 Okay, we're back. We're live from EMC World. Pat Gelsinger's playing in the background. We're here with Peter from OxygenCloud and Pat and John. Pat Gelsinger was just setting up the stage, talking about fundamental shifts in technology, how virtualization has changed everything and Chad Sackage is up there now doing an SAT. Well, I mean, data as gravity is something that we've been talking about in theCUBE. Obviously, we've been doing big data for a while, had Duke and doing stuff with social data. Gravity is really true and I like his analogy of apps were bound to the infrastructure and then now data is at a whole other level of innovation. So the old way was app-centric, now it's app and data-centric. So again, this disrupts Peter, the whole cloud notion because the role of data is fundamental across the architecture because now data is not bound necessarily to the application. It's actually decoupled. So how about that, Peter, Chad? I mean, your value proposition as OxygenCloud is, you know, get your data. It can be anywhere and access it from any device. So talk about that a little bit and what you're seeing in the marketplace and what you guys are bringing. Yeah, so I fully echo what you just said, Mark, about how things are being decoupled. Our approach to making data available anywhere isn't to treat it as another application. Let's get another web portal. Let's get another desktop app in place. Let's treat it as an infrastructure problem. So fundamentally, we have data that's stored inside IT or in wherever environments, but the users are not there anymore. How do they get to it? Instead of creating an app that you can say a website that you can upload and download and get your data from, let's enable the infrastructure fundamentally. Let's make the data itself, the storage itself mobile. So what we've done is virtualized, we created a virtualization layer around data that allows that data to be stored in any location in public, private cloud, but accessed as if it's natively available on that local machine, a virtual file system that wraps it all around. What's your vision on how that enables the utility message because we were just talking about the keynote and making notes here about agility. We were talking about agile IT, but also on the service provider side. I'll say data and agility is key. What's your vision on that? And what are the business benefits you're seeing around this new trend? Yeah, agility is, I think, traditionally agility is talked about as being able to move processing from one location to another. Let me fire up a VM in the cloud and I can have burst into the cloud. That's the capability. But a big sort of linchpin of that is you can move your processing into the cloud, but if your data is at home in a different location, you can't really do that much processing. You still have to move that data and data is what's sort of impacting that agility. If we're able to liberate that data, if you're able to virtualize that data so that it can be reconnected with any kind of computing, reconnected with any kind of application, you can enable this true agile message that Pat's talking about. Figure out how to solve the speed of light problem. Is that gonna work? That's next. We're close. But in a sense, you're coming up with a solution that addresses that fundamental problem, right, Chuck? Yeah, I mean, so Pat's up there talking right now. You can see the theme, Dave, already emerging here at Pat's keynote is about the customer attraction. So, again, go back to three years ago and start two full years of the queue. We've always said proof points is the key. So you're seeing the visa, you're seeing SAP examples, I'm sure you'll have a lot more customers. Peter, talk about some of the realities in the marketplace right now around the deployment. So rapid building, provisioning, the cycles of deployment by IT and or infrastructure is accelerating. So what proof points are you seeing out there as well? Yeah, I think this cycle is just beginning. So we've sort of seen on the consumer side, this acceleration in terms of applications being created and lots of different varieties of apps being produced out by the market, but all focused on the consumer. I think that technology or those lessons learned there are now being absorbed in IT. How do they take advantage of this more fluid infrastructure of this more fluid technology to create value added applications that solve real enterprise problems? So what we're seeing is companies, enterprises being very interested in this, but looking for answers, looking for help and how they can approach. So he's bringing up concepts like rapid build provision we just mentioned that he just brought up size of data, petabyte scale, zeta bytes around the corner, and then he also mentions value. What are you seeing in terms of the value proposition relative to these new architectures? Yeah, that's a very important question. The infrastructure makes things possible, right? So big data architecture might make it possible for you to be able to store and crunch a lot of data, but what you do with it, that's what's next. That's where the value actually comes from, is how can you build on this infrastructure to create things that change people's lives? What are you seeing for customers out there in terms of like whether their current needs are, obviously in public cloud everyone talks about, oh yeah, non-critical, but at SAP last week we were hearing some critical infrastructure, some core is moving to the cloud so they bought success factors in the SAP environment. Now EMC is talking private public hybrid. What are you seeing in terms of the traction? What use cases are you seeing as the most traction? The use case that we see every day are around enterprises wanting to provide access to enterprise content in the cloud. So cloud-based devices like iPad, iPhones, remote computers, they exist, they're already out there, the employees want access to