 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Here were theCUBE's expansive coverage from Oracle OpenWorld 2015 here in San Francisco. Here with Kevin DeNutriot, who's the CEO of Violin Memory. Many people know Violin, publicly traded company. Kevin, thank you for joining me here at Oracle OpenWorld. Good morning Stu, good to be here. All right, so Kevin, you and I were talking offset here a little bit. The storage industry is a dog eat dog world. Things take so long to change typically, but it seems over the last kind of 12 to 18 months, just all the rules are changing and there's big changes. I mean, what was it in the last couple of weeks? There's almost a hundred billion dollars of acquisitions in this space. What do you see as some of the big changes and what's happening to the storage industry? Sure, so I do believe this move from disc to flash is one of the biggest disruptions that we've seen in tech. And I liken it to when mainframes went to mini computers, mini computers to PCs. It tends to be so disruptive that it destroys the legacy leaders of an industry and a new set of leaders have to grow up to take the new space because the switch of a 30 or 40 billion dollar industry and technologies that quickly just disrupts the whole way you think about things, the whole way you think about leaders. And I think that's what's happening in the disc to flash movement, along with other disruptions of cloud and virtualization at the same time has created an opportunity, I think, for IT professionals to really make a difference in how they make their decisions. Yeah, so Kevin, I guess if we look at the two acquisitions that happened most recently, I mean, Dell buying EMC. EMC, like we said, started the whole storage industry as we know it today. And Sandisk, I mean, is a component company. They had bought Fusion I.O., who had IPOed. You know, what do you see as the landscape? You know, how does storage fit into some of those things that you talk about? Virtualization and cloud and system designs. I mean, Oracle's here talking about Exadata and Enterprise Cloud and, you know, they've got that legacy sun technologies that they bought. Well, I think generally integrated systems are a growing trend, whether you talk about hyper-converged in the virtualization space, or what we've tried to do with the flash storage platform of integrating the high level data services, the deduplication data efficiency engines you need, along with, you know, a architecture to manage flash. And more you can integrate for the customer and simplify it as the growth is so explosive with big data today and the internet of things still on the horizon. Okay, can you unpack for us a little bit the solutions that violin builds? Most people when they hear integrated, they think of kind of a stack. Is, you know, are you putting the storage together? Is reference architecture, is it converged? Hyper-converged? Are those just buzzwords? I mean, we see, as you said, systems are becoming more and more the way people buy things. So how do people buy violin as a product line? You know, who is the buyer? And how have you seen that been changing the last couple of years? So I think flash has gone through a couple of distinct stages. The first was about performance when we invented the market. It didn't really matter what it cost with solving the bottleneck that we saw on disk. Then it kind of moved to, I think, really growing substantially over the last couple of years around virtualization. And that's when deduplication and compression technology became so important. It's now mainstreaming. So we now think primary storage is gonna really collapse the multiple tiers that we have because of the deficiencies of disk into a single flash tier for all the active and primary workloads. So we've been targeting over the last couple of years to really intercept that beginning of that process and really create a single platform for the sand today. We only attack the sand. But to really give a single platform that you can consolidate all of your workloads, run your databases at the highest speed, run data efficiency applications like virtualization when you want to, and integrate that into a single simple platform to really get under not just the CAPEX that's growing because data storage demand is growing so much, but the OPEX that's been created by all of these multiple tiers, moving workloads around, having to do backup windows, all of that stuff can just be really extracted from the equation today. And that's why we talk about IT professional storage decision makers whoever they are today can be instrumental in making this change that can give a large enterprise an increase in application performance of 10x and probably a reduction of cost by 75% or more. So Kevin, you bring up a lot of good points there. Operations has been holding back IT in a lot of ways. For so long I've been talking, how much are people running around the data center, turning knobs, optimizing, creating a bespoke infrastructure that they have for this environment. Today, the business is driving a lot of these decisions. It's not storing just a store. I mean, we talk about the digital universe and how much data is being created, but if I can't get more value out of the data, if I can't create more business out of what I'm doing, why does it matter what I store? Yeah, so what do you see some of those business drivers, how does