 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here with Silicon Angle Media's flagship program. We go out to all the big enterprise technology shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Here at VMworld 2016, our seventh year at the show, we're in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome out on the program, two first-time guests from Comenario. We have Danny Galan, who is the founder and CEO, and Josh Epstein, who is the vice president of marketing. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. No, thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. All right, so Danny, give us a little bit about your background. You and I actually worked together at a large storage company in a previous life. People have said that VMworld is storage world. You are a storage company. But just give a little bit of audience your background in the company. Absolutely, so founded Comenario in 2008 as the next generation storage company. It happens to be in the next generation media, which is Flash, we're an old Flash storage company. A pleasure to be here. That's not the first time I've been part of the storage. I've been in the storage industry for quite a while. We've been together at EMC. So absolutely a pleasure to be here. All right, and Josh, just give us a little bit about your background and tell us what's Comenario known for. Is that there's so many storage companies here. You know, AFA or you know, XYZ. So I mean, so I also started my career at EMC way back and I left about that 10 years ago in Swar. I was never going to work in another storage company ever. So I spent that. I almost feel like I'm one of the high, I'm Stu. I also work at EMC, you know. I spent about 10 years doing a variety of B2B startups across the application stack. And I got introduced to Comenario this past year and really as I started digging into it, first I'm like, no way, I'm not going to do it. Started digging into it, met Danny, met the team and started looking at the industry. And you know, a lot's the same, but a lot's very different. It's a much more kind of exciting, agile time in infrastructure and storage in particular. And Flash is just a, you know, phenomenal market. I don't think we've ever seen, you know, a switch over of technology this wholesale ever. So great market, great tech, great team and excited to be part of the next generation of storage. Okay, so Danny, you said, founded the company back in 2008. Fast forward us through kind of the journey and I want kind of your longitudinal view as to kind of the storage industry. Many people that if they're not in storage, they look at storage as this arcane thing and we're always getting super excited about, Flash this, NVME, you know, 3DX point, you know, there's always some new, little cool point technology, but what do you see as the big trends? You know, storage used to be boring, not anymore, right? It's exciting times. I believe this is not just the biggest revolution in storage ever that is happening. This is the biggest revolution maybe since cloud and virtualization. And the reason I say this is if you look at any other element in the stat from applications, CPU, memory, networking, they all advanced borders of magnitude. The one element that was left behind is storage. One, because it was based on the only mechanical element in the data center but also the predominant architectures product there were designed 25 years ago. And so you had to do it differently. You had to reinvent how you do storage and the way we do it is completely different than the legacy way. All right, and vis-a-vis kind of the competition out there, there's so many sub segments, you know, from the days at EMC. EMC's got a broad portfolio. Joe Tucci used to always say, I want overlap so that my competition can't get a wedge in there. It was just announced today that the Dell EMC deal will close on September 7th. So we believe that's kind of a seminal moment in kind of the storage industry that, you know, storage as we know it, has changed forever. Absolutely. How does Caminario fit in and how do you drive forward on this deal? Do a great question. I think that the way we looked at the market, very early on, we said we believe the next generation cloud would be all flash. And when we said it, it was quite controversial. Flash was at $1,000 per gig and people look at us as a bit crazy. And we've seen technologies, some of them are excellent technologies going after specific niches in the market, virtualization, the public cloud, the SMB market. And we said, no, we believe that the next generation storage has to be all flash. And the next generation general purpose storage has to be all flash. And we've built the Caminario K2, the name of the product, as the next generation general purpose storage that truly you standardize your next generation cloud deployment or your next generation data center on it. Yeah, so Josh, I want to get your viewpoint. When we look at things at Wikibon, it's not always the direct replacement that makes a change. So it's not that, you know, VMware, we talked for years about Hyper-V competing for storage. It was like, you know, we spent years, it was block versus file versus object. When we look at the workloads, there's public cloud and there's SaaS. And when we said not owned in my data center controlled on my hardware, two thirds of that public cloud market is software as a service. So how does Caminario look at that? You know, how are you playing into those customers? Yeah, so, you know, when I joined we, Dan and I, we stepped back, we started looking at the market just organically. Caminario, over 