 Despite its $70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town. Everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are 100 people in 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, legend Moshe and I. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently and early this year appointed industry vet, Phil Bollinger as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury to run a MIA and APJ go-to-market and just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Herzog to be CMO. Herzog has worked at numerous companies ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, as SVP of product marketing and management at storage powerhouse EMC, among others. Herzog has been named CMO of the year as an on-con icon and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr. Eric Herzog. Good to see you, Eric. Thanks for coming on. Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE and I am, of course, sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. I know Hawaiian shirt. Okay, that's a pretty buttoned up company. Well, next time I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. Okay, so give us the backstory. How did this all come about? I'm sure you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but how did it come about? Tell us that story. So I have known Phil since the late 90s when he was VP at LSI of engineering. And I was working at a company called Milex, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP and he was providing the subsystem and we were providing the fiber to fiber and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Iceland team. And then he became the general manager. So while I didn't work for him, I worked with him at LSI and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won. And he said, hey, Erzog, we should talk. I have a CMO opening. So it literally happened over LinkedIn discussion where I reached out to him and congratulated him. He said, hey, I need a CMO, let's talk. So the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exact staff. That's awesome. That's right. He was running the Iceland division for a while at EMC. You guys were there. And of course, you know, you talk about Milex, LSI. There was a period of time where, you know, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So you sort of saw the whole landscape. So you got some serious storage history and chop. So I want to ask you, what attracted you to Infinidat? I mean, obviously they're a leader in the Magic Quadrant. We know about Infinibox and the petabyte scale and the low latency. But when you look at the market, you obviously, you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinibot message of optimizing applications, workloads and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that in overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, you know, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have. Yes, I found out when I got here, they took out 100 arrays from EMC and Etachi. And that company now has 20 Infiniboxes and Infinibox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, you know, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OpEx angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if we'll amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the Infinibox SSA, the Infinigard product, which is really optimized, not only as a PBA for a backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault so that you can then recover their review for malware or ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So between the relationship with Phil and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket, in fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. Okay, so yeah, I think it was Diplesi called him the best kept secret. He's not the only one. And so, you know, so that brings us to you and your mission because it's true. It is a best kept secret. You know, you're a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner Magic Quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops in block storage. You talked about the consolidation story. And I've talked to many folks in Infinidad about that Ken Steinhardt, rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend about, you know, so that that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion. And Infinidad has proven that it can operate very, very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel. As you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers. And there's been a lot of conflicts. So we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business through the channel globally. So we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting personally next week with five different CEOs of channel partners, of which only one of them is doing business with Infinidad now. So you want to expand our channel and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area, the work we do with all the industry analysts, and not just in North America, but in Europe as well and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort. Both of us, of course, haven't been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple years. So we're going to open that up and then obviously increase our demand generation activities as well. So we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do and deliver that message to the world, deliver it to the partner base so the partners can take advantage and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OpEx. So the partner wins and the end user wins, and that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. So you're not only just a marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So you're like a walking spec sheet, John Furrier says. You can just rattle it off and already impressed that how much you know about Infinidad. But when you joined EMC, it was almost like there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products and you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidad? Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technology that happens to run on a hybrid array and all flash array has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the Infinibox, you can easily use an Infinigard. You got an Infinigard, you can easily use an Infinibox SSA. So the capability of doing that helps reduce operational manpower and hence of course, OPEX. So the story is strong, technically. The story has a strong business tie-in. So, you know, part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days, you know, we've both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS and latency and bandwidth. And if the people didn't, if the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But, you know, the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud virtual environments and containers which Infinidad can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions yet with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CAPEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, you know, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, you know, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me, and we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that my job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CISO, by the VP of software development who then says to VP eventually, you know, that was that Infinidad stuff. We actually need that for our SAP workloader. Wow, you know, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CISO says, you know, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidad guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. So the other interesting thing about Infinidad is there's always a source of spirited discussions over the years with my business friends from Infinidad was the company figured out a way. It was formed in 2011. And at the time, the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to a flash. Of course, you know, lawyers work, big flash, all flash data center, et cetera, et cetera. But Infinidad with its memory cache and its architecture was able, this algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance than an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is, I think, unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting. But at the time, it made sense to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach. I might try to build a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe going to that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem. Is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud. What's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that. Sure. So the cloud strategy is, first of all, seems integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend either for their primary storage or for their secondary storage. So we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the telcos has 150 Infinibox SSAs and Infinigards. 150 running one of the largest telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure. Why don't you use us the giant telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup as a service or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infinibox or Infinibox SSA. So the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about Infinigard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery. But at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability which Infinigard can do, which of course is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. And we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play and again, we have a number of public references in the cloud US signal and others where they talk about why they use the Infinibox and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. Okay, so I got to ask you. So you mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters in Waltham. We going to pry you out of the golden state. Let's see, I was born at Stanford Hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere but here. And of course, as you remember, when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving on a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, The Silicon Valley Guy from the old book, that's me. Yeah, the hotel's in Waltham a little better, but that's not gonna be... So what's your priority? Last question, what's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinite, which is a little unusual, is there are sometimes our silos. And having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness. So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful even with the silos. Imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so we're gonna do that and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple of awards recently. We're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC awards. And one of the channel publications is gonna give us an award next week. So we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend, both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So those are things we're gonna do first. And we're gonna be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing. As I mentioned, I'm meeting five partner CEOs and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we wanna get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff going. We are going with Infinite Ad as one of our strong storage providers. So we're doing all that upfront work in the first hundred days so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. Love the channel story. And you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinite Ad does a lot of business in overseas, a lot of business in Europe. Obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel. But that's by its very nature. Stovepiple, most startups start in the US, big market, NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. So it's almost like Infinite Ad sort of simultaneously grew its overseas business and its US business. Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. And in fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today and one of the comments that was made for someone who's gonna give us a PO. So the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up the storage company these days, but the CIO called and said, I can't believe the work you did. We're gonna buy some more stuff this quarter. So that white glove service are technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service. It's pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company and will continue to be so. Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinitab since sort of day zero and really wish you the best. Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE and trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. I can't wait, all right. Thanks to Eric and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.