 Scott Gennaro. How are you, sir? Good to see you now. C.E.O. of Nirvana. formerly with Q-Logic, veteran of the Cube. You are a Cube alumni. You're on the leaderboard list of some of the top most prominent Cube interviews. Pat Gelsinger, you are. Yeah, you've been on several times. We had you on a VM world. We had you on an EMC world last year. You'd make a good blogger, actually, because you have that leaderboard mentality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. I'm only kidding, you're doing great as a C.E.O. Congratulations, by the way, on the new role. So Nirvana, you guys are rocking and rolling. We've been seeing a lot of you guys in the news lately. We've had you on the Cube, obviously, in Palo Alto. The press coverage of you guys have been fantastic. You've had the most amazing phenomenon happen over the past month. Obviously, the crisis in Japan has been a catastrophe. You guys put out the olive branch of essentially saying, hey, we have a value proposition with moving stuff around in data centers. You guys put out this offer and had this most amazing response. Could you just talk quickly about that latest trend, and this is the C.E.O. of Nirvana, that's got you in the room. So you guys know, I used to work at Atachi Data Systems. So I have a lot of friends in Japan, right? And so we were watching that pretty closely. On the weekend, I was sitting there and I'm thinking to myself, wow, our data center is actually 250 miles away from anything that's going on. That's an Equinox data center. So in that sense, we had no concerns whatsoever in the sense of disaster recovery, but they did talk about, they were going to be rolling blackouts, you know. Equinox basically told us, hey, no concerns, we're working with the government. But we never know. We never know, right? You never know, and this is people's data and it's the most critical stuff for them right in their business. So we sat in a room with our engineering and I said, hey, I'd like to go out and offer to all of our people or all of our customers in our Japanese location. The option to potentially move out temporarily, right? And so we actually decided to go do that. So we offered them to move out of the Japan location temporarily. We offered them two options. One is keep it in Japan because of performance reasons and do a second copy so they had a disaster recovery situation. So there's guys who only do one copy and they did two. And then we basically offered just to move them out completely. You know, once again, surprisingly, we had a handful of customers who actually took us up on it. And you didn't charge them? We didn't charge them for anything, no. We thought it was the right thing to do. The other thing I thought was interesting is that this technology really created an interesting dynamic because we did it because we wanted to help our customers. It got a lot of press and the press that it really got was this fact of how cloud technology allows you to do this kind of stuff, right? So kind of a afterthought, if you want to call it. We had a lot of interviews of people saying, wow, you know, we never really thought of cloud as an enable tool to be able to do this with customers, right? Which is able to quickly allow them to move their data outside of a location that could have a potential regional disaster. And so- So a gesture of massively great will, and honestly, you need it because you know that market situation there turned into a business opportunity for you? Is it like a- Because that's not your primary business, is it? I mean, it's just a function of your technology, right? Yeah, just so we're clear, I mean, we didn't make any money on any of this stuff. Yeah, this is totally cool. This came out more around the fact that all of a sudden people were sitting in a room going, wow, we never really thought about if we put our data in a cloud that you could quickly move the data out. So if somebody was had a traditional storage product in their data center in Japan, they'd have to back it up the tape and hopefully move that off. And you know, as you saw some of the roads there and stuff, it wasn't pretty. The airport was closed for a while a little bit, right? So how do you get it out? By putting the data in the cloud and being able to move the data off very quickly to anywhere in the US or in Europe, it just, I think it created a lot of buzz around, wow, we never thought about cloud in that sense for kind of a disaster recovery or a contingency for a regional disaster. Well, congratulations. It's great leadership on your part to do the right thing. And I'm really psyched that you got a lot of visibility on that, so good job. You guys are getting a lot of confirmation of the messaging that we've heard coming out in Nervonix, right? Particularly the Enterprise Class Cloud. You're seeing here at this event. I mean, I just got here, but I was been reading earlier and I said a lot of talk about true cloud, Enterprise Class Cloud. You've been banging that drum. Certainly, since you came on Nervonix is that's the heritage of Nervonix. