 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. This is SiliconANGLE's production of Oracle OpenWorld 2015 here for Moscone South in beautiful San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman from wikibon.com. Excited to have on the program Michael Grant, who's VP of sales with VitaCore, who is not only a user of Oracle's products, but they're also a service provider. Michael, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role in the organization, and for folks that haven't heard of VitaCore, you know, what's the company? Excellent, so my name is Michael Grant, the Vice President of Sales for VitaCore. VitaCore is a cloud service provider that focuses on VMware-based hosting for production and disaster recovery. Our, my background has been in technology. I've been at the large players, IBM, Verizon Business, and at some smaller players too that are taking over the market with a service-based approach to cloud hosting. All right, can you give me a little bit of the speeds and feed of the company? How big you are, where geographically you're located, and you talked about some of the workloads, but who do you target for your customers? Okay, great, yeah, so we're headquartered out of Sterling, Virginia. We're about a 50-person company, 20 million dollar run rate. We have about 1,000 customers across our fabric, and our main presence for data center hosting and for VMware-based hosting is out of Sterling, Virginia data center. Right there is actually the second most cloud storage hosted in the world, so a lot of people don't know. There's a lot of fiber, a lot of network, a lot of data center running out of that area. Then we have a secondary site that covers more nationally out of Chicago, Illinois. All right, so when I look at service providers, one of the biggest challenges they usually have is, I mean, growth. And you talk about the amount of changes that are happening, enterprises, talk about change, but service providers, it's the agility and the ability to make change is kind of fundamental. How do you characterize growth at your company? So I think that's it. So from a vertical perspective, we target a very specific segment. We're basically going for the mid-market, high SMB. Some of the low enterprise, really, that's our space. And for growth, we really run through our channel. We look at partners that are Cisco providers that are Nimble providers, that are looking to extend their fabric of IT solutions by offering cloud hosting. And that gives us a force multiplier in the market to go out and attack a broader base. From a growth perspective, we're seeing 30% year-over-year growth as an organization. And what makes us different to enable that growth is we provide more of a boutique, high-level, white-love approach to service. And a lot of what you see and what you hear and what our customers get, we've had and we've been independently studied and we're one of only two service providers globally to have zero outages in the last two years. So not only do we have proof from an independent watchdog watching our solution, we're able to go out in the market and tout that and provide a white-love service. All right, that's excellent. So to be able to deliver that, can you talk a little bit about kind of the behind-the-scenes, what goes, you know, the stuff that your customers don't need to worry about it, or do they? Do your customers ask you about your infrastructure and can you kind of map out from us, you know, what you guys build, how you chose that from an infrastructure standpoint? Excellent, so that's a great question. So customers of ours, we're very transparent with how we go to market. Customers purchase for three reasons, technology, value, and price. Now the technology, a lot of our competitors out there don't want to put it up front. For us, we're looking for a customer that understands Cisco, that understands Nimble, that understands VMware. It's a very targeted, enterprise-based infrastructure. It's a reference architecture, and that's what customers want. If we deliver that experience, then that customer can come in knowing that we have 20 engineers that are working 24-7 to manage that infrastructure, keep it up, and anything hypervisor down is going to be taken care of with an SLA and a commitment to delivering a valued service. So how do you look at utilization? I mean, we think of kind of the public cloud as, you know, almost having infinite resource. Obviously, you need to make sure that you're using what you have okay. You have to look at the cost. You need to, I mean, forecasting's always a scary thing for any company, but you know, how do you tackle those kind of challenges, and how do you work with your suppliers to sort that out? So great question. From our perspective, sales and engineering has to be very tight. We're, not for lack of a better word, a very nimble organization, and we have to be able to predict what our storage growth is, what our compute growth is going to be. So we look at that forecasting from a top down, from the engineering down, and we look at what's going to be coming down, and we balance that out from a front end. Then from a back end, our engineers are working closely with Cisco, they're working closely with Nimble to look at actually the resource allocation across the fabric, and then ultimately based on what they're seeing, they're either adding, subtracting, running algorithms to make that work every day. Now you mentioned before about public cloud hosting. From a vertical perspective, we're not targeting that market. We completely take ourselves out of the wake of those larger burst cloud environments. We're not looking for that. We're looking for a corporate static workload, an Oracle-based database, a SQL-based database, a database that is a mission critical to a corporate business that doesn't need infinite up-down time to be charged hourly. They want a monthly cost that's fixed, that's going to work on an enterprise architecture that's backed by an SLA and a service. So Michael, as we talk to users, the cloud is not a singular thing to them. Sure, there's lots of people using AWS, lots of people using Office 365, things from Microsoft. They've got their own workloads. They're working with companies like yours. One of the biggest challenges, how do I manage all this? How does it all kind of fit together? And I don't think Vitacorps is trying to own the orchestration of everything, but how do you tie into that? How does that fit into the conversation that you have with customers? So, very good question. So, every customer that we talk to is touching the cloud in some form or fashion today. Whether it's 365, whether it's Amazon, whether it's a private cloud, whether it's an internal cloud that they've built, whether it's an application, they may have hosted out in the cloud. So, from our perspective, we integrate through various set of ways. One is we're in Equinix data centers. So, within the Equinix exchange, we can actually directly tie into an Amazon workload and have a cross fabric built in between our cloud and their cloud. You can seamlessly move workloads. We've got other solutions that can tie in ADFS through Microsoft 365. So, once you migrate, you're tying that back in. So, the user's application, everything gets experienced and put together. So, we're sort of experts at making that stuff work. All right, so, Michael, can you share a little bit? You know, what's your activities been at Oracle Open World? You know, what have you learned? What have you shared? And I know your time at the show's wrapping up. So, what are your key takeaways? So, very impressed. It's my first application-based show, Nimble being a huge partner of ours. They asked VertiCorp if we could come out and present in their booth as a Nimble customer. So, we did two presentations here. I was very surprised. We had a lot of people sitting around, a lot of people listening, a lot of questions coming out from the application people about the infrastructure. So, those go hand in hand. And when you realize that you're targeting application developers or DBAs or people that are working with these heavy workloads, they're, it's critical that the infrastructure piece goes hand in hand with that. So, from my perspective, I see that it's not just an IT infrastructure decision. It's a corporate application decision that's running on this infrastructure. So, for me, the experience has been eye-opening. Oracle does a great job of putting a show together, that's for sure. And this is my first time in the Cisco Cube, so this has been pretty impressive as well. Yeah, well, great having you on the Cube. I want to give you the final word. Takeaway is, you know, what have you learned, you know, that you'd want your peers to understand? You're working with public partners like Cisco with Nimble Storage that, you know, you wish you'd known at the beginning or something you would have done a little bit different if you'd known going into it. So, I've learned that the importance of the technology partnerships that we're creating are so critical to our growth, to us as a business, that we need to be even more intertwined. I haven't had the pleasure of being entwined with the field marketing team or the marketing events or the product managers as much as I should. But man, just sitting with them, hearing them pitch, talking about the new things that they're building. I mean, we're on the forefront of this cloud revolution and being with partners like this to understand that, it's been amazing. All right, well, Michael Grant, really appreciate you taking the time to come share with our community everything that's going on here. And thanks for watching. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World right after this quick break. Thank you.