 everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Q. We are in the Palo Alto studio for a Q conversation. We have a special friend he comes by all the time to give us updates and and we got a special update today with some new announcements. So first off welcome Noam Shendar, the COO of Cezar. Great to see you. You too. Thank you. You brought along Bill Zinski, the VP SSD Planning and Marketing for Intel. Welcome Bill. Thank you. Good morning. So big news. Let's just jump right into it. Noam, tell us the big news. Sure. We're super excited that we've formed a strategic relationship with Intel, which puts together our innovative market leading software defined storage for enterprise storage as a service, wrapped around a number of building blocks from Intel. In fact, putting all of the hardware building blocks that we use into a single integrated package from Intel, including the SSDs for nonvolatile memory, including the servers themselves, including networking components and, of course, the Intel processors. So let's back up a couple steps. You guys have been at this a while. You've been doing software defined storage on other people's hardware for a while. Correct. What's different now? Why now and why change your strategy and then more specifically, why Intel? It's a it's a process of evolution. So we are growing very rapidly are the quarter that just ended Q3 2016 has been another record quarter for us. And as we scale, we need to get more efficient and we need to rely on hardware providers who have bigger scale, bigger reach and more functional components. So our our evolution, our growth has forced us to go look for really credible partners and Intel's at the top of that heat. And as you said, Intel known obviously for microprocessors bill, but you guys do a lot more than microprocessors for people that know a little bit more about the company. So it sounds like this this partner is a partnership, the right word. You know, partnership is always a tricky one, right? At least we're not here. The agreement. They're not here in its lives again, anything about it. The you guys really have kind of the whole the whole slew from the microprocessor all the way through to complete system. Yeah, I think what's changed a little bit obviously we're known for our CPUs and data center and client and and embedded stuff. But in this case, we've been able to work with Zadar and actually provide them like a complete solution, right? So not just the CPU, not just the networking card, not just the SSD, but also the motherboard solution that all the components come together in and really allow them to go focus on what they're great at and we can focus and provide them great hardware. And then in the nature of the of the agreement is it is is kind of an OEM relationship where this is kind of packaged up within the the the Dara service, but just happens to be running on a bunch of Intel hardware. Exactly. So we've always provided a complete solution to our customers. That's that's the convenience is a key advantage that we have. And so in this case, yes, we're taking the Intel components and we're wrapping them together into the complete offering, which is the the service and the appliance, right, coming together. Intel is doing a lot of the integration behind the scenes, which is an advantage for us. We are logistics are complex. So the more that we can simplify the better for us and the faster we can serve our customers. Right. And just to recap, you have both an on-prem solution, as well as cloud solution, correct? So your your customers can choose to deploy it to Dara kind of wherever it makes the most sense for them. Exactly. In fact, we're unique in the literal meaning of that word. No one else is providing exactly the same storage, both on-premises and in public clouds. Most companies focus on one or the other. And even those that straddle the gap between cloud and on-premise, they offer different solutions to develop one for here and one for there. We offer exactly the same thing with the same Intel hardware with the same software defined storage that we've developed, the same service, the same price, and the same service level agreement. All right. So, Bill, from your perspective, why are you excited about this? What is this kind of new and different from the Intel? I think there's a couple things. One, working with Dara, we're hoping to really allow them to scale their business because it is very innovative from a software defined storage standpoint, where if it's on-prem or in the cloud, the customer can make that decision actually on the fly, right? They can move things back and forth and figure out what works best for them. And we think that's really going to help enterprises move to these new usage models and these new capabilities in a very flexible way. And so we're excited about that, right? Upgrading the infrastructure from enterprise to cloud. The other piece, from my own perspective of being in the SSD part of the business is part of their new services were moving from traditional hard drives to SSD-based services for the same level of pricing. So they're giving customers a lot more benefit and value for essentially the same price. So we think that's exciting as well. And that will help kind of showcase the value of moving to solid-state storage and the benefit of the data center. Right. So you're involved with SSD all the time. And we've really been watching the adoption of SSD grow, right? And where before it was predominantly really high-value applications, really the latency applications, what people continue to discover is there's all kind of second-order impacts when you put in these faster SSDs and replace the spinning drives. I wonder if you could share some stories of just some general use cases of how much impact going from spinning disk to SSD can have on specific applications, business cases, et cetera. Yeah, sure. I'd say that it's kind of in a few areas, right? One is density, right? You can just get more storage in the equivalent area. So that helps maybe at the high level to think about how it really reduces OPEX in the data center, right? You get higher density. You get better reliability. You get lower power and a huge increase in performance. So all that allows you to lower your OPEX bill, making it just more efficient. And that's why you're seeing a huge adoption starting kind of in the cloud and then moving into the traditional enterprise. It's just a huge value for them. And I can jump in with a real-world example. It's from a previous life, a company I used to work for served Walmart. And Walmart, with the help of my former company, switched from a hard drive-based solution for their analytics to SSDs. And what that did is it allowed them to finish the task of figuring out which trucks go where sooner. So rather than, let's say, finishing at five in