 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Hey, welcome back to AWS, re-invent 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, very well caffeinated today, so is David Fleuer. We're really excited to be joined by two newcomers to theCUBE. We have Ryan Baxter, the director of cloud and verticals from Micron. Welcome. And Mo Farhat, director of SSD business line management. I'm marketing guy. Welcome guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So Micron, a 35 year old business. You must have seen massive changes in the last 35 years. But tell us what you guys are doing with AWS. What's exciting you about the announcements coming out? How are you partnering with them? Well, you know, as you're seeing around you today, the rise of hyper scale is the true story in IT. And we're closely engaged with AWS to support their storage memory and emerging memory technologies as well. And we're tremendously excited by the potential that AWS can bring to the market and is bringing to the market today. Right. So let's unwrap that a little bit more. One of the things that seems to be happening is that the traditional nexus of networking, storage going all the way through the central process where it's breaking up. And you've got some very interesting stuff with the NVIM, NVDIMS. Can you talk a little bit about that and what does it mean to architecture? Sure, so I don't know what line isn't blurring these days when it comes to computing. So yeah, we are certainly developing and pushing a product today called NVDIMEN. It is the first example of persistent memory which we believe will really usher in a completely new model and a really a way of thinking about the way folks do compute. And so it really requires some change on the system side but the advantages are significant with just a little bit of investment in terms of adjustments in software and the way you use hardware. What you can gain from a performance perspective is enormous. So by having large amounts of DRAM and then on behind it, a large amount of NAND storage and that combination of the two together on the same whole piece that goes in the computer suddenly multiplies by how many? 10 times? 100 times? At least an order of magnitude. I mean we're pretty excited about where this can go. Obviously it doesn't come for free. There will be some investment as far as just the application stack and how things need to change from a hardware enablement perspective. But yeah, things are changing very quickly. The traditional model of really memory and storage is very much at risk and very much blurring these days and we're excited about where it's going. So let's talk about the SSDs. I've been following the flash market for a long time and saying what a difference it makes to applications in the amount of data that they can get into them both from the memory side and the storage side. So what's happening on the SSD side? What's new and what are you focusing on? Well what's most exciting about the developments in SSDs today isn't that just that they're accelerating existing workloads but they're enabling all new workloads. Things like real time analytics to drive our AI engines have revolutionary potential for our daily lives and not just in the data center. And so when we take a look at what's happening in the SSD market today the big story is the ramp in adoption in PCIe connected or NVMe SSDs. And we believe that we're at a turning point right now and led by AWS and other hyperscalers in truly driving this adoption and what NVMe allows you to do is really harness the inherent parallelism of the solid memory technology, solid state memory technology and enable better control, enable lower latency, higher throughput and really move away from the legacy IO stack that was built in for the hard drive era. Or as we like to call it at Micron, spinning rust. Yeah. Right. So and that's really amazing isn't it? If you can have real time analytics connecting to systems of record at the same time that rushes in a completely what we call in Wikibon systems of intelligence, a completely new way of being able to provide much, much more data to those systems and drive productivity by an order again really very high levels difference of the type of applications that you can have. So let me ask you this is a lot of changes we've talked about where we're taking out the network side we're taking out the storage side and the memory side. What's one of the most important things about getting this to happen over the next few years? Right. Well, I think I'll start I guess one of the most important things in our minds is paying attention to the customers and really what drives them, what provides the most value for their deployments and in the cloud and so we have the privilege of working with folks like AWS because these customers at the end of the day challenge us to be better. They challenge us to maintain or improve our quality levels. They challenge us to be more flexible from a go-to-market and business model perspective and frankly a lot of the features that they're looking at incorporating into otherwise standard products today actually end up finding their way into the next generation products that we design tomorrow. So it informs a lot of the way we need to think about traditional memory and storage models in the future. What about the standards that are required? The standards? Yeah. So we certainly, the standards bodies are alive and well and are absolutely necessary for what we need to do to push our products into the market on a daily basis. Oftentimes those standards are too rigid or not feature-laden enough to be able to get enough benefit for the particular end customer and so in those cases we're sort of having to bend the model a little bit. So our products are based on a relatively straightforward set of foundational standards but from there we listen to the customer to enable new features, new capability of our otherwise standard products. Absolutely and in fact, Micron today is really working with our customers upfront in helping drive the standards with deep technical engagement on next generation NVMe features as well as next generation form factors. Really our technology leadership in DRAM, NAND, everything in between, really positions Micron very strongly to shape the future here and we can't do it without strong customer engagements and we're really very excited about the potential for our future here. Yeah. Fantastic. How does the standards focus that you guys have? How does that set Micron apart from your competition? Well, it helps us be a good player in the industry. It helps cement a leadership. It allows us to have a playing field that goes to the benefit of our customers, our partners in delivering predictability to the market, delivering overall lower costs to the market and all the other ancillary benefits that agreement on standards provide. I love what you talked about with respect to, working together in partnership with your customers. We hear a lot about that from AWS. They're very customer centric and I love their, there was an article on siliconangle.com this morning, was the third installation of John Furrier's exclusive with Andy Jassy and I love their kind of backwards approach to product development which is really, surprisingly still revolutionary. So the customer is such a driving force into what Amazon has become and it sounds like what you're both saying, that's really very much paralleled at Micron. Yeah, absolutely. You know, leading is hard when you're firmly looking forward and really blazing new trails in technology, in our product set here and really driving the revolution towards the solid state data center. You can't do it looking in the rear view mirror. You've got to go in collaboration and it's really some of the most exciting things that we do here is really enabling our customers to succeed. Absolutely. So and your focus at the moment, I'm putting words in your mouth, I presume that's really with the cloud providers, the hyperscale people like AWS, like Microsoft, like Google, are those your sort of where you're starting the conversations and then that'll come down into the enterprise as well after that. Is that the model? So, you know, we provide solutions to a broad range of customers. There is no doubt that hyperscale is in the driver's seat in terms of demand now and in the future for IT technology of all stripes there. So we're very focused on it. Yeah, there are cloud models that obviously are heavily supported by our OEM customers as well. So maintaining engagement and really being best in class in their eyes is also extremely important for us. So this event, I actually heard this morning 44,000 people here across the entire strip. Last year it was around 30,000 or so. How does this massive momentum that AWS has, how does that inspire Micron? And what can people see, feel, touch and experience at your booth here in the expo? Well, really, again, the growth in a number of attendees is nothing compared to the growth in AWS's business overall. These numbers are truly inspiring. They're changing the landscape of IT today. And so encourage everybody to come by our booth and look at the variety of solutions that we have, both on the SSD side, memory side, as well as the all-popular NVDEMs. And I think what events like this help to do is mobilize 44,000 of the brightest people in the world that come from all different walks of life, not just from a technical perspective, but software, hardware, application-oriented marketing to really have a meeting of the minds, if you will. And it really does. It challenges the traditional way of thinking of how we design our solutions and how we support customers like AWS. So guys, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with David and me. Thank you very much. Really exciting to hear what you guys are doing and we wish you continued success. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, David. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Have you here? Furmo and Ryan and my co-host, David Fleur. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live on day two at AWS 2017 re-invent. Stick around, we'll be right back.