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting and I think the big thing that we've changed over the last, you know, called six months is we repositioned the company. And the big reposition was, when most people said Nervonix, if they knew who we were, they would probably have said public cloud. You know, and public is very important to us. We have our data centers and, you know, seven locations and, you know, roughly still about 90% of my customers are in the public cloud. One of the, I was on a panel earlier and the big discussion that we came up with was this conversation around, was anyone really using enterprise type data in the cloud? And I said, well, let me go down the list, right? And I listed off, you know, 15 customers. I said, these are big name customers. Can you share some of those with us? Oh yeah, I said, you know, GE's using us, you know, Comcast, Fox, you know, NBC, Cisco, you know, we went down the list. Do they have enterprise data? I mean, you know, it starts to split hair about what they mean by enterprise data, but they... Well, they're huge enterprises. The data is in the eye of the beholder, but go ahead. Exactly, and then, you know, the other discussion we got into a lot was, are people using cloud, public cloud for, you know, primary data, and it was interesting, and Mike from EMC, what's Mike's last name? He runs their cloud. Mike Feinberg. Yeah, so Mike, you know, Mike and I were actually on the same page as that. How we defined primary data 10 years ago is probably not the right way to define primary data today. I have a lot of customers who use our cloud for what, you know, those companies consider primary, you know, tier one data. The difference is that when we think of primary tier one data, a lot of times we think of Oracle online databases. We think of, you know, transactional databases. The new companies that are emerging and the new applications that are emerging aren't built that way, right? You know, so they're not online applications. Give me an example. Well, an example would be, you know, there's a lot of web 2.0 companies, right? You know, and how they pull data. We've got a lot of people who actually use their... Financial services too, would that be an example? Which one? Financial services. Yeah, financial services is another one. But we have a lot of customers who, you know, have their websites and they use our cloud for their websites. Now you would probably say, oh my God, how did they do that? You think it would be too slow? But it's not, you know, because they design the product. You know, they've designed these websites to be able to do these upload, downloads, dating sites. You know, most of the stuff that's in these dating sites, you know, the pictures and all that unstructured data and the information about, you know, who they are and what they are, we've got a lot of dating sites that, you know, that data's in the cloud. And they're pulling it down. The moment you hit a button and say, I'm interested in that person, it comes down right away. That's the new normal as people are calling it. That's the new application. That's primary data to them, right? That is real live primary data to them. It's not backup archive. And so we have a lot of customers doing that type of stuff. But you know, but backup archive is a good use case. I mean, those two use cases for the cloud, right? It's huge. When I talk to the Wikibon members, I would say two thirds of the data in their enterprise is tier three or tier four. 90% of the data doesn't get touched after 90 days. And if you look at recovery, most of the recoveries are done on data that's 24 hours old. And then after that, it's a very steep exponential curve and it shouldn't be there. It should be just in the cloud somewhere. It's essentially stale data that you're never gonna touch. Why do I want that on premise? Right, so 65% or greater. Data that's being created today is kind of this low performance, unstructured, large blocks of data, right? Yeah. You know, and going back to your point is, is that a lot of it is very low performance. And so you back it up, you put it in the cloud. You know, I'll give you a good example is that we have a lot of customers who are doing snaps, right? Snaps are big. If you're a NetApp customer, you're doing snaps, right? Right. If you're a VM, you know, VMWare customer, you're doing snapshots all the time. Well, snapshots are backups, right? You know, most of the time you're not gonna use it. So where do they store that stuff? They store it on tier one storage most of the time. They do a snap on NetApp and they back it up to a NetApp box, right? They do a snap in VMWare and they're backing up to an EMC or a NetApp box. Those are backups. They should be off into the cloud. So we're seeing a lot more companies now writing interfaces to back that stuff into the cloud. So, but backup and archive is still one of our biggest areas. The other one is data collaboration, right? We see a lot of companies, you know, wanting to share data globally and the cloud allows you to do that. So, you know, when I look at it today, every time I walk into a new customer and I've probably been in front of 60 customers in the last, you know, 75 to 90 days, I've never walked out of a meeting where either there was a follow-up meeting scheduled or there was a proof of concept starting. So, you know, the cloud is here. You never walked out where that didn't happen. That didn't happen, yeah. I mean, cloud is here. The enterprise customers are interested in it. And I think the cool thing that we've done, which is uniquely different than anyone else, is that first of all, I want to make sure I'm clear about something. When I talk about cloud, I talk about usage-based cloud. A lot of people don't, you know, and we've talked about that before. You talk about pay-as-you-go. Pay-as-you-go with, you know, I'm not selling you. What I call true cloud. Yeah, exactly. And it's not semantics, right? It's, well, no, it's not, but you know, the point is, is that, you know. If you pay-as-you-go, it's cloud, right? I mean, that's what you're saying. Right, but there's a lot of companies out there and we've talked about this before and the EMC is one of them. Cloud washing. They talk a lot about, you know. Pat Kelsen might disagree with you. He's actually used the word cloud washing. Well, I don't know if he would disagree, we should ask him. Yeah, the point is, is that, they don't charge usage-based. Now they'll say they're enabling customers. Yeah, but they can't, right? How can they charge usage-based? They kill their revenue, the