 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Oh, welcome back inside the Sands. We are in Las Vegas. We are live here on theCUBE, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage of AWS re-invent 2019 by welcoming in Eric Holberg, VP of Cloud Solutions at Infinidat. Eric, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, nice to see you too. So share a little bit at home for the folks who might not be too familiar with Infinidat. I know you guys big in data storage in terms of what's happening in the enterprise, but shed a little bit of light on that for us. Yeah, so Infinidat's all about reinventing the next generation of data storage at multi-petabyte scale. And whether that's through our on-prem appliances, where we have over 5.4 exabytes deployed now around the world, large enterprises, or whether that's through our cloud services like NutriX Cloud, which we're talking a lot about today and through the conference, we're solving large data challenges for customers with block or file storage requirements. We're doing that through technology that gets the price point of hard drives with the performance capabilities of solid-state media, DRAM and Flash, and we're doing it at very large scale, even though we kind of fly out of the radar a bit from a marketing standpoint. So there's a lot of interesting things going on with storage demand. There's no question that the cloud is eating away at some of the traditional on-prem. And there's very few companies that are gaining share rapidly. You happen to be one of them. Pure storage grew 15% this quarter, much, much lower. Generally, HPE shrinking, I think Dell EMC grew a little bit. IBM has been down, I don't think they've announced yet. So you're seeing a couple of things. Cloud eating away, and then all this injection of Flash, you're really the only guys who can make spinning disk run as fast as Flash. Everybody else is just throwing Flash at the problem, and that's created headroom. So, what are you guys seeing? Because you're clearly growing. You're a market share gainer, you have the advantage of being new and smaller. Talk about your business and how you're growing and why you're growing. It's nothing but growth, and it comes from this increase in the overall data that requirements that customers have, and it comes from the economic aspects of that data. Fundamentally, data storage is all about economics, and we're able to deliver through our technical advantage of blending disk, Flash, and DRAM an order of magnitude, cost, basis, advantage, and that translates into direct financial benefits that allow ultimately enterprises to do more with their data. That's what we're all about. So, as workload shift to the cloud, there's an on-prem component. We're going to talk about cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera, but you got a product called Nutrix. Talk about that and where it fits into this big macro trend that we just been talking about. Absolutely. So, Nutrix fits into the broader landscape in a couple of ways. First of all, many of the clients that we deal with are large enterprises, and they're in their relatively early stages of cloud transformation. So, Nutrix provides an easy on-ramp for them to come from our best-in-class on-prem infrastructure and make that data accessible in one or multiple clouds. And that kind of, maybe it's for Tastev, maybe it's for a disaster recovery, a pilot-light scenario, or a couple other use cases for general-purpose primary data storage. That's their on-ramp to then taking advantage of the more strategic value of Nutrix, which is allowing clouds to compete for the business on the compute side of things. You kind of hit a keyword in there too, so I'm going to transform. And we've talked about that a lot, transformation versus transition in terms of storage capabilities, enterprise storage capabilities, whatever. Take us through that transformation, if you will, and not the transition, and what's the paradigm change? What's going on in that space that's requiring people to make this dive into the deep end, if you will, and not just tickling the water with the toes? Well, I think there's two elements to it. There's a business and kind of a philosophical reorientation around taking advantage of flexible resources and allowing infrastructure to change over time and pay OpEx-based business models, that sort of stuff, and getting comfortable with that honestly is a journey into of itself because many procurement organizations, especially large organizations, they don't know what to do with a monthly bill or an uncommitted reserve amount or things like that. So part of it is being able to walk with the customer as they transform on the business side of things, and then the other side is accepting and going down the path of variable workloads, being able to accommodate large varieties of mixed data environments and be agile on the technology side so that you can put the data where it needs to be with the performance that it needs to be and with the capabilities that it needs to be. All right, so we're pressed for time, so I really want to get a few topics in it. For Infinity, I see three main opportunities broadly. One is on-prem stealing market share. We talked about that a little bit. Two is this multi-cloud thing, and we'll talk about that as well. If you're an on-prem company, you got to have a multi-cloud strategy, and even if you're a pure cloud company, you got to have a multi-cloud strategy. And the third is the cloud. You've got to embrace the cloud. If you deny the cloud, you're denying the biggest trend. So let's start with the cloud. What's your cloud strategy? What's your relationship with AWS, and