information through those mediums. So that's a real hotbed. How can you provide access to all this enterprise content with the security, with the control that enterprises absolutely need? So let me ask you a question more of on a startup, you're an entrepreneur, you're leading a company that's growing, and you're navigating the waters of a highly volatile, massively growing marketplace that we're in right now. We talk about the nasancy of the cloud and big data markets really in the early, early days. As a startup, how do you navigate the surge of movement by these big whales like EMC? I mean, obviously they're laying out this massive value proposition, got VMware with their stack, it's filling in since VMworld 2010, IBM out there, HP kind of struggling a little bit, a little bit. But you know what I'm saying, but these big guys are making these moves, how do you navigate the waters? These seismic changes, these big whales are moving around it. Yeah, it's definitely a tough challenge. The way I sort of approach it is that the need for the market exists and the market wants what the market wants. The big companies also want to provide what the market wants. But they don't necessarily have the technology or the speed to deliver that. You know what I'm saying, let's face it. They're going for a big chunk, yeah. They're going after big giant pies and they got a legacy customer, they can't move fast, right? That's UV startups, right? So our strategy there is to be relevant, right? To provide the basic technologies, to provide the approach that can build the early market. So towards that, and we have the big partnership with EMC, that's why we're at the show, we provide anywhere access to EMC storage, Icelon, Atlas, VNX. So that provides that bridge to go to the next step. And of course, there I'm leveraging EMC's reach and EMC's. Yeah, their ecosystem. They're thermals, so the market places are always like thermals, right? You want to be underneath that and get sucked up into the growth, right? So you're going to try to position in there. That's our strategy so far and it's been working out. So you plug their storage into your grid? Yes. And then you discover it, you map it, and make it available to mobile devices or anything. Exactly, exactly. We allow, we enable EMC customers to use the EMC storage that they're familiar with, use that to solve their cloud access and cloud storage problems without having to say, hey, let's give up, let's move to the public cloud, let's not deal with this anymore. Which obviously is not that popular. A lot of people would say, well, people send us all the time to guys like EMC and NetApp. Oh, Facebook doesn't use your storage, or whomever, name a web company. They don't use that storage, so you're in big trouble. What you're saying is, well, that may be true, and it is true, those guys don't use a lot of any traditional legacy storage. But now you're going to the enterprise and you're like, what about you guys? You don't want to rip that out. So you're giving them an alternative. Do you see it as a bridge or do you see it at the cost of that storage with your service coming down to the point where they actually can be competitive with white box storage in that you've got a lot of infrastructure that you have to put around it, you know, the white box stuff. You got to have dev ops, you got to really be, you have rock stars, you understand it. Not everybody is Google and Facebook. Not everybody has those types of engineers. How do you see that playing out? Yeah, I think the first thing to recognize there is that the way a Google uses storage or the way a eBay uses storage, it's different from how regular IT uses storage. They're using storage in an asset scale for a very specific application with very specific needs. This is not generally the case in an IT environment where you've got a lot of other considerations. It's not one application by many and it's not just about new data but it's also about existing data. So it's more complicated. So cost wise, when you generally compare, you can look at cloud having economy of scale but that economy of scale really doesn't exist in the enterprise where there's so many different types of applications involved. Toward your point Dave, I think it is a bridge. I think everybody is going to do, we're going to eventually be managing storage as a service. That I think is a foregone conclusion. The question is, what are the qualities of that service? Where does that data live and how do you drive the lower costs? And I think IT storage in the IT context, if you're aware of, if you can take advantage of that awareness of that, you could drive much lower overall costs than using a public storage or Wi-Fi storage. So talk about more about storage as a service. So you obviously bring the ability from a location, GL location standpoint and access and mobility, which is huge in part of cloud storage as a service. What about things like, you think of S3, swipe the credit card, I'm going to pay as you go. Do you see that capability coming to organizations? I mean, we just did a survey and still, the vast majority of organizations have no charge back or if they have charge back, it's like we have one bill that we just sort of lump into the admin costs, the overhead costs. How important are things like charge backs and pay as you go to really succeed for enterprises to succeed at that cloud model? Yeah, I think it's not one thing. Clearly the ability to be able to provision storage or resources to users very fast. And on that end, EMC Amos does a great job of providing a cloud-based infrastructure that you can deploy internally in-house and roll out to your users. That part is definitely important. But it's really, we're not just providing storage to end users, because what are you going to do with that? There's nothing you, end user doesn't, give it end user S3 storage, what are they going to do with that? There's nothing to do with that. So it's