 Hi, I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE. This is a CUBE Conversation with Rod Bag, VP of Customer Support at Nimble. We're back here in Palo Alto Studio with theCUBE. Rod, welcome back to CUBE Conversation. Thank you, good to be here. I want to talk about the industry. Some of the changes are going on. A lot of folks are very interested in some of these game-changing moves that companies like Nimble are making in the infrastructure, where you can come out of nowhere with great people, great team, great product, and make a big impact go public. Great entrepreneurial story, really, it's fantastic. But it really points to the product market fit, and this market is explosive. We've got cloud, mobile, and social. You have open source kind of operating at this whole other level of tier one, like software engineers are becoming network engineers, network engineers are becoming software engineers. DBAs are sleeping with everyone. It means crazy, right? The IT market is really changing. What is the big thing that's happening from your view? You've been around the block. You've worked in the industry for a long time. You've seen cycles of innovation come and go. What's so transformative about what's happening right now? Yeah, so obviously right now that's kind of spurred us on is the new technology of cash, or flash, and using that as cash. So that, I think, has really sort of unwound the whole way storage is looked at and how you solve the storage problem and so on. So I think that's kind of the key thing right now that we're a part of, is obviously the cash. Using flash as cash. Beyond that, you sort of mentioned this whole network engineers are now storage engineers. It's really interesting. I mean, building a new product based on some new technology like this or any new technology, it really does make you think differently. And so a lot of the engineers that we're hiring and so on, they're not the typical old school file system engineers. I mean, these guys are real computer scientists, kind of guys that are where they're creating secret sauce that has a lot to do with very sort of in-depth, how you design data structures to be efficient. Very nitty gritty stuff like this that's, with our CTO, for example, from MIT. I mean, it takes that kind of brain power to figure this stuff out and do it well. And I think it's just a very interesting dynamic going on at Nimble, especially with this set of engineers that are just dealing with these new technologies and trying to make them work well. It's obviously, you know, I love the buzzword, consumerization of IT. It's been kind of kicked around for a while. I love it because it really points to the future, which is the notion of a consumer experience in an enterprise is now what everyone wants. Applications are driving that. So you now have some great things happening under the coverage, virtualization. You got flash, you got some of these technologies. You got even, STN is making, chipping away at some progress here. But what is the big thing under the coverage? In the engine of innovation, in the architecture, what is the big game changing trend that you see that you see is gonna be more compelling, most compelling? So you mentioned flash, what else do you see happening? Is it the workloads? Is the virtualization, is it the software? Yeah, I think, you know, virtualization, I think is a key thing. You know, and that's kind of obvious. I mean, that's where everything is going. I think the other thing, I guess, is really the management of these things. I mean, we really try to make it very simple, you know, for the array. But you kind of got to look at it at the bigger picture now. Again, I think it's, you know, when you talk to the storage guy, the storage guy really now is responsible for making sure that all these other applications are working well, whether it's the database or exchange or whatever, you know, SAP app is on there. You know, all this sort of stuff is really now, as it's converging onto the same storage platform and without having all these silos. You know, how do you really manage all that stuff and deploy it easily to all of these constituents that are within your company? You know, as the storage guy, I mean, I think the storage guy really has become in the focus point now. And you kind of, you know, sort of relegate all of the performance requirements and everything else to that once you've converged everything. So, you know, you really don't want your DBAs having to worry about performance anymore. They've got enough things to worry about. So, I think how you manage all of that, those applications coming together and making sure that they're running well and so on is kind of the key thing and how you deploy that in this virtualized environment. That's, you know, again, that's sort of a focus that we've had on it making that easy for our community. Yeah, and you can, when our last time we were talking about automation and whatnot. And, but the buzzword of hybrid cloud is the big thing in the enterprise right now. Hybrid cloud, I mean, that's, but if you peel back hybrid cloud, you're basically talking about cross management, IDing, storage network, app mobility, everything else, a long list of things. They're all kind of interrelated now. You can't silo out things. That's a big challenge. How do you see that resolving? I mean, obviously it's not 100% complete. People coming out, it's loses now in platforms, but as a CIO and I'm looking at this environment saying, hey, I'll do some hybrid cloud. I might want to use Amazon Azure or whatever. OpenStack, great. I got apps to run. I got storage to deal with. Pretty complicated. How do you see all this thing playing out? Yeah, I guess, you know, like today as it's happening, there's obviously a place for those cloud storage, you know, Azure and the like. I think if you're really