 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and it's ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services re-invent 2016. SiliconANGLE's CUBE live three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier. My next guest is Nelson Nahill, who's the CEO of Zadara Storage, CUBE alumni, a friend of theCUBE. Welcome back, good to see you. Hi John, good to see you. So I was at a venture capital party last night, grade lock and amplify two great firms and it was packed with entrepreneurs and people in the industry. And I overheard two guys talking and I didn't know who they were. They were saying, can you believe these VCs back Easter are all in there, they're going after storage. And I'm like, and I overheard, I'm like, storage. And they were perplexed, like no one's investing in storage. But now yet storage is back on the table. Storage, I said in 2010 is sexy, right? Dave called it Snorage, being boring. But right now data storage is at the center of all the action. And no one knows how the game's going to play out yet. All the VCs are abetting. You have a thesis, it's working. Give us the update and that's first, explain what you guys do real quick and then let's get into what's happening. Yeah, no definite. So that's the main thing is that storage is where customer put the data. And the opportunity there is not just to provide the capacity, but the opportunity to provide the additional services around the data, data protection, data disaster recovery, you know, data security, analytics, everything else. So storage will continue to be strong as long as the data is important and the data is more and more important over the time. So your journey, take us through the update now, Zidore, what you guys do for the business update? What's the current plan? Where are you guys at? What are some of the successes? Definitely, so we just had a couple of weeks ago our annual summit that we double in size every year we tried to catch up with Amazon, but Amazon also is doubling their own conference every year. We announced a couple of big announcements. One is that we are also cross connected to Google Cloud. So our storage service is available at Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud, as well as on-premise. And the second announcement that is, we form a very strong strategic alliance with Intel. And Intel is providing us technology in servers and flash. And we announced it, for example, that we will provide flash as a service at lower cost than SAS hard drives. So our customers, and this is one of the nice things that happened at our summit, we told the customer, listen, no matter when you started with our SAS drives, if you started a week ago, six months ago, two years ago, you can just online migrate your SAS drive to flash and it will be lower cost and obviously better performance. You know, I've always loved your business model because it takes away the hassle of provisioning storage. And James Hamilton pointed out a very interesting step yesterday in his presentation, obviously they're all cloud off-premise, but he brings up the same point that all customers are dealing with, trying to, one, identify the scale points needed for any kind of peak load of any kind. They have an obvious case called Prime Friday. Huge scale, so they have an elastic environment. For most enterprises, provisioning storage is an art in science, right? So it's like, it's throwing the dart at the dart board to try to figure out what to provision up. You guys solved that, right? Am I getting that right? You guys solved that problem? Where you got the analytics? So the main problem with the provisioning storage is that the traditional storage boxes are very monolithic, so you need to buy upfront whatever you will need for the next two, three years. Who can predict today what they will need in two, three years? So you either overbuy and you pay more or you underbuy and then when you need, you don't have the storage and it's very... And it's also hard to buy, it might not be available, different form factor than you have on... Exactly, so... You solved that. We solved that because we provide the latest technology to the customer. Customer can expand and shrink at any time, can use, pay for what they use. And again, this was a good example. We have a new partnership with Intel. We can provide flash at better price than HDD. And the customer can online migrate the old HDDs and get flash and they don't need to care. I mean, in two years, I'm sure that the Intel and Samsung and all these companies will provide even larger flash, faster flash. So Nelson, who buys from you and what's the scenario where you're buying? What's the, I guess, what's the pain point? What's the signal that makes you, makes them want to work with you? Yeah, so in general, because we are in the storage business, people that are buying or searching and funding us are people that are looking for some kind of storage refresh. And obviously the old storage has getting out of maintenance or they need storage with enterprise-plus capabilities in Amazon or Azure or Google or on-premise. And this is kind of the trigger, a particular project. But very quickly, we find that when we start working, so, you know, you don't need to buy the storage. You can try, you can expand, you can shrink, you can pay only for what you