smaller depending on what the workload is. I think agility is the main thing, more than the pricing and so on. The agility means that people today in this global economy, they don't have rigid needs, they don't know if the Brexit will be good or will be bad, so having the opportunity to say, okay, if I need something, I go to a console and provision and if I don't need it anymore because of recession or whatever, I can decommission, it's huge for companies and then people need to do these calculations as opposed to, okay, it will take me a lot of capex and few weeks to get installed and if I don't need much, I stack with whatever I have. So I think that the agility and the capability to extend and shrink depending on the success is key for companies. I want to follow up on the other concept that you talked about, which is Amazon as a partner because clearly seven people feels like a pretty high-risk move to jump in bed with these guys that have a ton of engineering resources, a ton of capital. Yeah, and refer to as some of the customers. Right, right. But how did it impact your business in terms of your go-to-market? Because if it works, suddenly you're part of their marketplace, your exposure to a huge customer base, but then too, it's different, right? It's click-buying, it's not belly-to-belly sales, it's not a traditional way to go-to-market that you've got to kind of fit in. How did that work? And then how do you jive that with your traditional go-to-market and your traditional kind of non-Amazon customers? So I think that this, for us, was a blessing, I would say, because the fact that we are present in a marketplace anybody of Amazon can go to the AWS marketplace and with one click provision our storage and sell enterprise storage with one click, it is pretty fascinating compared to the nine months of one year cycle of storage boxes. It also helped us as a company, as I said, with the innovation rate, with the way that we see things, the way that we sell, the way that we're marketing, I think that today, startups not only need to have a really good product and innovation in the product, but we need to be innovative on marketing, we need to be innovative on how we sell. Sell is no longer, I sell to you and you buy from me, it's more of a partnership. And competition is also a partnership, so people need to be all the time thinking about, okay, how I need to work with you so it's mutual benefit for both of us. So we've talked about enterprises in terms of your business model, we talked about what Amazon was talking about what they've announced before. Talk to us about some of your customers outside the enterprise, maybe in the startup space, we know there's a big pool of low hanging fruit there on the Amazon side. Do you play in that space as well with AWS? Yeah, yeah, so basically we offer storage and block storage, file storage as a service and storage is a very horizontal type of field, startups need storage, enterprises need storage. So we do have customers that are small startup, just starting and we do have customers that are really big, 1450, customers that are using our storage as well. So again, the premise is that we provide a very highly configurable storage with performance, security and data protection features comparable to enterprise storage, right? But provision from a console in a minute and pay for what you use. And obviously for startups, it's good. I mean, the whole as a service for startups is really good. We as a company, ourself, we use the cloud for ourself, we started in the cloud from day one. We don't have IT department, you know, on premise. So that's a great story. We like Siddharah, but let's jump to it. How do the customers, what do the customers do with this flexibility? What do you see in the customer behavior that they can do now, your customers, that they just couldn't do before having this flexibility on the store? You know, how do they really take advantage of what you're offering? So a good example, we have a university that started with us. I think they started back in December, December, 2015, like six months ago, seven months ago. And we provision, this case is on premise and they actually start looking to do cloud as well. So we provisioned the first hardware that they did for a particular project. They said, oh, we need to connect VMware and this and that. And since then, every week or every two weeks, they provision more storage for different applications. Some are traditional applications like Exchange and VMware and things like that, that they still want to see the traditional storage, the Iskasi, Block, Fiber Channel, NFS, SIFS, this kind of thing. And some are new applications that are more of the object storage and connected to AWS and so on. So our vision is that we are providing storage for different kinds of application. We do really well the separation of workloads between customers and between, even the workloads of the same customer. So a customer can have a flash only, low latency, Fiber Channel block for the super high performance storage. And at the same time, on the same cloud can have another customer or the same customer, a workload that is more of a file oriented, the large capacity, low cost per gigabyte and so on. So what they like is the capability to go to the console