looking at, you know, high performance, very, very latency critical kind of applications, you know, that that sort of, you know, still fits within the data center. Maybe you're going out to a managed service provider or something to provide that for you separately from some of the big cloud storage providers that really aren't going to allow you to have that kind of, you know, very low latency, you know, very, you know, tightly managed environment that really suits your needs and can grow with you as you go. So I think that's, you know, it's kind of stay separate. You know, obviously our focus is really, you know, making sure that when we build our product that it's really as a converge solution, really, you know, providing that, you know, high performance for the mixed workloads that you're going to have that are latency critical. So I think there's still some separation there, you know, from what you get out of a cloud storage solution versus something like Nimble. Talk about to the, talk to the folks out there, the young guns coming into the industry. You know, us old guys have been around the block. We've seen the archaic old IT days, you know, from mainframes through client server to the PC revolution to internet working, all that good stuff. Now the web, now you got this, you know, the guys coming into the environment now do have either large scale programming backgrounds. There might be hardware engineers. There might be front end coders. So what are, though there might be a DevOps guy. Hey, I want integrated stats. I want reference design. I want pre-engineered everything. So when you talk to the young folks out there, what do you say to them? Like you're lucky or like put your battle gear on. I mean, what's your advice to the folks out there getting into the business who really want to get in and get their hands around some of this new tech. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I mean, I guess, you know, if they're really the new guys, you know, the key thing is get an internship somewhere at a high tech company, preferably Nimble. But, you know, so we have a lot of interns at Nimble and it really is interesting because they're pretty diverse set of disciplines within computer science. I mean, there's a lot of them out there. But, you know, I've actually had a guy that I knew for years, you know, contact me the other day about coming into Nimble. And, you know, you really are looking for just talented people that, you know, not necessarily the skill set, but you really want talented people because things change so fast. You know, you might be, think you're skilled at X, but, you know, and you won't fit in Y, but it's not necessarily true. I mean, it's, you know, once you're talented- I interviewed Tyler Bell at Factual. He was an archeologist, no, data scientist. So I was like, you don't know. Musicians can be the best- Yeah, data scientists are typically guys that are from Biomed kind of stuff, you know, because they're dealing with big numbers and they have a, you know, a brain about analytics and so now they're, you know, working with Siegel databases doing analytics. My final question for you is, what are you most excited about right now in the industry, in the Nimble, and all around you? What's orbiting around your world, personal tech, stuff you're interested in tech in general and also within Nimble? What's super exciting to you? Well, you know, I guess, you know, if I look back like four or five years ago, or even longer when I was at, you know, another storage company, you know, I just didn't think there was another boom in storage coming. I mean, it just, back then, it felt like that's done whether I don't want to be in that sort of game anymore. Snorage, boring. Yeah, and then, you know, and then when I heard from Varun, you know, about what he was, you know, starting up with Nimble, I mean, it just opened my eyes that there's always a new technology and there's always gonna be somebody out there that's thinking about how to apply it to an existing problem in a different way and solving a different problem. So, you know, I think just, you know, I mean, storage absolutely has me excited again. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff coming down the road. I think, you know, that we're looking at and I'm sure a lot of others are that, I just think you'll see continuous innovation, you know, going forward. And I thought it was, you know, sort of at the end of 10 years ago and it's back again, so I mean. What's the one thing you could say out to customers out there that's around the corner that they might not be aware of that's gonna be in their environment, that's gonna change over the next five or 10 years? What radical thing is gonna evolve in your opinion that the customers might not see coming that'll be goodness for them? I don't know on that one. Integrated stacks, I mean, no, in terms of like their environment today, I mean, you guys, you guys are certainly a disruptive product. What's the next disruption that's coming from around the corner? Is it management? Is it the new devices? Is it cloud? What's your take on that? I guess I'll rephrase it that way. Yeah. You know, I think cloud, you know, well, it's got so much hype now. It's almost inevitable that something's gotta come out of it that'll benefit a lot of people, you know, and that'll be the next big wave beyond that, I don't even know at this point. Yeah, well, it's a software world data. You guys do some great stuff with automation. Congratulations on all the success that Nimble, we really love watching you guys. Now you're public, we're lucky that you look at the numbers. I know you won't talk about some of the numbers on camera, but we appreciate it. Brad, thanks for joining in this CUBE conversation. All right, great, thank you. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.