how are you taking advantage of that? So we're all about delivering our data services in whatever means, whatever physical infrastructure, whatever underlying business model the customer requires. With that in mind, we deliver NutriX Cloud as a service for use with major public cloud environments, including AWS. And our relationship with AWS, they recognize, I think, they would say that we bring access to large-scale tier one environments all around the world, coming from our base on the on-prem. And they're very interested in obviously working with the customers on cloud transformation at the scale that we operate as well. So it's a mutually beneficial partnership. We're proud to be an APN member and all of that sort. Yeah, I mean, if you can put your stack in the AWS cloud, which is what you're doing, it's going to drive other services, right? It's going to drive ML and stage makers, and backup and all kinds of great things. Absolutely. Storage guys at AWS may not love you, but everybody else at AWS is going to be happy because you're driving other services. All right, let's talk about multi-cloud. It's obviously a controversial topic. We've got John Furrier every year does a exclusive interview with Andy Jassy. He's on the record, and I think he's right. He says, look it, multi-cloud is going to be more complex, less secure and more expensive. He's right. And he goes, but he also recognizes that there are multiple clouds out there. And so organizations have to participate in multi-cloud strategies. I've predicted as has Stu Miniman and John Furrier. Amazon's going to participate in that some day. Look at what they're doing in hybrid. So Amazon looks at multi-cloud as multiple public clouds and on-prem as hybrid. Come back to infinity. What's your multi-cloud strategy? So the great thing about our strategy is that we're able to deliver the same data in whatever public cloud environments the customer wants to deploy. So we actually run our own independent infrastructure that sits just outside the walled gardens of all the major public clouds. And then we can provide network connectivity using their direct connect interfaces or similar private network interconnects. All API-driven customer doesn't have to think about the underlying infrastructure. And fundamentally it allows them to subscribe to our storage as a service directly in whatever public clouds they choose. And now let's talk about the on-prem piece of that, which is the hybrid component using Jassy's sort of definitional framework. You've got Flex, that extender on-prem story. Talk about that a little bit. Absolutely, so our customers are saying, hey, I want the public cloud business model on the on-prem environment. And Flex is our answer to that kind of question. So we deliver essentially hardware, independence, price per gig per month. We maintain title to the asset, all that sort of stuff. And we're in charge of refreshing the infrastructure every three years. And we back it with a more than public cloud level availability guarantee, 100% availability guarantee for the Flex business model. We've seen companies flash-based products as backup targets. Infinidat uses a combination of flash and spinning disk to keep costs down. And you've got math magic to make it as performant. One of the things I like what you're doing is you're partnering with, I think most of, if not all, the backup software vendors in opening up new market opportunities and expanding your TAM by partnering with those guys. Talk a little bit about, can you give us some specifics there? Absolutely. So for example, we were presenting at the Veeam booth earlier this week about the intersection between at Finnebox and the Veeam backup software suite. And we have similar capabilities with some of the other backup platforms as well. So two sides to that. One, using the on-prem or cloud environments as a source. And there we have integrations with our snapshot technology specifically. And then two, using our Infinigard product on the on-prem side as a target. And there we have deep integration at an API level with the various backup platforms. So it's a cohesive universe where customers can take primary data, they can put it on Infinidat, they can use whatever enterprise backup platform, they can also put it as a target on Infinidat technology. And we're talking a lot about today, what about tomorrow? I mean, what's the bigger picture down the road? What's your crystal ball telling you in terms of future complexities and challenges and what you see where this is headed? I think from a storage standpoint at least, obviously lots of other complexities beyond that universe. But from a storage standpoint, people want to stop thinking about infrastructure. They want to think about cloud data services. They want to think about essentially going from storage arrays to storage clouds. We're doing that on on-prem, we're doing that in public cloud environments and we're knitting it all together with our initiative called the Elastic Data Fabric. Our ultimate goal there and what we think customers really want is to be able to get the data services that they want at any given instant through the business model they care about, independent of the underlying infrastructure. And that's what we're set up to deliver over the next couple of years at Infinidat. Thank you for the time. We appreciate that. By the way, Eric has become a very important cuber of EIC. His sixth appearance here on theCUBE. I wish we had a plaque or something to give you, but how about just an Ataboy? Thanks very much. We appreciate that, Eric. Back with more coverage here from AWS ReInvent 2019. You're watching us live, we're here on theCUBE.