 Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco for the Amazon Web Services Summit, AWS Summit. Go to crowdchat.net slash AWS Summit. We've got a live crowd chat going on right now. Go there, be heard, be on the record, be a thought leader. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joining my co-host, Jeff Frick. Who's your placing Dave Vellante? It's a long day. I've got to say Dave Vellante. He's definitely not Dave Vellante. Ron Biacchini's back in theCUBE. You're a CUBE alumni with VR. Welcome back. Thank you. Thanks for having me. We got into it last time. We geeked out a little bit about kinesis and all the coolness of it, but I want to just take a step back and just get your take on where we are now from re-invent. So at re-invent we heard the big splash, workspaces announced, kinesis, AppStream, among other things. What's your take on where Amazon is? What's the grade? What's the letter grade? You mean A plus, A minus, B plus? What's the deal? Absolutely A plus. So they've been working with us very heavily doing our beta. We just came out with our cloud release. And basically what we're going to allow people to do is to be able to run enterprise applications with our box on-prem. Yet all the data, all the capacity, everything you're storing is in the cloud. They've been an incredible customer. They've, oh sorry, vendor. They've helped us, they supported the beta and they just really... It's nice when you talk about a vendor as a customer. I know, I know, sorry. That means something. That means a good sign. That's actually a positive gesture. That's right. They've truly been incredible. We've got a lot of customers now are running the beta like 12 to 15 sites and they've just been incredibly supportive. And so we've been going in and they've helped the customer store the data in AWS and we've been running the transactions in front of it. And they've just been super supportive and honestly, they've helped us win over customers. A lot of the customers are going in very open to AWS with someone in nervous about putting their data somewhere else and Amazon has really gone out of their way to make them feel comfortable with the solution. And that was kind of the early knock, right? Is that they weren't so great with transactional data and that's where you guys are really come in to make a play. That's right. So all along, we've sold our product, our product's called an edge filer and our product sits in front of traditional storage and we take the transactions off of what the traditional storage does. But to an incredible amount, a typical user for us will see 98% of the transactions occurring locally in our box, typically in solid state RAM or flash, yet 100% of the capacity gets pushed back to the repository behind us. With this new release that we've just come out with, that repository is AWS. And so you can imagine running an application against our edge filer, the core repository could be on-prem in a traditional NAS box or it could be off-prem in a NAS box, but now with Amazon support in this release, it could be in AWS. You'll be able to see the exact same performance no matter where the data is stored. That's great. So you'd come from Pittsburgh, right? Yes. Professor Carnegie Mellon, great, great institution of learning out there with Caltech and Harvey Mudd and MIT. We're a little bit of insulated out here on the bubble out here at Silicon Valley. So in terms of the customer adoption that you're seeing and acceptance of cloud within, I don't want to say the Rust Belt because you're not in Cleveland, but in the heart of America, what is kind of the mood there? Because I do think we don't really see the reality out here. You know, in general, I'd say that people are very, very conservative. And as you get further out from the valley, probably more so. And one of the things that we've done and one of the things that Amazon is supporting us with is allowing customers to run their application on us in an eval period with the data being sent to AWS. And that helps. And people really need to see that the application continues to run, they get the same performance and they want a long period of time where they show that there's no difference and then they move. Honestly, when they move, they move big, which we love, but there's always this conservatism to make sure that they're not giving up anything when they do it. But is that the ability to really try before they buy? That's slightly different than kind of a classic enterprise software model. So how's that kind of going over? No, it is. At Avere, we've specifically set up an eval pool of equipment that allows us to send our evals out and to allow people to see, try before they buy, exactly right. And typically, very quickly, within the quarter, we'll then convert that to sale because they'll put it in, they'll see that applications run at the exact same performance and they'll see the data being stored in Amazon and so they have all the reliability of that and yet they'll see no performance degradation. It's very important that people understand they're going to see the application performance they've expected in the past yet have this new ability of storing the data in the cloud. That's great. So one of the big challenges that we're seeing is the competition Amazon has. I want to get your comments on that. I'll see Cisco just announce a billion dollar plan for the cloud. That's vaporware at this point but they're promoting this internet of everything which is kind of a twist of internet of things. I don't get that branding personally but IBM certainly has reorganized their company Steve Mills and team. IBM's going out to cloud, they have good big data chops, HP targeting Amazon directly. This goes on and on and you got Microsoft, you