 Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE, happy adaptive flash launch, brought to you by Nimble Storage. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman, we're here live at Nimble Storage for exclusive product announcement, Stu, Nimble Storage, big product launch with the large part of the market in storage, in the mid-market, really exploding, a lot of folks focusing on the high end, talking about all flash, this is a hybrid approach. What's your take before we get into the announcement? Yeah, John, so, you know, Nimble's been a fun company to watch. If you look, you know, we've been, you know, talking about storage on theCUBE since our first show at EMC World in 2010, talked to all the storage players and, you know, where's the innovation? What's really driving change in storage? And there were a few IPOs and a couple of them stumbled and Nimble's going strong. So, good revenue year over year, good differentiation in their product line and excited to see what they're going to talk. We've got some of their customers on, we've got some of the executives on and, you know, good things to do. We've been covering the flash market storage, obviously, for a very long time. Obviously, the convergent infrastructure is the hottest thing on the planet right now. You're seeing success at many levels where performance, cost per gigabyte and also throughput are huge issues. And it seems that not one trick pony kind of wins the game. So I want to get your take on the competitive landscape, specifically around the competition, right? We're seeing a lot of folks focusing on the high end, exclusively looking at transactions. Okay, that's great. But as flash goes mainstream, as a utility, as a technology, what's the implications for just normal mid-market enterprises? Sure. So, as we know, the enterprise tends to move a little slow. So if we look back to the founding of Nimble, you have people that came from the data domain, building new storage efficiency architectures, using things like, you know, thin provisioning and compression and flash to really change the economics. So rather than kind of the old way with kind of tiering, you know, the new way is, you know, really using software to be able to really manage how it's done, Nimble does what's called the castle architecture, which I'm sure we're going to talk about with Suresh. And, you know, going after, you know, NetApp's business, going after the VNX business from EMC. And, you know, they got checkboxes and a lot of character, John, you much can convert to infrastructure, they've got SmartStack, there's a whole lot of places that Nimble does fit into scale-out. We're live in Silicon Valley here at Nimble Storage Headquarters in San Jose. This is theCUBE. We go out to the advanced extractor, Sid Linois, big announcement here with Nimble Software. Still, I've got to talk to you about the company. One, they're a public company. They've done well with their performance. The numbers are out in the open in the public market. So it's a real marketplace on the competition side. There's a lot of private companies that have outrageous valuations, mainly in the all-flash array. And they're getting a lot of attention. Some say that's not a real market. That's just more of a private equity market. But what is the difference between hybrid and all-flash rate? And can you tease out why what they're doing in this hybrid approach is so important? Yeah. So, John, you're right. Right now, Nimble really plays really well in kind of the fat middle of the market. So then that mid-range customer, and as flash prices go down, the expected expectation with adaptive flash is that flash is going to be even more part of it. We know that Nimble is going to push higher up into the enterprise. Classic disruption that you start a little bit smaller and then you go into the bigger accounts. The financials, as you said, are real good. They did over $125 million last year. And they've got a $1.7 billion market valuation. So they're doing good growth. Their existing customers are buying more of what they're doing. So interesting to see where they're going to go with it today. And absolutely, we're going to dig into that discussion of hybrid consumers, all flat and gray. Where's their real revenue? Because Nimble's got strong revenue and good valuations, but not open the moon. Stu, I got to say to the folks out there, this is a huge Silicon Valley success story in the industry. You're seeing a company that's a durable company pumping on all cylinders. Nimble's software, really, really successful here in Silicon Valley. So I got to ask you where they go next. Obviously, with the mid-market being a great growth driver for the company, this should set the table pretty well for the channel strategy. I'm hearing from a lot of channel partners out there over the past few years and the past Cube shows we've been to that they're hungry for solutions. How does this product fit into the channel? Is it channel friendly? Do you see an opportunity for Nimble in that regard? Yeah, John, absolutely. The mid-market is owned by the channel, and every one of the big storage guys are trying to fight for that channel. And Nimble's there. One of the things, John, that's really interesting is if you look at margins, Nimble's actually getting 10 points better than the EMC's in that absolute world. So if there's margins, that means there's more money to pay the channel, and we know they're going to operate it out there, so they're going to make money. And we've talked convergent structures, the big company, the smart stack reference architecture that Nimble has in partnering with Cisco. And of course, we know Cisco's been running away with that convergent market with what they're doing with NetApp, EMC, and starting to spread out to a broader and more diverse portfolio of storage partners. The criticism on Nimble has been that they might not have to depock us like some of the big players out there throwing money at this market, and also that all flash arrays are getting attention, specifically from a modern perspective. All flashes can say, oh, that's real modern, and also the dollars in terms of the big whales that are going to come into this market pretty heavily, like EMC and others. So we're going to dig into that with the folks