 Hey, welcome back to VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco, California, Muscle, South Lobby. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events. Extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante at wikibon.org. Hi, everybody. We're going to talk Flash with Ken Groey. He's here from Virenit. He's a worldwide vice president of CustomerOps. Ken, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for a long time. Watcher. Glad to be finally here. Great timing. Great timing. Thank you for everything that happens right here. Appreciate that. Yeah, so you're in a obviously smoking hot space. We've been talking about Flash all week. You saw the announcements of V-SAN from VMware. That's great news for you guys. And just give us the update on Virenit. You guys have really, we know Mike, saw Mike come on. All of a sudden things started happening and did the deal with Seagate. So what's the latest? Well, the crux is numbers speak more than anything. So I'm pleased to see that our company's grown 300% this year, which is a huge change. And I realize Flash is everything. If you walk the floor right now, and there's a lot of vibe, I think about 23,000 people across the show, I think almost 80% of the exhibitors are all around Flash. So the good news about Virenit, though, is we're really beginning to invest. We started generally availability of our FlashMax Connect software as of April. So there's a lot of talk about creating a Flash platform, but really we're really walking the walk now by having the product available, having our high availability software available, having our shareability software. So it's not just selling Flash for the performance aspects, Dave. It's really building and creating and leading a Flash platform transformation. And that's where we're going to get through. I think you've talked about prior questions about how do we get it to the enterprise space? So the web scale I think we all know is all PCI Flash-based, but how do we get to the brick-and-mortar enterprise space? And I think the familiarity of getting to a platform that looks like a sand, that feels like a sand, and has the data services of a sand, with albeit with the respect of the performance that microseconds that Flash, and only PCI Flash can provide from Verden. I think that's how you get to the enterprise accounts that everyone would like to see. Yeah, I mean, when you talk to the people in the labs, they tout your product as one of the best, if not the best out there, but so that Flash transformation, that's largely software-led. Absolutely, good catch. So talk about that a little bit. Well, it has to be software-led because at some point, basically if you, one of the troubles we have going through is do you want to buy a Flash array and some of the end-users might say where's PCI Flash makes more sense? Where it does make more sense is the heritage behind it. If you want to get close to the app and you want to be closer to the actual performance behind it, you want to get that performance, but you also want the familiarity so you can go back to the IT director, the sand administrator, and have the same type of data services or high availability that you might be accustomed to. So that kind of bridges the gap between the person who's representing or maybe being the database administrator, or maybe the application owner, or actually the people that are administrating the sand. So I mentioned the word transformation is I just didn't talk about how we're transforming the data center with Flash and getting a greener. I talk about how the people who manage the storage, how they need to be professionally transformed. I liken it to, we've been in the business for a while, I liken it to back when the first sands were sold. People were putting raid storage out there, but it wasn't until the transformation happened to sand and the IT professionals actually had to decide how you could have networking and actually have that available to everybody. That transformation's happening today, but with Flash, the building blocks PCI Flash, our company's uniquely equipped to actually bring out, for lack of a better word, a Veritas-like what they do on a sand basis, but actually have the high availability software, the shareability software actually in place so people can have the comfort and the familiarity with the actual sand in place and have the speed as far as PCI Flash. Ken, talk about the dynamic in the marketplace. I always talk to tele-entrepreneurs this, you get in the market as you're an entrepreneur, you build a company, you got to get on the field. You can't score a touchdown or hit a home run if you're not swinging at the plate or being on the field. You can't really do anything from the stands. You guys hit the Flash thermal growth, like all of a sudden the market was just realized, spun in your direction, your technology right there, you're right where the puck came to you, as they say in the Wayne Gretzky analogy, you guys were where the puck, you skated to where the puck was coming. What is it about Veritas that makes it today really hot? I mean, you guys are growing, got good growth. What's the 300% growth reason why that customers are buying tele? Share with the audience up there why. Three three. And what it is. Thanks for the question, John. I appreciate it. And thanks for acknowledging our growth. And I shout out to our founders, Kumar and Vijay, who started this company seven years ago and then basically morphed it from Nor Flash and the appliance over to PCI Flash two years ago. But the reason for the growth is really threefold. First off, if you're an OEM, you really resonate with the fact that you've got unconditional performance. The higher you beat up this car, the more there is an OEM would actually perform better for their applications. And that's why we're becoming a choice, given the Flash marketplace that's out there. So