got EMC, VMware, Dividle, it's a cloud of flavor of the month. So the competition's heating up. So the question is how far will Amazon take of the enterprise before these guys put the seawall up or can they protect themselves or will Amazon just take a big chunk of it? I think what Amazon's taught the world is the move to the cloud is really about economy is scale. It's once they have all the infrastructure and once they scale that out there's huge economies to be had there and Amazon has been very aggressive at least with us and our customers about continuing that growth or continuing to try to, it's a big land grab to try to grab as many customers as they can. And as long as they do that as long as they keep that up and stay out in front I think you'll see that they'll well hopefully maintain the leadership. A lot of what you see by other people making similar announcements is that this is really the right way to do it. It's all about leveraging that economy, putting the whole network of pulling everything together. Yeah and you mentioned that kind of scale you can't dismiss than the next logical discussion which is large scale operating systems. So large scale network, you talk about Amazon changing their network, you heard Andy Jassy say they're proud of their network infrastructure, they've been retooling it with SDN, happening more stuff, happening at the network lay, you see converges with flash and the drives in memory action. So with all that, there's now a large scale mindset. Right. I mean that was a unique computer science problem that was only narrowed down to a handful of people like Carnegie Mellon, Carson Schwann and Georgia Tech, friend of ours, great work over there. You got Michigan and some other computer science programs doing some work. So again, but that's not mainstream. How do you get that large scale architecture and mindset ingrained into guys who are moving storage boxes around in the data center? So the interesting thing is our product has been market in market three years. Our product in market right now has very much been on-prem. The performance and the capacity so all on-prem with our four O release, this is the first time we're enabling people to get access to that large scale repository. And you know, some people are driving, I think it's probably pretty typical of what you'd expect. Some people are driving to that. A lot of people are being very conservative. Show me that it works. Show me that I can maintain my interfaces and show me that I can keep the same performance up. A lot of what our product does is that, the front end of our product, what the customers connect to, that maintains the same POSIX style NFS and SMB interface that you got from traditional NAS, yet now the repository's in the cloud. So we kind of believe it's the best of both worlds. Maintaining interface, the infrastructure that you're comfortable with, yet allow you to leverage that large scale repository at the cloud. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about Amazon's ecosystem and really a key part to being enterprise ready and ready to go out to this market is building up an ecosystem on the developer side, the SIS side, system developer side. So talk about working with AWS from a partner perspective. How's that been? How's this opportunity really kind of evolved over time? But the market opportunity as well is working with them as an organization. So working with Amazon as a partner has truly been incredible for us. So the interesting thing is in the data center space, we're another vendor fighting to push into that space. And so we compete with all the typical guys you'd see in the data center, EMC, and network appliance, and Hitachi. And Amazon now sees that we give them away to move into the data center. And they've truly been exceptional from technical side. We've got incredible support in making our product and our operates with their product. We've got resources up and down the company to help us do that. But I'd say where they really have excelled for us has been on the go-to-market piece. They very quickly identified how we help their customers. And those customers are being brought to us and we're bringing customers to them. So I think on both technical side and on the go-to-market side, they've been truly a very partner. Ron, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Again, great to have you. I want to ask you one final prediction. I want you to reach deep and share with the folks some data that's not so much Amazon data, but just something that's prolific in the sense of share something that they might not be aware of in this cloud, big data, mobile world, a lot of stuff going on, a lot of retool, a lot of rebuild up. Share a factoid or anecdote with the folks that they might not know about that's relevant to their world. You know, I think what people may be understanding or don't understand, it's all about latency. Everything that the user sees is all about latency. It's all about hiding latency, you're pulling that latency. Every single thing that we do, transaction-based, it's all about that latency. We have to find a way to support cloud environments, yet not make the latency to that environment apparent to the end user. Latency is a problem, you know, you're crossing the street and you don't have your right map, map, data. You can't just play the little recording. We'll be with you in a minute. That's right. For service as you run around. Thanks for coming on theCUBE again, tech athlete, they're popping the champagne, they got the beer going on here. You can hear all the work here. This is theCUBE, we go where the action is. We just happen to be right next to the bar right now. That's ironic, that's not planned by design, so right back after this short break.