50% of our business has historically been from SaaS companies. And so we stepped back, looked at that, tried to understand why that was and looked at the market in general. And just thinking about the cloud market to your point, I mean, the cloud strategy for enterprise really is dominated by adopting SaaS infrastructures. And that's for a few different reasons, right? You know, one, you know, the, all the ISVs are moving to cloud delivered versions of their applications. You know, but the other piece is that the simplicity it offers to the enterprise, it's not just great software, not just a great application. It's the ability to kind of outsource that entire application delivery infrastructure. So as we see these SaaS companies really looking at application delivery infrastructure as part of their core competence, looking to actually build out storage infrastructures, data set infrastructures to optimize for that delivery. And that's really what Caminario does uniquely, but several things that we do differently from anyone else that really fits squarely in that realm for SaaS infrastructure. All right, so in yesterday's morning keynote, Pat Gelsinger kind of gave a dissertation on digital transformation. Can you connect the docs for us, Josh? You know, how does that impact really the infrastructure strategy as people kind of digitize and go online more with their businesses? I mean, I look at, I spent a lot of time, you know, across the application stack, right? If you look at what's happening at the very top level, the types of things that are driving the evolution of user experience, whether it's mobility, IoT, real-time analytics, at that top level, requirements are changing. Users expect a different experience. In the middle level, in the application development cycle, everything is different. I mean, agile development, DevOps, the way that people attack this problem of delivering new functionality is changed, it's different. At that bottom level, at that storage infrastructure layer, it's like the old man in the room. I mean, legacy architectures can't evolve that quickly. So they need to really build this agile storage architecture that can evolve in time, can evolve both scaling up, scaling out, the ability to actually adopt new technologies that become available, and the ability to evolve with the application as the application evolves itself is really important. All right, Danny, I was wondering if you can give us a little bit of kind of some facts about customers, what they're adopting, you know, SaaS customers, how many do you have, and how are they looking to come in order to help drive that digital transformation? So why do we have such a high adoption rate in public clouds? Because if you look at public clouds, you have really infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service, and we believe that software as a service is really leading the pack in terms of how they treat infrastructure. Today we have hundreds of SaaS companies as customers that are running their whole stack, their whole end-to-end application stack on coming now, or why, okay? If you look at what a typical SaaS company needs, they have some sort of front application that generates really money for them, but also very sophisticated real-time analytics. This is probably the most difficult behavior for the underlying infrastructure because on the same dataset, you're running two very different workloads, and on top of it, you need to run DevOps, you need to run engineering, virtualization, et cetera. So how do you do that on a common platform that can grow with you? And the reason they adopt Caminayo is that we have exceptional scalability. We scale with them seamlessly, and we do it in a very cost-efficient way. So scalability, cost-efficiency, and the ability to really run any types of mixed workload really distinguish us versus any other technology out there for SaaS companies. I wonder if you can unpack for us a little bit more the analytics you talked about, because the big trend we see that we think is heartening is it's not just about storing or keeping up with your information. Scalability, distributed architectures, of course, are critical for lots of new modern applications, but how can I leverage, understand my data, get new business value out of my data? Oh, absolutely, this is a great question, because what we've developed in the underlying technology that has a very close relationship with the application is we've developed a proprietary patent algorithms that detects the behavior of the application that talks to us, and when it's analytics, we will adapt our behavior to exactly the behavior of the analytical engine that runs on Caminario. That gives the customer a very predictable performance across any workload at any given time, and it really gives them peace of mind when they're running very different types of analytics on Caminario. If I could just build on that, if you take the perspective of a SaaS company or an online customer-facing online service, online retail, online finance, it's all about differentiating the technology, differentiating their offering, their functionality, their user experience, so integrating real-time analytics has become extremely important, whether it be in an online retail setting where you're offering customized or personalized buying experiences. That is an example of online analytics that are running side-by-side on production databases, so the ability to handle that classic OLTP workload with an analytics workload simultaneously and deliver consistently high user experience is fundamental to that SaaS company or that online services