really about how you take that infrastructure and marry it to what John was talking about earlier, the value at the application sitting on top of all this infrastructure to make it more valuable. And that's the build out, that's the broom that I think we were beginning to that in a couple years from now, you're going to see many, many more applications sitting on top of cloud approaches to infrastructure. We were at Sapphire last week, I guess it'd be Sapphire. And this is our third year at Sapphire. And last year you started to see executives carrying around iPads, Bill McDermott talked about how he purchased 3,000 iPads, Steve Jobs called them up and said, why, what are you doing with this? That was very cool. Oliver Busman, the CIO, runs around with an iPad, everybody does. So SAP is really enabling, now when you really peel the skin, what you find is it's a lot of travel and expense reporting, good, good stuff. But it's not sort of iTunes like experience just yet. That's maybe where they're going. Do you see that as where the enterprise will go and what role do you play? Yeah, definitely the iPad. And we also hear this a lot. We have customers that, it's routine now to hear about 1,000 iPad deployments centrally pushed out to end users here and also internationally. There's no doubt that the sexiness of the iPad, the use case of being able to travel light and get the information you need is very, very attractive. And that's the entry point, but that will be the entry point that I think brings on a much more fundamental change. For the enterprise, for end users, as it becomes accepted as the infrastructure pushes in, things will change. And we're certainly, Oxygen is certainly writing that boon to support the iPad access question, but in that process, put in infrastructure that allows storage to be much more efficiently accessed and managed, allow end users to do more than just, hey, I can get my file while I'm on the road. Our vision is to build out a complete platform that not only provides access to content that you put into the system, but access to all content in the enterprise and then taking advantage of that dataset to be able to provide value added services and applications to directly to end users. So you're trying to be much more than an S3 competitor? Absolutely. Obviously there are guys out there that are front-ending S3, bringing in services. How do you compete with those guys? So we're definitely not in the cloud storage business in the sense that we don't sell cloud storage. That's not what we're about. We're that middleware layer that sits between the user and the cloud storage to make all of that infrastructure or that capacity much more useful. So we're much more interested in how we can enable new things, right? New applications on top of all of this. And our key focus that may be different from competitors is we don't think of ourselves as an application. We think of ourselves as part of the infrastructure. So we're building from the bottom up to enable new classes of data applications, big data applications. And I think that trend is going to give us an advantage and we already have many exciting things that are in the labs right now that we'll be seeing in the next six months. We'll be announcing the next six months that we'll demonstrate this point about how you can drive a lot more value with applications on top of this infrastructure. What's your channel model? How do you go to market? Well, today we're focused on the enterprise market. Oxygen since inception has always been in the enterprise market. That's my background. So it's a direct sales? Or how do you go to market for the channel? Is it as you go through EMC, for example? It is a, today we have a channel driven strategy through EMC and other distributors who already have the user base are seeing the problems around storage and how do you get access to storage? And we provide that blue, that application or that infrastructure grease that makes that possible. Okay, so they're selling a solution and you get a license fee off of that. Is that how it works? Sometimes. Sometimes it's a lead referral type of notion. Other times it's a joint development, joint solution development. There are a lot, there is a lot of interest. We have major discussions with EMC and all the other players that are off. This is an extremely hot area and I think everybody is trying to figure out how does it all fit together? And that's what's exciting, right? It is, at the end of the day, when the chips settle, who's going to be around? Who's going to be relevant? And Oxygen's aiming to be the player that's relevant. Well, and you're not threatening to some of the traditional legacy guys or some of these new startups. Like Francis John, we've had Scott Gennaro on from Nirvonix. I mean that's threatening to some of the legacy storage guys. I think Nirvonix is one of those startups like Oxygen that's emerging and Nirvonix in particular, Dave, has been doing really well with their recent wins at petabyte scale. And we're talking about comparing Dropbox, Box.net and these emerging companies and Nirvonix has got massive petabyte deals and the Scuttlebutt within Silicon Valley is that although Box has got all these thousands and thousands of customers, they just don't have a lot of petabytes under their roof and only has two data centers. So there's a lot of debate about what really is the viability about the actual data in these infrastructures and is it a software layer versus an actual cloud storage. So that's why this whole platform as a service debate around race to zero is interesting. So on one hand you got the bubble innovation around Box and Dropbox and then you got the real kind of the meat and potatoes of Nirvonix doing well, completely different metrics. So Box obviously valuations dwarfing Nirvonix. So in case the market's valuing number of customers over actual petabytes. So it's an interesting conversation. Yeah, I mean, and