whole thing. That's VMware. VMware. What was that about? Hey, that's a whole thing, that's a whole thing. And another 15 minutes on the end of the panel. That's true cloud. Yeah, exactly. They don't charge for it, though. But that's just a lot. Yeah, it's free usage. But going back to the point is that, and where customers do have concerns about security and putting stuff in the public cloud, we offer a hybrid and we offer a private cloud, right? So we're the only company out there today that will actually do usage-based public, private, and hybrid in a customer's environment. And no one else does that. And so what I do now is I actually walk into customers, and this is getting a lot of traction, and customers say, I want cloud. They're like, great, what does that mean? So we go through the big discussion about what does that mean? Every time they say I want usage-based, that's not an option, right? Customers want usage-based for their cloud. Now they'll say, I don't know if I can get my auditors to agree on putting it into one of your data centers. I say, great. What if I put it in your data center and charge a usage-based? Can you do that? Oh my God, if you can do that, that sounds great, right? So why are you able to do that and the other guys can't? What's, what's? Well, I think there's a couple reasons. One of it is our business model. I mean, there's no question about it. I mean, we have a business model that allows us to do it. As you said very clearly, you know, and I say this all the time because I was at one of those big storage companies, right? You know, on the high-end storage, you know, probably 50% of the data is on the wrong storage. I mean, it's on high-expensive storage, right? Which means it needs to come off then. Only 20, 25% of most data should be on that tier one type storage. I never heard you complaining about that when you were going to talk to your data assistant. I know, I know you, I'm coming out right here. So the second one, I'm, you know, they were all the bones of Barry. Do you know how many customers I've talked to where I've said, jeez, that tier three type environment, you know, 40% utilization, they almost laugh and say it that high, right? They always say it that high. So the point is, is that, you know, so if you believe that to be true, and I think if you've ever sat in a room with a customer over a beer who doesn't want to admit it publicly would probably agree with what I just said. So now all of a sudden you're an EMC, you're an HP, you're an IBM, you're whoever, and you go into a customer and say, I'm going to offer you usage-based pricing. They're going to drive their revenue. They're going to drive their margins down to nothing. You know what I mean? And that's going to be a fundamental problem. That's the dilemma there. And so the technology we're talking about is very disruptive. Now, my software, you know, my file system allows me to do a lot of this stuff too, right? You know, it gives me the capability of doing the provisioning and the billing and then, you know, the web interfaces and a lot of the stuff we're talking about. And the other thing too, which I think is really critical is that we do billions of files, not millions of files. And so we have a huge amount of scalability that the other guys don't have. Are you seeing people that can't scale and that are claiming they can? Is that unique? We're in a lot of issues around some of our competitors' environments where they can't scale. Really? Yeah, and the reason we know about it is because now they're approaching us, talking to us about, you know, hey, we want you to come in and have a conversation. Does that hurt you? I mean, does that, in other words, that say, I mean, a large established company is not able to scale, but is there a sort of a negative halo effect not necessarily on us? Because, I mean, they can scale with us, right? But it- And you can demonstrate that. And we can demonstrate it. But it could create a potential, somebody sitting at a user group like this, saying, hey, I've got, you know, EMC Atmos installed and I can't get it to scale and blah, blah, blah, so cloud's not ready and they kind of do a blanket. But in most of those environments, if we heard that we'd go in and we'd have a conversation and we'd show them why we can scale better than them. And, you know, usually we end up winning those guys back. Scott, final question for you because we're behind a little bit on time, apologize, but congratulations on a lot of stuff. What's next for you guys? What's happening now? What's the action for Nervonix? You guys have done really well. You've taken over at the helm. You got the funding. You guys are fully funded, great customer traction. What's happening right now and what's around the corner for Nervonix? I think a couple things, right? I mean, one is, is that, you know, our plan now, because the market's ready, is really to go in what we call this hyper growth, right? We're investing pretty aggressively in sales. We're investing more in engineering to come out with the following product. We are in our second generation of product. We're about to come out with our third generation of product. Everyone else is in alpha, beta, early stuff, that. And then we're aggressively going after the channel. You're gonna see a big play for us to go after the channel. We're gonna productize the cloud and put it in the channel. And being able to look out for a couple more OEM agreements, so. All right, Nervonix is on the roll and Nervonix is rolling strong with Scott Gennaro to helm. Channel plan coming around the corner. Third generation product, clearly a good lead. And everyone else, congratulations and great stuff in Japan on that gesture. I thought it was fantastic, congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE again. Scott, always a pleasure.