company who are just competing, they themselves are competing on functionality, on customer attention, on user experience. In fact Stu, we believe that today we're the number one storage providers for SaaS companies because all of those advantages and the fact that we're very, very focused on this segment of the market where we enjoyed the tremendous success. Yeah, it's an interesting claim. Do you have any facts and figures you can back that up with as an analyst? We always need to understand. Absolutely, if you look at the top 500 SaaS companies and the presence that we have there, this is how we derive, obviously, this is more of a use case, there is no particular market that measures that and to the best of our knowledge from what we've done internally and some outside consultants, we derive to that conclusion. Yeah, any commentary about yourselves compared to not the traditional storage guys, but what about Amazon? Because most people, you think SaaS, you think startups building some of these environments, we've all seen, if we watch the industry, some big guys that go to Amazon, get off of Amazon, get back on Amazon and go back and forth. Yes, obviously we've all seen Amazon success and the numbers and adoption and we like to compare ourselves to AWS with one element, it's the ease of acquiring. How easy it is to just deploy instantly 100 VMs and 200 terabytes. And one of the things that we've done throughout the life of the company is how easy it is to do business. Let's face it Stu, people hate buying storage. It's complex, it's convoluted, it's not easy at all and we aim to change it drastically. And what we've done is two things that we believe is completely different from the rest of the industry. We call our program Kassure program that really gives the customer two elements that haven't got from legacy storage. One, predictability and two, agility. What do I mean by that? You want to make sure that when you buy your next generation a storage product it gives you predictability, predictability in cost, in availability and performance. And in fact we've put hard guarantees in our contract on those three elements. But also you want to make sure that you're protecting your future not just your current purchase. And we've done it as well. We guarantee our customers that they will never forklift upgrade with Kaminaru because we have this very scalable architecture that you can mix and match new technologies with current technologies. They will never increase their maintenance pricing and we will guarantee the life of the SSD forever. No limitations as long as they're under maintenance with Kaminaru. So predictability and agility for the future. Josh, do you have any customer examples, feedback you're getting from customers to validate what Danny is saying about the differentiation that you have? Yeah, no, just recent examples that we've talked about publicly work with a company called Payoneer, that leading payment processing company, offices around the world. They're running Kaminaru on both real-time analytics, OLTP and no SQL workloads for the great MongoDB customer. We've worked with a company called the Emergency Communication Networks, which is a SaaS-based offering replacing traditional 911 services, a very novel approach to delivering that kind of infrastructure and relying on high-performance off-lash that's extremely scalable and has a very consistent scalability story. It's been a big factor in them adopting we've got really across the board and SaaS is an interesting space, as Danny said, it's not a vertical, right? It's a business model. And really all ISVs are moving to some type of cloud-delivered solution or they won't be here in five years. And so the examples run across the board. If I could just pick up on something we talked about, the Amazon issue. I mean, one of the things we're seeing, I mean, clearly, if you're a startup, if you're a SaaS startup, an app startup, you're going to build on AWS from day one, but it reaches a certain point, a certain scale where the economics really turn in favor of building out your own private cloud-like infrastructure. And really what we see is those customers that reach that scale, they look at that application delivery infrastructure as part of their core competence, as part of their product. So they really do want the flexibility to build it out, to match it directly with the requirements of their application. All right, Danny, I wanted to give you the final word as people look at Cominario, what can we expect going forward? Any kind of benchmarks or milestones? We can look to see kind of the continued momentum that you've built. Absolutely, so we've been growing exceptionally fast. We tripled the company over the last five quarters. Any metric that you can think of, we enjoyed tremendous success. It's no doubt that what we've thought way back then, that the next generation cloud would be all flash is happening today. I think that it's clear to people, it's just a matter of time. Some people are doing it today, some it will take a year or two, but it's here, it's now. And the final word is people should jump into the water. People absolutely needs to give us a try when they think about their next generation architecture and their next generation challenges in the next few years. Danny Galan, Josh Epstein. Really appreciate the updates on Cominario. Really interesting to look at kind of SaaS and where that can live going forward. Helped to clarify a little bit some of that hybrid cloud message we've been talking about for many years. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2016. You've been watching theCUBE.