 Okay, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is special coverage of theCUBE, here live in San Francisco, at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and we go out where the signal is, not the noise. We go where the action is, and the action right now is on the field at AT&T Park. I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. We have Brian Mitchell from AvidNet, advocate, customer advocate, NetApp, partner. Brian, great to see you again. What do you think? What do you think about this? I love it, man. Right on, excellent. You guys are the ESPN of tech, and what a better place. Yeah, Dave, home run shot right there. You're a tech athlete, welcome to a special presentation. So what's going on with you guys here? Tell us about what's going on at the event and we're having it here on the field. Sure, so we're doing a lot of things, gang. We're doing a lot of things with FlexPod, number one FlexPod distributor. We pre-built FlexPods day in, day out. You know, we do a lot of work with NetApp as well. So, you know, we're talking about distributor with NetApp. We're talking about one stop shop for all things NetApp and ecosystem partners like VMware. You know, this is all about team sport, baseball, you know, good team sport. NetApp's a very loyal partner. Has been good to the channel. We talked to them last year. But at the end of the day, loyalty can go fast. It was no margin, right? Sure. It's the margin opportunity, because the service's opportunity is massive, right? I mean, so you got a margin on product and then the wrapping of gross profit on top of that. What's that, how's that playing out? And what are the customers doing for, you doing with customers around that, that additional services? Sure. So, you know, we have bits and bytes, you're a technical guy, you know. You know, I can definitely talk about that, but you know. We don't want to talk about numbers. The kinds of services and all that technical things that you got to drop. Sure, sure. So, you know, it starts with integration, right? You know, the big thing with integration is, we pre-built the FlexSpot with Cisco and NetApp. We also talk a lot with folks that say, hey, how do we help integrate this? How do we help with consulting, right? So, I get a lot of questions often times, hey Brian, I need help with, you know, how do you size this config, this NetApp? Great, love to help. At the same time, you know, that helps us with revenue, with margins. A lot of opportunities. So, Brian, having that delivers FlexSpot, if I understand if I infer correctly, as a single SKU, is that right? That's correct. Okay, so you do that for, so the thing about FlexSpot, people love FlexSpot because it's flexible, right? Sure. Do whatever you want with it, different hypervisors, so you have a lot of permutations that you have to test, to validate, and of course work with NetApp to do that, but talk about that single SKU strategy. Is that, a lot of people don't know about that. You know, it's pretty neat, Dave. A lot of times we often find that folks will say, hey, you know, I'm going to build it myself. Guess what happens? It goes south. You know, the build fails, customers not happy. What we do is we say, hey, let us take the screwdriver level integration. Let's actually build it ourselves. Then we actually literally will test it, cable it. Literally, the FlexSpot here at VMworld is built by us. We've got a demo pool of FlexSpots shipping around the world. So literally, when we talk about that, we're talking about taking that, low level screwdriver integration and allowing the partner to leverage our services so that they can go out and deliver higher dollar consulting services. So where are the opportunities now? I mean, you've got so many permutations that are possible. So what are your sweet spots? So, you know, sweet spots are definitely three key areas. I see, number one, the data center, right? Pretty traditional stuff, right? You've got your exchange, your sequel. It's all about apps, Oracle. Then you know, second spot, SMB, mid-size enterprise. You're going to talk a lot about FlexSpot Express with the C series, with the fast 2200s. Then you've got the third one, which is pretty interesting. I like to call it FlexSpot Big Data, Big Data Pod. And it's the FlexSpot Select for Hadoop. What's going on with Flash from your perspective? Honestly, you're in the trenches. A lot of buzz. We've been talking about a little Flash fellow, but there's significant benefits of having Flash under the hood in storage. What are you seeing? What are customers asking you? What's some of the use cases that you're hearing from your customers? Yeah, you know, a lot of use cases are around, hey, I just want to be able to accelerate this Oracle or the SQL server application. I want to be able to, you know, deliver this tier of storage faster. Oftentimes, we get into a conversation about, hey, you know, how do I set up a tiering strategy? You know, we find that a lot of folks are saying, you know, go all Flash. That's great, but guess what? What about spinning disk? What about those latency tolerant applications, right? Home directories, data warehouses. So we actually will say, hey, what about hybrid storage? Both spinning disk and Flash storage makes sense. What's going on in the application? Because the old days, IT would provision some core IT and then kind of wait for the phone calls, help desk. I'm oversimplifying that. Yeah. But now apps are everywhere. Now apps coming from business units, you got core IT and you have demands from the business units. That can whip up some apps. They might go to Amazon. They want to do it in-house. What's that look like inside a normal enterprise? You know, normal enterprise, it's here on fire, right? You know, they don't know what to do. They're sitting there thinking, wow, I've got to be able to deliver this app. I don't know how to get there. Number one, they are having pressures. A lot of the business units, they're going outside of IT. What we're saying is, hey, install NetApp with the help of such Amazon web services. We're talking about being able to leverage the cloud for a lot of those archive apps. A lot of those pieces of data, but hey, you know, the type of data is just, oh, right? We've got to cut you off. They're going to go national Anthem right now. We're live in San Francisco. We're still here live. We're going to stay with them until we get the boot and know the hook, but they're going to go do special presentation. Ronnie Lotz here, they got a lot of, Brian Sagan's here, Pat Gelsing will be here, Tom George. We're live on San Francisco 40, what a giant's field. So we're going to pause for the national Anthem with tech athlete Brian Mitchell. Okay, national Anthem here. This is the cube where we're about to kick off time. That's the cube first. It's almost first inning. What analysis, what is the cube first right there? All right, we're going to wrap this up. We're getting the hook here. Brian Mitchell, tech athlete, advocate of NetApp with NetApp. I mean, with AvNet. Thanks for coming on the cube special presentation. We're going to cut to the presentation. We've got 10 minutes, we'll be right back. Stay here. We'll be right back in 10 minutes, special presentation, and we'll go back live here on the outfield at San Francisco Giant's AT&T Park. We'll be right back. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is a special cube presentation live at AT&T Park.