the morning, you finished at three in the morning. That meant fewer trucks because the trucks had more time to drive around, so they didn't need to dispatch as many in order to restock all the shelves. That's a great example of practical applications. The other one, Bill, which you're not directly involved with, but obviously is growing importance in Intel is the data center business, right? Sure, of course. Depending on if you ask Michael Dell or other people what's going on with PCs, but it's certainly not the New York growth that it had for years and years and years. But the data center is growing, right? As more and more stuff moves to data center-based applications, whether that be in a cloud or a private data center. So again, the impact of this within that business at Intel. Yeah, a couple of things. At the high level, we talk about the virtuous cycle of growth that we think is really going to drive the industry for the next decade. And the idea is that all of these devices get connected, be it a car, be it the PC that you have today or your phone. These things are generating more and more data. Jet engines, cars generate terabytes of data that get moved up into the cloud. That drives cloud growth. It allows you to get scale and efficiency, optimize algorithms, and then improve the devices which leads to more devices. So we think this is going to lead to kind of this cycle of growth through all these connected platforms. And we see that absolutely happening in the data center and that's just going to continue to drive us forward. And we think things like what Zidara is doing is going to help facilitate to more cloud-based storage as a service usage models, which will further help accelerate growth. Yeah, the need for storage is not going down anytime soon. Definitely not. And the other really key piece that this continues to support, which is obviously core to your mission, no, is software defined, right? Classic line, everybody uses it over and over from Andreessen softwares eating the world. It's really software defined kind of everything. And you guys continue to really leverage that paradigm to deliver really a flexible service to your customers. Absolutely, the beauty of software defined for us is the ability to serve our customers and react to their needs. We like to contrast software defined with hardware bound. When you have hardware bound storage, it is what it is. If you want it to do something new, it may take two, three years until that functionality is there. We're able to deliver new functionality to our customers within weeks. And we accelerated that even more when we introduced our container services called ZCS. ZCS allows customers to run their own arbitrary code inside a Docker container inside the storage. So we have had customers using this for things like anti-virus or file sync and share. We didn't provide the file sync and share functionality, but the customer was able to integrate that on their own in a matter of days. Right, right. And of course, the other thing with cloud specifically, I mean, there are clouds as public clouds, but really cloud is just kind of an attitude and kind of a way to deliver services and a way to deliver functionality. It's really about speed, it's about flexibility, being able to flex up, flex down, add, take away, and really kind of remove this kind of buy a bunch and then build up to whatever your capacity percentage is that you start to get uncomfortable and then buy a bunch more. But really it's that flexibility that gives people the power to do big things, little things and move between the two. Absolutely, and it also makes our job of selling easier because the customer can decide based on what they know and they don't have to guess or predict or plan in advance. They buy or order what they need and if their needs change, so be it. They can increase the usage, decrease the usage and we talked about changing location. They can go from on-prem to the cloud or back with no penalty, with no difficulty. So we just tell them, go ahead, whatever, based on what you know, make your order, you can always undo. Because that assumes they have a Zadar system in both locations so they can just move that data back and forth depending on what the requirement is. Yeah, well they don't need to have a Zadar system in the public cloud because we have our Zadar systems at Google, at Microsoft Azure, and at Amazon Web Services. So if they have our on-prem system, they already have available to them our global network of locations. Because it's in there. Not necessarily theirs has to be in there. Exactly. Got it, got it. Well Bill, we're running a long time. I want to give you kind of the last word from the Intel perspective. As you sit back and watch what's going on with SSDs, what's going on with data centers, what's going on with software defined, what gets you up in the morning, what are you excited about? I'd say opportunities like this, working with the Zadar is great because the software defined everything, as you put it, is really changing data centers from the cloud side to the enterprise and we like that, right? It helps move the speed of business forward and creates opportunities. From an SSD perspective, particularly in the data center, it's about driving density and efficiency there and really kind of changing the game in the data center and you'll see a lot more solid state. So great future, a lot of fun stuff to work on. Great. And knowing from your perspective, just in terms of the ongoing kind of growing up, if you will, or maturation of Zadar, kind of put this in into context of what it means in this stage of your guys' lives as you continue to grow and deliver more to your customers? It's more of everything. So we're seeing, it's really, as Chief Operating Officer, this isn't what gets me up in the morning, it's what keeps me up at night. It's the deals are getting more numerous, they're getting larger, the customers are getting more demanding because they expect more and more and they're everywhere in the world and every continent, no exception. So we have requests from Africa as we speak. So where it's going is this is the way that IT is going to happen moving forward. The capex way of buying storage is it worked well for a couple of decades but the time has come to shift to a new system and the world is switching to it because it's far more convenient and it's far more financially advantageous to do it that way. And it just makes more sense, right? At the end of the day, it's mapping demands to supply within your own organization which just makes more sense. All right, well, Bill Odzinski, thanks for stopping by. No, I'm always good to see you. I'm sure we'll see you in the not too distant future. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studio for CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time.