 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. We're here at theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We extract the student from the noise. I'm John Furrier, joined Dave Vellante. And one of the special things about theCUBE is it's wall-to-wall. We talked to Pat Galesman, the CEO of VMworld, all the top executives, all the entrepreneurs. We talked to the thought, we talked to the guys building the engine under the hood. And it's always a surprise. What we always love to do is bring people in when there's action. And there's some news to break. We're going to break it. If there's action, we will send people to it like AT&T Park last night with NetApp. And our next guest is a special guest, who we love, Tarkin Maynard, who was the CEO of Y, sold at the Dell. And now has some big news. A CUBE alumni, always a great guest. Tarkin, welcome back again. Good to see you. Good to see you next time. Tan, smiling, this full of dollars. Looking good. New venture. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you guys. Good to see you. So first, let's just get into it. You're a man about town right now. You have a new venture. Yeah. Tell us the news. Right to the hard news. Sure, sure. Basically, I joined a company called Nexenta. The company has been around actually for a while in this software-defined storage space, software-defined data center space. The company started with three co-founders, basically Evan Powell, Alex Heisman, and Dmitry Yasupov. Amazingly smart people, great IP. And then the company is in just the heart of all the action. All the storage has been so boring. It's a boring space. We need to do a lot of this. Getting sexy, though. Like selling storage, like most boring space. But I'll tell you, over the past two decades, I think that market is changing crazy. And the last two, three years with all this new software, cloud implementations, virtualization, convergence in the back end, it's a great story. I love the company. To be honest with you, after our Dell integration, I had a great time with Dell in the first year, I had a little bit of a problem with my dad and so on. So, health issues. I had to take some time off. I took time off four months. My girlfriend said, you have to leave the house. I'm done with you. Well, you had a good time. She drew you out. We were following you on Facebook, for sure. We watched the photos. You were fantastic. Great places you visited. You're a good tan. So I had to find- She kicked you out. Get the job, come on. I had to find something very exciting. I'll tell you. I was not planning to come back actually this quick. But this deal came in and I love the investors, Menlo, Sierra, Javelin, Translin Capital, some great investors. As I mentioned to you earlier, offline, VMware is a great partner. Cisco is a great partner. Dell is a great partner. So I think there's a huge opportunity- Plus, VMware's giving you all this free marketing this week. I mean, it's unbelievable. Yeah, I'd love that. I'd love that. I'd love Pat and Carly Schumbach and the entire company, new organizational structure with Sanjay Poonen. Coming in from- Sanjay's coming on theCUBE a little later today. Great guy. He's going to be fun. He's going to be fun. Okay, so tell us a little bit more about the opportunity, the company, and the market space. So look, we talked about this many, many times before. Obviously, as you know, with social workloads, mobility, virtualization is obviously a big deal. You know, that's better than I do. And on the top of that now, you have the entire contextual intelligence, big data workloads going crazy. And on the top of that now, the convergence in the front end. And that's what my life in the last eight years with Wwise, Dell, convergence in the end user environments, with voice, data, video, all integrated into one kind of a platform. And Dell is doing a phenomenal job in that. But now in the back end, you have to have the right infrastructure at the right cost level to support that kind of a workload with virtualization, with VDI, with convergence, with social media, with big data. So I do not believe based on things that I'm seeing and all the customer talks I had over the past few years, especially in the last month or so, when I was doing my due diligence with NexCenter and with their customers and some of the prospects. And even here at VMworld, customers are complaining that infrastructure and data center is too expensive. Too, too slow, too fat. It's not agile enough, too complicated. So everybody's looking at this software defined data center space, I believe in it. With networking, obviously on the compute side, VMware did a great job in the last 10 years with Diane and then, you know, Paul Moritz. And now obviously with Pat and team, but on the storage and networking side, there is still tons of opportunity. On the networking side, companies like Big Switch, Nissiria, but VMware did with Nissiria and all those companies I'm watching, I love those companies. But on the networking side, things are still not defined. There's still software defined networking is still not defined. So there's still some work to be done in that space. But in storage, the game is now. The data is now. Voice data video, big data, all that workloads require more agile, more flexible storage. And I don't think it's going to happen with the legacy old school boring storage. Has to be software defined, virtualized. So what's the new school? First of all, we said in 2010, storage is sexy because we saw it becoming the center of the conversation because of all what you just talked about. It's here, it's happening right now. So what is the new school of disruption? Sure, so here you look, at the end of the day, I respect all those big companies done phenomenal job in storage from NetApp, EMC, Hitachi data systems, even some of the other storage niche players over the past. We've