here, but what's your take before we get the guests on? How do they compete? Is it modern? And how do they compete with the go-to market? Yeah, so I know we'll bring David Floyer on later to really go into what is a modern architecture, but, you know, Nimble was founded in 2017, launched in 2010, so this is a modern architecture. It does fit into scale-out environments. We're starting to see a line blurring between hybrid guys and the all-flash guys. T-Gile made an announcement within the last week, and they have a full, all-flash version of what they're doing. We'll see how Nimble's environment matches up to what they're doing. The register actually wrote an article kind of teasing out is, did T-Gile be nimble to the punch with kind of this new architecture? So these guys are obviously a diamond in the rough. The question we want to get into in this product now is, does this move up market? Do they have the ability to go up market? What does their product portfolio look like? And what are you expecting to hear today from Nimble? Yeah, so absolutely, John. I mean, every company has it's going to move up market. It's much easier to move up market, especially the channel guys are going to work with bigger deals, and customers are buying more from their environment. You know, more repeat customers that their steel sizes are going to grow, and they're going to be able to extend them to work with them. So we're here at Nimble Storage in Silicon Valley. We're live as the queue. We're covering the exclusive product to Nestle from Nimble Storage. We'll get into it. We don't want to release the data too early. We're going to go live to the press conference here with all their customers. But Stu, I got to ask you, where do they go from here? Can Nimble continue to keep pace with the change of the industry? One of the things that is on the mind of customers is, can the vendors, can the technology providers like Nimble move at the pace of the market? Obviously, we have a good market in the sense that the flash prices are coming down. The question is, can the modern infrastructure, on the cost perspective, through IOPS, throughput, and cost per gigabyte, all those three things are in play, which plays well for this hybrid. What's your take on this landscape, how fast it's shifting, and what is Nimble doing and have to do to be competitive? Yes. So John, architecturally, I like what Nimble's done. The biggest criticism I've seen is, you know, Nimble's a storage company, and the storage market is changing. Silo's are breaking down, because infrastructure's driving change at the pull of storage back into the compute layer. What, at Wikibon, we call the server sand market, it's changing things with VMware, doing the vSand, when the Tanix is doing some of these others. So, you know, want to understand how, you know, Nimble sees the world. When you talk to, you know, a pure storage out there, one that's getting a lot of buzz, you know, they say, oh, you know, it's not going to go that way. You know, it's all flashing into separate array. And, you know, fundamentally, you know, what is the architecture to build things on in the future? Before we get going, so I want to ask you a final question around Nimble. Is it a technology advantage they have, or is it just timing, positioning in the market, product portfolio, what's your take? Is it the engine of their technology, or is it the timing of the market and their positioning, what's your take on that? Yeah, so John, it's interesting, when Nimble first launched, they weren't, you know, we are the flash player out there, it was kind of like, oh, here's a new, you know, file architecture built with an iSCSI box, and you know, today, we're probably barely going to hear iSCSI boxers, supposedly, you know, by the end of this year, beginning next year, they're also supporting Fiverr Channel, not a big deal to customers that we talked about, it's about performance, it's about skillsetting, it's about pricing, it's about that software that makes up the component, and you know, Nimble definitely has differentiation in the way that the architecture thing, from the scale-up perspective, they've got over, I understand, 1200 customers with a bit of scale-up architecture, so, you know, there's a lot of there there. So you see the architecture of the hybrid being a critical thing, and also the technology. Yeah, right, it is a modern architecture, it hits the checkboxes, what companies have been looking for, if they want to make a partner to work with their data, and John, more than just storage, it's also the backup, backup's a big piece of it, so we need like net-up pad before most of the software is just all in there, so I don't need to buy a separate box, I don't need to have extra software on it, but Nimble's going to pull that storage, primary storage and backup in a nice press-off. Well, hybrid's a great word, obviously we hear hybrid cloud as a key bridge to the cloud, a lot of modern enterprise, we should call it the cube, the hybrid cube, we should create a hybrid cube just to kind of get in line with the trends. Yeah, we're doing it, we're the chain-arising Yeah. Docker package this week, containers are such a hot topic too, so how does that fit in, how does cloud fit in with what Nimble's doing, how do containers fit in, is there a big data player at all, because some of some storage architectures that really scale out, they should be able to fit analytics and in memory databases and all that. As I always said, we said in the cube you can't fight fashion, and having a composite architecture like what these guys are doing hybrid really bodes well for what the people want, they want an engine that's going to be flexible and adaptive, they call it adaptive flash here, more importantly the developers who are writing the software want to have turnkey infrastructure that can be horizontally scalable and also work with open source and other things, so I see a great opportunity for the software side of the house, certainly on the storage, whoever can create that enablement for horizontally scalable DevOps, cloud, whatnot, that's the winning formula. This is the cube, we're live here in Silicon Valley at Nimble Storage for exclusive product launch, we'll be right back with more exclusive coverage right after this short break.