 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Hi, Jeff Rick here. We're in Las Vegas at the IBM Interconnect 2015. It's the first Interconnect conference. They combined a bunch of other conferences into one, really with a focus on mobile and cloud and social and a lot of exciting things going on. I'm really excited to have Ory Bauer here, the director of XIV Worldwide Development. Welcome. Thank you very much and thank you for hosting me here. Yeah, absolutely. So we talked to you about nine months ago at IBM Edge 2014. So I presume a whole lot has happened since then. Give us an update. Yeah, there was a lot going on and perhaps you've seen our big announcement last week of the IBM Spectrum family, Spectrum Storage family, which include a whole suite of software defined storage solutions. And as part of that announcement, we announced what we call the IBM Spectrum Accelerate, which is a software defined storage solution that is based on the XIV software. So in it? Yeah, good. Now I was going to say, well, this is big news, right? Because one of the themes we hear about over and over and over, right, is software is eating the world, software to find everything. And this is a really concrete step that IBM has taken to kind of go down that path with an existing product line, right? Correct. You know, part of the announcement, we announced that IBM is going to invest $1 billion over the next five years in the development of software defined storage solutions. And Spectrum Accelerate, which is based on the XIV software, was one of the endcores of this announcement. And in essence, what we did there is we took the XIV software, which is, you know, well proven. We have it installed at thousands of customers for many years now. We took that same software and we are now offering it as a software-only solution. So in essence, what customers can go and do is download this software and install it on their own servers and get all the values of the great XIV solution that we offered in an appliance model up until today as a software-only solution. Okay, so to make sure I understand, so they can just get the software. So you had to come up with new software licensing models and software delivery and software teams and run it on their own X86. Is that great? That's exactly right. So what we are allowing customers is just to use either existing servers that they already have in their data center, or newly bought, you know, X86 servers with some internal drives and SSDs inside. And we let them run the XIV software on top of that. Now what the customers get is a value in the sense of agility. Okay, this can be deployed extremely fast within minutes. You could set up a whole new XIV array where compared to other solutions, it may take you months to set up a new storage solution. So here within minutes you could set up a new storage array and it's also extremely flexible. You're no longer tied to a specific hardware. You could just use any X86 server and put the software on top of it. Now some of it is generic to software-defined storage. What's unique about the XIV solution is first it's a well-proven solution. So we're taking the same software that is running on the appliance. And by the way, we're going to continue to offer the appliance. It's going to ask you, say, can people still get the classic version, right? The classic as we used to say. Exactly, they can still get the classic version. And in addition to that, we are going to offer the same software running in a software-only model. So that's one key value. I mean, you get all the nice benefits of the great architectures of XIV, the fact that you get consistent performance. It's extremely easy to use. There is no tuning. It's hotspots-free. All the benefits of XIV, you get out of the box. And in addition to that, because we offer the combination of the hardware-based appliance as well as the software version, you can manage both from a single hyperscale manager, as we call it, from a single pane of glass. Manage both the hardware and the software solution. You can do mirroring between them and all the advanced functionality which works on the hardware appliance also works on the software version. So it's very exciting and innovative. And we got a lot of very positive feedback to our announcement last week. So talk a bit about, from your guy's team point of view, you were making appliances, you were making integrated devices, and now really you've shifted to having a software, a really software-only offering. How does the team feel about that? Is it exciting? Does it open up a lot of new opportunities? Is it re-energizing? How is that really affecting your development? Because that's a different animal, right? So that's an excellent question. So first, if you go back to the origins of XIV, the whole concept of XIV was running software on top of just of the shelf hardware. So in a sense, we're kind of going back to our roots. You go back to your roots. Exactly. We're kind of going back to our roots by allowing the software just to run on any hardware. Now as part of this development, it was done in a very fast manner because we had all the heritage of the great software that we already have on our software. And we were able to do a very agile development process and get the software out relatively quickly and announce it last week. I was going to say, what are you going to have in store for us at the next edge but you don't quite have the 10-month window like you had between edge and now? I can promise you that we're going to have also very exciting additional news coming at edge in a couple of months from now. But for now, we are focusing on the spectrum accelerators. All right. Well, thanks for taking some time. I know we were tight. We got to squeeze you in. We look forward to hopefully seeing you at edge and congratulations on the new product. Thank you very much. And I look forward to it. Awesome. All right. I'm Jeff Frick here. We're on the ground in Las Vegas, California at IBM Interconnect 2015, the first IBM Interconnect show with about 20,000 people spread out over four hotels. It's quite a show. Thanks for watching theCUBE. We'll be back next time.