and provision and have one minute later the storage ready to go rather than I need to call this vendor for NAS, I need to call this vendor for flash, I need to call this vendor for block. That's great. And two, kind of the traditional storage paradigm was you were always overextended, right? You always had to buy more than you needed because you had to get it in chunks and it took forever. So your efficiency was significantly less than you can do now kind of on demand. Yeah, the user experience, whether it's in the public cloud or private cloud is exactly the same. You go to the console, provision is ready to go. We manage the system for the customers, we monitor the system for the customer. When they reach a certain level of utilization, we call the customers, hey, we are going to ship you a couple of boxes for free. You don't need to do anything. All you need to do is to connect the boxes into the rack and we do all the remote DevOps and so on. And they are always storage ready to go for next time that you need provision storage. So what's next? What are you looking at? What's coming up down the road? What are you guys focused on? Yeah, so we do, first of all, as I said, we are trying to extend more and more workloads. Storage need to be configured specific for every need. And this is our expertise, right? As opposed to having a vinyl storage, or having a vanilla type of storage, only one, we can provision storage for low latency, blog, file, enterprise file, CIFS, NFS, object, fiber channel and so on. So we are looking to add more services, more storage services. We are looking to, we are developing capabilities to better do the hybrid cloud. Today we do very easily remote replication for disaster recovery and movement, but there are things that can be improved and the main idea is that customers, whether the storage is in the public cloud or it is on premise or it is in a different cloud, they will have a single console that can manage all the storage and easily move things back and forth. And are you going to butt heads with some of the Amazon products in doing that or are there some places like, I'm just picking one Glacier, where you don't want to play in that space and potentially stuff would be migrated. How do you kind of work with the Amazon offerings or you just compete head to head or how does that kind of work? Okay, in general the philosophy is that we offer storage. We try to get a higher level of capabilities than Amazon. So we understand that if somebody can do in Amazon with Amazon product, not likely to come to that. Right, right, you got to value that, right? Yeah, so we are playing the value add. And we do a lot of things that Amazon don't do, but again, this is storage. So at the end of the day, we do compete with some of their products. Some of the customer can do with Amazon, some others cannot do. Again, we provide higher level functionality. A good example is just the release the EFS finally. We do NAS as well and they do NAS, but ours for example is integrated with Active Directory. It has Snapshot, Geo, Replication, and things like you will find more of an enterprise NAS type of capability and that's done. So some people will use this, some people will use that. And I think Amazon is aware of that and it's good for Amazon because at the end of the day, the customer is happy and even if they use us, they still use the compute of Amazon, the networking and all the other 150 more products. So you're dancing that line of complimentary versus competition very well and really out of that, have a very symbiotic relationship, their innovation drives your innovation. Yes, and I think that Amazon is doing the same. So Amazon is well known for being a really good partner but competing with the partner, sometimes hiding from the partner. Right, right. So it is an interesting game I would say and we enjoy playing. All right, so I'll give you the last word. So Andy Jassy's a big fan of theCUBE, he's been on theCUBE, I think he was down when you were on it at ReInvent. If you were talking to Andy Jassy as a representative of the ecosystem, what are two things would you say? Andy, things are great, but could you please do? Mm. That's a good question. And so one of the things that we, and again with Amazon we have a special relationship because we do things a little bit different so they changed their direct connect in order to accomplish us. We are now in the Amazon marketplace as a special exception that they did for us and they are really good at us. So yeah, we would like more of the Amazon marketplace to be, you know, to have more marketing around, easy to find, if we could be the Amazon console will be great. Very good. Andy, please. Andy, you heard it. Andy, give Nelson some love, you know, get him up to the top of the select. It's kind of like an Apple store, right? Exactly. A thousand applications, how am I supposed to find my favorite one? All right Nelson, well thank you for stopping by and giving us the desired update and congratulations on all your success. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to see you. Absolutely, I'm Jeff Frick. She's Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE and we're at AWS Summit. Santa Clara, we'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching. Thank you.