been around the corner. We remember all those old companies doing a lot of storage, some micro system about companies in that space. Having said all that, those old infrastructures, I don't believe are beneficial to a lot of the Fortune 500 types and also mid-sized companies for them to deliver better value to their end users on those new workloads. So the storage has to be much easier deployed, it has to be much secure as everything goes going to the cloud. Maybe that's a public cloud and private cloud and let's be honest about it. Amazon is a reality. They just got that deal with CIA. It's not only small and medium businesses, you and me on my mobile app, putting on Amazon. Now large companies are going there and what is the reason? Simplicity costs. That's the actual oil, the list goes on and on and on. But the problem is, I believe still with Fortune 5000 companies, people are asking, can I really put all my stuff on a public cloud, all critical stuff? Yes, some of it, yes, but some of it is still up in there. So what I believe is, I truly believe it's on my heart and that's why I'm in this game and I put my own money into Next Center and with my investors, we believe in that a lot of CIOs are going to look for an Amazon type of delivery model internally as their data center becomes their own homegrown Amazon and that can only happen with companies like Next Center. Software defined data centers. Let's talk about the news of the new gig. So talk about when you joined, what you're going to be doing, key goals, and is it a pivot, is it an extension? They have some history, operating history? So look, I'll tell you a great question. You guys are all asking the right questions. The company started a while ago. The great founders, phenomenal team. By the way, I would never do a deal with a company with the wrong team. The team is phenomenal. Obviously, I have some team members I've worked with in the past and so forth there helping out and looking at this. I have great partners like Carl at VMware, Dell, Michael Dell and the team, Jeff Clark, a lot of key people, Marius, Sam Grimler there are also looking at this because this is a big partner to Dell, it changes the game for Dell customers also with Next Center. And also on the top of that great IP. They use a very capable, very secure, this is a very key thing, basically a file system. Based on the file system, the company is written some amazing packages, software packages and they're taking advantage of the open source what built in this proprietary but open IP to deliver software defined storage at a cost level I don't believe any company can touch. And IP coming with the right cost structure with the right tall addressable market. Look, software defined data center market is six billion dollars already. Six billion dollars today already that market. All is software defined. Okay, so that's not the TAM, that's what the revenue is today. Yeah, it says revenue, it's so small. Online storage market today, some data points I saw from IDC and a few others is 200 billion dollar plus by 2016. This market is going to go crazy. There's so much storage need but not only in size but efficiency and the other piece, security. So to your question, it's not a pivot so you want to continue what the team did. I think the team- You had a turbo charge. Turbo charge it, I think the team has done a great job. We want to make sure we talk to more customers, more partnerships. So scale it up. Scale it up, but at the same time from software defined storage space, we're also going to start looking at software defined data center space as a whole with security. Security in this space is going to be a big deal. So we're going to focus on that as a company. You talked about the Amazon like experience in the data center. So what does that look like? Is that a solution? Is it a piece of software that I buy? Is it an appliance? I think, you know, when you look at the world, you have this VMware EMC world. We had this Cisco kind of a world. Then we have this open systems world with open stack with Dell leading in that front. And you have this Amazon world, right? It is as a service. So what I see is companies are looking at the hybrid solutions. And they have all that infrastructure installed over the past two, three, four decades. They have to make sense out of it. You know, my goal is not to go to customer like we did advice and Dell. Hey, replace everything with my new stuff. That's not the goal. What we want to do is, and what you're hearing from the customers, use what you have and let us not spend too much money on new gear, bring some advanced, secure, available, manageable, reliable, and low total cost of ownership software which can plug into the things that we do so we can get more out of our infrastructure today. And as we move forward, our goal is to move into a new era in which we can deliver Amazon type of a service in-house without needing to go to Amazon to an outside party because we have liability issues, we have privacy issues, we have security issues still. So what I'm seeing is in high levels, in simple terms, a good marriage, a good fusion of private and public cloud based on software IP, software defined data center IP which creates a convergence in the back end to enable convergence in the front end. Okay, with all those services that you would expect from that, but my, so I know it's software. I mean, you guys are a software company. But is it ultimately delivered in a box, in an appliance, or are you dogmatic about that? Or are you? No, no, look, at the end of the day, today the company is a pure software company, no hardware connection, there is no appliance built into this, but easily can build it. So you don't rule that out? I don't rule that out. I mean, today, at the end of the day, one of the unique things about this company is, this company has tons of options. Nex Santa has so many