it's two different worlds but they're related, you know, when you start evaluating them from an evaluation standpoint, right, an enterprise customer, you know, looking for security and I'm presuming you're seeing this, right, partnering with you to see you're looking for recoverability and data protection. Yeah. Do you feel, but John's making an interesting point, the market, whatever that is, the VC market is valuing some of these consumer plays much, much higher than the enterprise play. You see that a lot, you know, the B to C really starts out exploding and then the B to B actually, you know, slow and steady is really worth it. Well, if someone puts their credit card down and does some file sharing, like saying in Box was their number one value proposition, that's interesting. It's got some stickiness to it, but you have upsell opportunity. So they're really valuing the future value of the company and Nirvonix is doing much more serious infrastructure around the petabyte scale. And as is Oxygen Cloud presumably with your partners. Is that right? So do you see that being as valuable a component? Is the market as big? Is it, you know, should you come in? It's a tough choice, right? Do you go for the customers? Do you go for the core infrastructure? Yeah, well, for Oxygen, it's definitely about being relevant in the enterprise. And there it's not really about app or infrastructure. It's really about how you drive value, right? The Box, Nirvonix and Box are very different. And Nirvonix is definitely more infrastructure and provide a storage layer. Whereas Box is really an application. More collaborative, more collaborations. More collaborative, you know, higher up. They've gotten some traction and certainly a lot of funding. So I think that's what's exciting. But it's like you said, there aren't these petabyte announcements, right? They're not necessarily a file storage company. I mean, Box.net just opened a new data center in Vegas. They've only had one data center literally for the life of their company. So it's interesting, they're a cloud play but not only have two data centers. Yeah, and they probably wouldn't measure themselves that way. I mean, it's definitely about end users and the number of end users. I think Box is a great example, Dave, of like a company that does something really well and sticks with it and establishes that marketplace for that. And they've done that on the collaborative side. We've had Whitney on here in the queue last year at EMC World. Yeah, obviously very focused, right? And that has its advantages. Well, it depends, right? How sticky really is it? You can have thousands of customers that they're actually not really using the application. You have the risk of being heckled the nightclub effect. It's hot one day and not hot the next. It's like you said, they're valuing the future value of the company and they've got this freemium model and hopefully it'll be premium but you guys are going at completely different things, right? You're getting your extracting value for every transaction, it's a transaction based model. It is a, our value is about the enterprise of what we enable. So we generally do enterprise site licensing. Yeah, you're not giving stuff away to see what happens. Where the value that we're creating isn't, well the valuation on Box is really a bet on this, right? Everything is going to be in the public cloud and that a web portal with synchronization is how everybody wants to access their data. That is debatable, right? And from Oxygen's point of view, we think that the cloud is everywhere. What's the key trend that's driving your business right now? I mean as the CEO you got to navigate through all those issues, growing and building a company, product strategy, making sure you're in the right shape. What's the one thing within your company that's unique to Oxygen that's in the DNA of your company and two, what's that key trend that's driving your business? Yeah, the key sort of, the key DNA that makes us different from everybody else is our approach as infrastructure. So we're not thinking about an application, we're thinking about how do we enable the fundamental storage to support these types of new applications. So big difference, what we are value to the market today is that we don't require you to upload all your data to the cloud just to get access. We don't require you to give up control. We have a solution that says you've got storage, you know how to manage it, and you've already paid for it. Why not use that storage, that infrastructure to support cloud access? You don't have to just throw up your hands and give your data up to the cloud. And the key trend driving your business? Control over data, virtualization. The enterprises want to offer these virtualized services. So data liberation? Data liberalization. Freedom of data, liberating the data. As a control point, perhaps. Right, it's freedom for their employees to access their data, but while still we're maintaining full control of that data. And you mentioned enterprise credibility and relevance, right? So that's going to be around compliance, protection. Yes, there are a whole series of discussions. Selling to a single end user. It's really about this application. Does it do the one-use case that I needed to do? Usually share files. Sure, but if you're selling to the enterprise, they have a lot more considerations. There's a lot of questions. How do they pick this as the approach for going into the future? And that's where we really excel at is creating that enterprise class service for the market. Peter, thanks for coming on and expanding the conversation. We're going to take a quick break here on theCUBE. Get a coffee. We're going to go right back to Pat Gelsinger's keynote and we'll be right back with more commentary here inside theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's coverage of EMC World 2012, which kicks off their agenda for this year, so we'll be right back.