 Live from San Francisco. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Nimble Storage, the power of predictive analytics. Now your host, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman. Welcome, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Launch in downtown San Francisco. A lot of exciting announcements coming out around storage. Cloud is big, big data is big. All that data's gotta sit somewhere so storage is still underneath it all and we're excited to get the update on some of the new and innovative things that Nimble is doing here. We're joined by Stu Miniman. Welcome, Stu, from Wikibon, all the way up from Boston. And our first guest, the very famous, I'm sure you all know him, Stephen Foskett, the organizer of Tech Field Day. So Tech Field Day has now come to theCUBE. Tech Field Day comes to, I think I've been on theCUBE before. Yeah, Stephen, I said, you know, we wonder if theCUBE would exist if it wasn't for you. You introduced John and Dave back in, before we started doing theCUBE at the enterprise events and yeah, great to have you back on the program. You've been on a number of times and you know, he's just some guy. I mean, he's got what he says on his bio. So yeah, Stephen, so, you know, all flash and analytics and all these things. You know, what's your take? What's happening in the storage industry today? Well, it's great to be here and to see Nimble. I asked for permission to be able to say this, to see that Nimble finally has an all flash array. That's a shout out to John Gruber there with all the finalies, right? Yeah, it's fantastic to see that Nimble has entered the all flash club. It seems that there's this, you know, this pent up demand for more and more storage performance and more and more storage capacity. And you know, this is the way to do it. It's great to see that Nimble has engineered a system and furthermore, you know, the easy way out would have been to just pull out the hard drives. I'm glad that it's not just, that's not what they did. All right, so yeah, maybe give us, you know, your initial take on, you know, what the pieces are. Analytics is a big discussion here. Of course, building on the Inso site product that they've had for a few years. We're going to have Rod Vagon shortly to talk about that in depth, you know, how does Nimble position themselves in the field? How do you see them differentiating themselves amongst what is a pretty crowded field? You know, not only in storage, but I mean the all flash array market, all the big guys seem to have it. So plenty of small guys have it. You know, how does Nimble stack up? Sure, yeah. Nimble is in an interesting position because essentially for the last few years they've been an execution machine. They have their claim to fame as much as the technology. You know, they came out with a hybrid flash disc storage array, but as much as the technology it has been about the execution. It's been about, you know, putting Salesforce on the ground, putting support on the ground, you know, getting into the competitive sales and being able to support those arrays. And one of the technologies, one of the key components of that is this Inso site that you mentioned. Essentially they have sort of a, you know, big data application of their own to assist in the support of these systems. And that is just incredibly important. I was saying just now, if Nimble had not announced, you know, an all flash array, being able to sell and support the heck out of these things is actually probably more valuable to the company because it means that they can, you know, grow revenue, grow market share. Essentially Nimble has emerged as the biggest little storage company. And that is a really nice place to be positioned in terms of growth. I mean, they're a public company. They've got a proven primary storage platform. Now they have an all flash addition to it. They've got really, really solid support. It puts them in a really, really good position in the market. All right, so where do you see them fitting kind of in the broader IT space? We've had, you know, they've got the partnership with Cisco, with the smart stack for convergence. We've seen the growth of the hyperconvergence guys. You know, when I look at storage in general, the biggest growth area has actually been in the cloud. I said, if you take, you know, Nimble and the other companies that have IPOed in the storage space in the last few years and put them together, Amazon has sold more storage than they have, you know, a kind of a year over year basis. So, you know, in the context of the greater, you know, what's the role of storage going forward? And, you know, the storage admins too. Yeah, that's a real good point, because of course, you know, cloud storage is sort of a different market. And Nimble is very much in the enterprise. It's very much in the data center. This is a company that is in there head to head with the companies that you've heard of in enterprise storage companies like NetApp and EMC and Hitachi data systems, you know, and of course Dell and HP and those. And that's kind of an unusual position for, you know, a new company. This is not a cloud storage company. This is not a, you know, containers or whatever. This is a company that's producing a product for, you know, mainstream applications, mainstream consumption. And that's why it's so important that they execute on the mission of support and availability and enterprise features like replication, moving data around and so on. Because frankly, I think the numbers show that a lot of the other companies in this space are losing market share and losing, you know, sales are declining, market share is declining. There's an opportunity for somebody to come in and gobble some of this up, especially with Dell acquiring EMC. You know, there's some lingering questions about NetApp. There's still lingering questions about Dell and about HP. It leaves an opening. But it's still so interesting because there's all this pressure on the storage market. And as you said, storage is changing. People are buying storage without buying storage a lot of times. But at the end of the day, we hear over and over how storage demands are actually growing dramatically. How the amount of data that's collected is growing dramatically. How it's only going to accelerate video and multimedia. So still, with the right solution, seems like a great opportunity, good time to be in the storage market as long as you've got, you know, the horses for the courses and you can compete. Right, yeah. And I think that's the important thing. You know, you can't come to market with a product that's not the right product, especially in this space. Enterprise storage is a very conservative space. They want features. They want reliability. They want support. They want compatibility. And we've seen time and again companies coming in, especially in this all flash space, with products that are feature poor, that are brand new, untested products, you know, products that aren't supported well from a little company, or that don't deliver on the promise of performance. And that's really the challenge here, is for Nimble to come in and basically live up to what they've established in the hybrid array space. All right, so Stephen, unfortunately, we don't have a lot more time left. As you look through what we're going to hear today, what things are you going to be looking for? What things have you heard from the community that we should have as whether this launch today is something that is going to help re-accelerate Nimble's growth or something that says, you know, well, it's about time they have an all flash array. How do we measure success? Yeah, that's a great point. And that's what everybody should be looking for here. What we want to see is we want to see that Nimble didn't just pull the hard drives out and stick in some SSDs. We want to see some real engineering here. We want to see some really interesting, innovative approaches to solid state storage. And personally, I feel, as I said before, regarding support, I want to see more about how InfoSight is enabling not just the company to build a better array, but the company to support that array for their customers. Excellent. Well, Stephen, thanks for stopping by. Wish we had a bit more time. We'll have to get you on again. I know it's been a while since your last visit. And we'll look for you out and about as you continue on the travels. Love keeping up on it. Very good. Thank you guys for having me on. Absolutely. So Jeff Frick here with Stu Miniman. We are at the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Launch. It's an exciting event. It's just getting started. We're going to be here for the rest of the day. We're going to have all the key people on. Give you the story. And so stay tuned. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Gosh, I feel like I'm on TV. You guys are.