performance number one. Oh, unconditioned performance. If you go to our website, that's our tagline, unconditioned performance. However, you mentioned Wayne Gretzky, you're going with the pucks going to. With the pucks going to, and I think you will see our tagline kind of move towards, is more of a leading the Flash platform transformation. So I mean by that, it's the integration as Dave, you mentioned before, with high availability, with shareability, with caching software. At the kernel level, the actual design for Flash, having that available so you actually can make that transition. So no longer you clinging on to the sand tree, you move into the performance of actual Flash. So that helps in the end user. And what I've kind of done since I moved over in May is build what I think is a pretty good end user sales force. And September 10th, we'll talk about a partner community we'll be building as well. But if you get the end user, that creates a demand. We've been bringing on more and more OEMs. I mentioned this card before. So you got OEM, direct sales? OEMs, direct sales. Indirect? Indirect. Indirect will be announced December 10th. So, Ken, who are some of your big customers? I'm sorry. That's a big OEM, EMC, yes. EMC. Okay, so if you know Extreme Server Flash, that's it. You just got to scoop, EMC's doing it. Yeah, and then Seagate, of course, X8, their product. We're very happy to be one of the providers of them as an OEM. But over 50% of our sales to date have been to the direct end users. That's where a big part of our business and that's where it really resonates with people. If you look, I think Pat's first slide was, he talked about how the applications going from first to second to third. It's all consumer based. It's all, I carry an iPhone 5 everywhere I go when I try to work at that type of real time speed. With that type of transition to consumerized type applications, you need a third generation type, you know, building blocks. And that would be PCI Flash by Verde. So I wonder if we could unpack a little bit more how you guys differentiate. Sean, I've been talking all week, you know, we just had Jerry on from Craylock. Just talking about the number of players. I heard he really thought it was a big flip slide. And yeah, but of course the flip side of that is people saying, she's like the Winchester disk drives in the 1980s, you had 80 companies and you know, can the market sustain them all? So how do you guys differentiate from all the, you know, we always say extract the signal from the noise. How do you differentiate from the other players out there? Well, first off, for the people who know the business, the people that buy them by the pallet full, let's call it the scale and accounts, the people that are leading us there. You've probably named the names before. Those customers, the Flash innovators, they're buying pervasive Flash. They're the people who enjoy using the customer, using the actual product itself because it's got the highest high-end performance. So on condition performance, you don't have the outliers. The more you hit it with the high-thread writes, the higher-thread reads, that's where you really shine. So thanks for noticing that. As far as the customer base, I mean, the ability to have a V-caching product with a right back, no one else had, well, one of two players that have that. As far as the VHA software, it's uniquely positioned so you have the same familiarity out there. And then every time we give an end user presentation for my Salesforce, when you see the V-sharing capability as far as software, that's truly unique, Dave, in the marketplace. Talk about that V-caching with the right back. As I said, that's unique. So describe what that is and what makes it so hard. Well, the reason why it's hard is you've got to have it so it conforms to the existing systems. You have to have in place so that the actual methodology in place as far as the applications in the accounts are used to having different situations where you have the same familiarity, the same data services you have in place. With right back, you have different choices. You have right through, you have right around, a right back cache. And the fact that we've been in the flashing business, you mentioned and acknowledged the new appliance with our founders, this is known our first attempt in the flash marketplace. We've been in the business in five years before we went to PCI Flash. We can do the hard business and we can do the different choices for customers, whether it be right back, right through, or right around as far as the V-caching. But the truth is, when we go in and use our sales calls, they always resonate around shareability. They like the fact that you can put, this is a 2.2 terabyte card. They like to can share some of the namespaces and we call them V-shares across the different, so you actually have a shared pool of V-spaces around the different pool of flash. I think earlier today, I know Carl mentioned it. I know Pat mentioned it yesterday. That's truly unique for us. The ability to share and access is across more users. But you had mentioned, I think when the RAID vendors were out there, there was like 20 something RAID vendors, but then after the change to the same marketplace to get down to two or three, I think you didn't see that type of change around flash as well. There are five or six PCI flash vendors. I think we're going to be one of the three or four that people bet their business on because we have the familiarity of having that software and that's where our investments are. Ken, talk about something that's, I've always get a stickler on buzzwords, but do some of these things matter? High availability is a word that's like a punchline. It's like cost of ownership. It's relevant, but I want to ask you specifically, what has changed in the current marketplace around high availability? High availability is a table stakes kind of deal