use. It is a really good proposition. They don't need to do too much of the magic numbers and predict what will happen in the next three years because they need to know what will happen next month and next month they can go to a console and change. So we enter in these conversations at the time of the refresh of storage, but very quickly become a customer that not only provision for that particular project, but for multiple projects and can be, again, in the public cloud, in the private cloud, multi-cloud and can easily replicate data between... What are the big market drivers right now? Do you see out there that really are forcing customers to really look at storage as a SaaS on-premise? Yeah, well, again, everything is moving as a SaaS model and storage has not been moving mostly because of the traditional storage vendor who don't want to move or don't have the capability to move. But SaaS is better. I mean, the agility that you have, you don't need to worry about, you know, having people managing storage, you can have the people doing more important things. You don't need to worry about the latest technology, but because you can use the storage that you need for the next six months or one year and then replay for the latest technology and storage provider like us, we have in our interest to provide the best technology at the best at the time because we want to keep the customer happy forever. We don't do leasing. It's not a leasing that after three years, the customer goes away. Our interaction with the customer is on a daily basis and if we can bring lower cost, higher performance. You're not, you don't just ship product and then see it later. Right, we see. We're actively involved. Every day, every week. Almost like an off-balance sheet IT department. Yes, it's like the IT department for storage. And so we are interested to keep the customer happy and growing with us during the whole lifetime. And because of that, we push the best technologies that we can provide. So talk about what you're doing here at AWS, getting deals, getting done, conversations with customers, executives, partners, are you partnering with AWS at all? Or what's your? At AWS, we were, I think, on the second reinvent. We started back in 2012. Back then, it was half, no, half. Yeah, we were here. One-tenth on the side. And we were the only storage company back then. I remember that. And so we are cross-connected to AWS. Any customer of AWS can use our storage if the customer needs, for example, dedicated performance and capacity and manageability of the storage. That encryption address seems that the higher-level capabilities than EFS, for example, we do integration with Active Directory and Snapshot remote applications. So you have to be really positioned with the customer if you're going to provide the SaaS to be able to understand what's going on in the cloud. Yes, yes. It is typically our enterprises that use our storage. With us, they can keep the same capabilities that they will have on traditional NAS. Do you get worried that Amazon's just going to say, hey, we're going to just take your market from you? No, actually, Amazon is a great partner. I mean, Amazon will not have this kind of ecosystem if they will not be a great partner. And yes, on the storage side, we compete a little bit. We understand. But they're a different kind of storage. Right, right. We understand that any customer that can use Amazon storage, that will use Amazon storage, we are not competing in the price per gigabyte. We compete in the enterprise. You're a use case, Jim. You want on-prem service. That's what you guys do. We do on-prem service and also off-prem, connected to AWS and Google and Microsoft Cloud. So even a customer of AWS that is 100% AWS can use our storage. Okay, go back five years now and as an entrepreneur co-founder of the company, would you imagine the world where it is today? Did you see it this dynamic? I mean, the storage business of the past five years has been, I mean, EMC is no longer around, I mean. The interesting thing when, before starting Zadara, I was interviewing for Amazon and I love it. I love the people, I love the business model. They did green light, a lot of projects here at Amazon. The common story amongst all the people is like, Andy Jassy loves to take risks. But if you screw up, they... The main thing that I thought back then was, wow, this is amazing. Imagine if we could do enterprise storage with the same security performance and capability of the NetApps and EMC, but with the business model of Amazon and Payday. You guys are a very technical company, so you have like a tech advantage. Are you happy with the business performance right now? Yeah, our business is growing very fast. 100% year over year and we don't, our main problem with it cannot ship enough equipment fast enough and yeah, so far it's going great. Nelson, thank you for coming on theCUBE. CEO, co-founder of Zadara Storage. Great to see you again. Congratulations. Thank you. Good strategy, love the product, love your business model, making it easy for customers. This is theCUBE bringing you all the data here at Amazon Reinvent 2016. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, we're going to go all the way to 630. I think 19 interviews today, more and more tomorrow. Be right back with more after this short break.