options that most companies don't have. They have the IP which can be delivered separately as a standalone software is just being done with many amazing customers from large banks to large-class service companies. One of our investors is Korean Telecom. They're doing tons of work with us. So there are telcos, there are banks, there are federal institutions having said all this. Some of our customers, as I made the announcement already this morning, after your tweet as well, thank you for your tweeting, I'm getting tweets from some of the ODMs in China. Hey, we would love to talk to you. Actually, tonight at 5 p.m. I'm doing a big party at St. Regis Hotel in Yerba Buena Terrace. We're going to have a few ODMs from Taiwan to come in and talk about software-defined data center in relation, in lieu of our partnerships with VMware, Dell, Microsoft, and others. Who's going to be at that party? So look, at that party is, I don't want to give you all the names. It's a private party where you guys are invited, obviously, on the fourth floor. We're going to have top executives from VMware, a lot of executives coming from Dell. We have a few people from Microsoft and about 50 startup CEOs and tons of investors. So if you're looking for money for your next deal, please come on, I'm not going to charge you a commission. Okay, well yeah, we are looking for some finance for crowd spots, but we'll talk about that later. I'm excited for you, Tarkin. We love having your energy in the cube. And obviously, the Dell relationship, it sounds like it's a big part of this deal. So to explain, these guys have a relationship with Dell? Absolutely. And other vendors, or is it just Dell? No, they're very open, very honest about this. And NextCenter did a great job from a business development perspective because also the product is so open to partnerships. Actually, the BD teams in NextCenter has a phenomenal portfolio to do a lot of BD and OEM work. So there are tons of partnerships overseas as well, but we're not getting too much in detail. Dell partnerships are very critical, obviously, for us. There's a partnership with Cisco, there's a lot of work going on with Cisco, there's tons of work going on with VMware. But obviously, I'm not ruling out. I'm talking to my friends at Citrix. We've done a lot of work with them. Hopefully, we're going to do something with them because I think there's a nice tie-in with Citrix as well on the VDI front because the VDI workloads are a huge deal for storage, as you know. One of the biggest inhibitors, one of the biggest pain in my arm was when I was doing the wise deal over the past eight years was the storage cost. Because all these old school, boring storage vendors, you know who they are, they come in and charge all that money. You kind of mentioned them earlier, they're gonna kill the TCO. Look, they have these big headquarters, big suit executives, big salaries, they have to pay for that kind of a margin. So they do a 50, 60% margin on product, on proprietary boxes. We want to change that game. Customers deserve better, lower cost, better IP, and that's our goal. And that's the reason I love this country. It opens up opportunities for us through you to tell our story to our customers. Well, timing is good because Nixenta needs somebody with a voice and you have a voice obviously. Of course, all the big guys, many of the big guys are talking to software-defined game. It sounds like you've been delivering for a couple of years now, so. Absolutely. And look, this is not a typical startup. Some startups, you bootstrap it, there was no revenue, this company has revenue, growing fast. What's the headcount? So today we have about 200 people. Okay, it's sizable. It's not a startup, it's not a startup, it's a company. Hey, it's a company. And we've said all that, but it's primarily an R&D company, a research shop, you're doing phenomenal products. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you one thing. This is to my own detriment. I was talking to the founders, one of our founders, Alex Heisman, he's a phenomenal Russian guy. I'm talking, he has research progress all over the place. There are some of the research we've been working on. I'm telling you, this stuff is real. You can start maybe three more companies out of this company's IP. So that's why I'm very excited about it. And I want to put my entire energy to this with the team. And the team is a really good team. So are you chairman and CEO? I'm the chairman of the CEO, and the CEO of the company. And we have a phenomenal board, as I mentioned with Menlo, Sierra, Javelin, Noah Doyle from Javelin. We have Toshi from TransLink, Praveen Vizrani from Menlo, great team, Tim Gullery. Tim is, by the way, the PhD in storage. He's going to deny that publicly. But he knows his space well, and I trusted these guys. They've done a long term due diligence on this company. I'll tell you, I've been looking at this company for a few months, and I like what I'm seeing. And I'll tell you, our partners, Dell, Cisco, VMware, all of those guys are very excited about that too. Tarkin Maynard, chairman and CEO of Nexenta. Congratulations, great to see you back in the game, back on the track, back from your personal break. Great success with Y's, and I'll say the market's changed. Look at Michael Dell. He's going to take the company private, and he's going to be aggressive. Awesome, awesome. And he's going to get this company back. He's going to be a big owner of it, and that's going to be fun to watch, and certainly entertaining, and as they retool the product. But yeah, Storages is a good fit for you guys. Start Market Fit's great. Congratulations. We'll see you tonight at your party if we can swing by, if we're still awake and alive. Dave and I are day three. Tarkin Maynard here, chairman and CEO, Breaking News here inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you brother.