for a lot of the infrastructure side. I mean, that's a goal everyone wants high availability. It's like freedom, right? So, but what is about high availability today? Well, that's different than what's a couple years ago. I'll give a tangible example. One of our best use cases with the VHA software that you just mentioned as well is Oracle Rack. Some of our customers want the demands of Oracle Rack and the way that that can seamlessly work in their environment. And to be blunt with you, you get the speed of PCI flash, but the affordability of putting a few cards in your environment and have that be able to do it, but you have the blessing and the endorsement of actually having a rack environment have it out there. So that's the way I view high availability at the highest levels, five-ninth type availability where the customers can depend upon it. And that's something you guys pitch a lot with your clients? All day, it's probably your second most proficient use case. So performance and high availability kind of go hand in hand. I mean, well, sometimes they don't. I mean, people don't have high availability if they don't go down. They're not performing. So it's kind of like a implied benefit. John, it's database. We're doing great in the retailing marketplace. So think the bricks and mortar type companies that are putting a front end that looks amazing like Google or amazing like Amazon or amazing like Facebook, but there's still the large retailers you might go shop on a weekend with. So the people at the show are talking about two major themes we're hearing. Follow the applications, application-centric infrastructure and enabling infrastructure that's going to be available to enable the apps to basically run DevOps and or create infrastructure. So what are you guys doing? What's the innovation strategy around the, enabling the middle of the stack? Because VMware can't get to the top of the stack and innovate until they fix the middle of the stack, which is performance, availability, but enabling apps. Flash seems to really sit beautifully for the apps. It's like a memory tier. It's not also, you can put it for disk. So what are you guys doing in that area? What can you talk about for customers? Whatever we can do to make it seamless. So people enjoy using VMotion. What we can do to enjoy so that seamless for VMotion, I mentioned Oracle Rack before. One thing I'd like to do is in my past, we enjoyed seeing VMware and I think Pat went through the slides before where VMware has got to a point there's more virtual servers in place than physical servers. I think three, four years ago it went above 50%. Merits, Merits, 2010. Okay, thank you. So what we need to do in the value we provide to our OEM partners and our end users, that last 25%. So even the most proficient, virtualized customer out there, they need that last minute to get their tier one critical applications, fully virtualized. And I think it's one of the mantas that I know Carl was talking about, was Pat was talking about. This flash technology gets the mission critical applications so they can be virtualized as well. Because I think this whole robust environment here, 23,000 people, would benefit if it was 100% virtualized. So final question for you, we're up on time here, Ken, you guys have got great growth. What's next? What's around the corner? Can you just give us a peek around the corner for you guys? Did you mention messaging, some new messaging that might be coming around? But what else is, what's going to be new for you guys? Well, thank you for acknowledging it. So it's leading the flash platform transformation. September tends to see a big announcement of our channel ecosystem, I appreciate that. You will see denser cards, but more importantly, we're investing all we can in our software. We want to lead that flash platform transformation. You will see future releases about different availability starts, card management and other sophisticated ways. So we can make it seamless as you're used to running your sand, but for flash network, flash network. So having that fabric in place, and again, it's addicting work in microseconds. The fact that the product can bring in 50 microseconds versus a familiarity where you should have around four to 10 milliseconds. People are going to like being close to the applications on the consumer side, and it's exciting time for us. We will keep the growth. For the potential new customers that might not know Viridin, explain to them real quick, we'll give you the final word of the segment. Why you've helped other customers that might be like them, and what should they know about Viridin? We'll wrap it up. Okay, great. On your third generation applications, you might add there a sequel, a new database that might be in place. Viridin is exactly your choice to put out there. It will give the speed you need that's out there in the familiarity of actually having the data services around our software, FlashMax Connect. If you have an existing second generation application that you'd like to get end of life, or a little more kick out of it, or a midlife kicker, whether it be Oracle, SAP, we even have a huge use case in one of the largest companies in China just put it in their exchange environment. That's a great use case as well. So today's performance, next generation type performance, but familiarity of data services that you've been around for 15, 20 years. And that's why I think we're leading the Flash platform transformation. So thank you. That's awesome. Flash is hot. As I always tell, Dave and I always talk about it. Under the hood is the engine of innovation. The apps are what's driving the car. All the instrumentation is there with big data. And Flash is a big part of it. Congratulations to you guys. So watch Viridin. We're going to be watching you guys. Viridin inside theCUBE. This is John and Dave here. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.