violin become critical to the way business runs? Sure, so I think that's, the use cases we're discovering and we are discovering them as we go along, but if you look at retail, for instance, inventory is the heartbeat of a retailer and we've taken the largest retailers in the world from taking a week to analyze inventory to a day. So nightly they can make distribution and pricing decisions. So that would be in retail. In a telco or cable, for example, where you're billing lots and lots of users, the billing system, we've seen a telco increase revenues by 150 euro a year just by putting their billing system on flash, identifying someone running out of minutes, messages, data, and being able to shut it off, make them a new offer and rebuild them for a new offering. So we see business cases because of flash and the speed that it delivers to these applications, changing the competitive dynamics or the way that you can operate your business. So it can be revenue driving, it could be efficiency driving, and that's what's changing the landscape along with the cost transformation, the total cost of ownership of a data center today. So Kevin, can you give us this product update? What's new with the product line? What should people be thinking of? And who are you competing? Who do you disrupt? And who are some of the top competitors that you're seeing out in the marketplace? So today we still primarily are competing with the big boys. So EMC, IBM, Atachi, and in their highest end product lines like VMAXs, VSPs from Atachi, or DSA case. So we're really attacking the high end of the marketplace and we've delivered what we call the Flash Storage Platform. It's a series of arrays along with a full suite of software that ranges from really a unique Flash architecture and Flash fabric architecture that doesn't use SSDs up through data efficiency software and all of the data management products to try and deliver a product line against those five, six, nine architectures that is very simple to use, can be controlled one, two, three clicks, all of the functionality, not have multiple products in the environment. So that's where we started, we announced it February of 2015. We've closed more than a dozen Fortune 500s. We should be at four Fortune 100s in the next couple of weeks. So at the high end of the market, really delivering a different value proposition than people have been able to get in the legacy hybrid array world. All right, so Kevin, can you give us kind of the company update? Your public company, are you jealous of all these guys that are going private lately? EMC has plenty of transitions they're going to be doing and they can do that out of the public eye now. What's your state on the kind of the public markets and the financial state of violent memory? Sure, so we knew a couple of years ago that we had to retool the product line because we didn't have the data efficiency software that we needed. And so we basically took a step back and really targeted for February launch that where we thought the marketplace was going, this mainstreaming of flash and primary storage. So we retooled both the balance sheet and the product line and the financials of the company, raised $120 million last year so that we had the runway to get through a product transition. We still have that 120 million in the bank, burning about 10 or 15 million a quarter, but can reach profitability in four to six quarters with the new product line that's been growing at basically 100% a quarter since it's been launched. All right, so Kevin, you've been talking to people about this transformation, what's going on in violent memory. If you wanna leave our watchers, what's the one thing they should understand about violent memory? Sure, I think that we were the pioneer of the industry and we have experience in the largest corporations in the world in their most mission critical applications all over the world and all verticals. And we've now delivered a platform that's truly transformational and IT professionals can be instrumental in changing the competitiveness of their businesses and the cost structure that it costs to keep the data center expanding in the new architectures of the future. All right, last thing I wanna close on is Oracle. Obviously a huge show here in San Francisco. Talk about how violent plays in the Oracle solutions. Sure, so Oracle has been one of the heartbeats of our success and that we've accelerated databases all over the world with the largest corporation. So we're very close to Oracle and really trying to understand how we can best take those core applications that make the world's businesses tick and speed them up so it changes the dynamics. Today we're having some fun. We've got some stars in the booth every day. Today we have someone who was very instrumental in the 49ers championships. We have Jerry Rice in the booth to really show that people make the difference and so we have a lot of technology. We think we're bringing to the market about our people and making the difference for the customers and we think customers can be instrumental in changing their businesses. Yeah, well, Jerry Rice definitely changed the game when it came to the wide receiver. Kevin Anucho really appreciate you coming, sharing the story of violent memory. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon here with theCUBE's coverage, Oracle Open World 2015. Thanks for watching. Thanks.