 here with theCUBE. We are in the studio in Palo Alto, theCUBE Studio offices for a CUBE conversation talking about storage, enterprise storage, cloud, and all the things that are keeping us up at night in the excitement that we see every day out in the field. So we're really excited to be joined by Noam Shendar, who comes in all the time for Zadar Storage, and he brought in a special guest, Dave Elliott, Global Product Lead Storage, Google Cloud Platform. Welcome, Dave. Yeah, thanks for having me. So we'll get right into it, big announcement. Noam, tell us all about it. Sure, we're super excited to announce that we're now connected up to the Google Cloud Platform. Our customers know already that we've connected to the other two major providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and we've been working diligently on what we think is the most exciting addition to that, and that's Google Cloud Platform. It's available right now. It's immediately available. It means that any customer of Google Cloud Platform can take advantage of our award-winning enterprise storage as a service connected directly to virtual machines at Google Cloud. So it clearly completes the trifacta, which we know that is the power right now in the public cloud. But what's special about Google Cloud Platform that you can get that the other providers don't offer to your customers? Google Cloud is special because we all know Google, the search engine company, and because Google has been doing this for so long, they have the existing infrastructure. So Google has global data centers with the networks connecting those global data centers, such that customers, wherever they are, can connect through hundreds of edge locations for low-latency access to the cloud. So whereas with the other major clouds, the customer has to be physically close to the actual cloud location for optimal latency, Google Cloud customers have far more flexibility in terms of location, and we think this will do even more to get more people on board cloud with their enterprise applications. Okay, so Dave, what I want to know is are you going to paint the Zidara rack colors? I think you've got a Google bike out front, the yellow, the green, the red. So what does this mean for Google? Obviously you guys have storage, you have massive amounts of storage, we all have lots of stuff on our personal Google storage as well as our little theCUBE storage. So what does this mean for your customers? So really to put it in context, as enterprises move to the cloud, there are different requirements from maybe peer-play startups. So we've had fantastic success, we've been in the cloud business now for I think nine years, but as we mature as a business and as customers mature and make it clear that they want to move more and more workloads to the cloud, their requirements though still look significantly in many cases like the requirements from the old days, from the legacy vendors. I'm a storage guy and I know there's certain requirements around SLAs, performance, the ability to move between clouds from on-prem to the cloud. And so as Google matures, as our customers ask for this type of functionality, we're able to meet those requirements by working with Zidara. So this really gives you the yes, we have that checkbox when you're getting into a hardcore enterprise guy that's maybe new to the cloud or he wants that comfort level that he's going to have all the stuff he had before but now part of it's going to be sitting into your guys infrastructure. It's two use cases, right? It's the traditional customer, consumer, enterprise customer who has today their workloads running on-prem or in private, their own private data centers or Colos and it's the customers today that are running on our compute instances who love our compute instances but perhaps are holding back for moving some of those more delicate workloads to the cloud. So those are two general use cases. Right, because that's really the point. It's not just about storage for the customer. The storage is an enabler for his applications, right? So this really opens up a whole another set of applications for the other Google services that doesn't really compete directly with the storage. Exactly, exactly, that's it. So as customers move, the really interesting things happen is customers move those workloads to the cloud. They can then take advantage of layered on other services like data analytics and machine learning and things like that. And so it's really about, really everything I think about this relationship is about helping enterprises move, migrate more and more workloads to the cloud in a more seamless way. Right, so it's kind of a good news, bad news for you, Noam. The good news is now you're partnering with Google, the bad news is they got a lot of, they got a lot of reach and distribution. Are you guys ready? What's the impact on your business now having this humongous partner distribution network, potential new client network? Are you guys ready to support that? What kind of new challenges does that present to you guys? It'll present growth challenges, but we're ready. So what we've done is made sure that we have the support infrastructure in place and also the sales infrastructure in place. So if customers need help prior to the sale, during the sale or after the sale, we have different teams that handle this and we have partners as well. That's a big change for us in the last couple of years, switching from a fully direct model to a model that's now 60% partner driven and that number is growing. Those partners are helping us with, especially with integration. The customer may need storage but also they may need to deploy other applications in Google Cloud. Those partners put it all together and provide a single, let's use the positive expression, a single back to pat. A single back to pat, not throughout the show or drink your own champagne, as they like to say. Exactly. And one of the things we talked about off air before we turn on the cameras is that you were excited about is really the distribution of Google and specifically Google access points because latency is real. As Grace Hopper said, the speed of light is just too damn slow. So you really need those access points to get to the compute and the store to make cloud work the way you want it to work. Exactly, for example, a common request is to connect remote clients to a central storage repository. So with most clouds, that's limited by a public network and the latencies and the hops that come along with that. With Google's peering capabilities, pretty much everybody is closer to the compute of Google than other clouds. And we know this because when we do the search and we get the answer back in .0012 seconds, a big piece of that is the latency between us and whatever Google location is doing that search for us. The compute benefits from that, the Google Cloud benefits from that and therefore our customers do too. Right, and Dave, and I presume this is just one of a number of steps within Google Cloud's kind of pursuit of the enterprise and moving in more kind of enterprise customers, enterprise workloads into the Google Cloud platform. Yeah, that's 100% accurate. I mean, we continue to build out the organization. We're building out partnerships and of course the products to better meet the needs of larger enterprises that have just unique needs. I will thank you for pointing out the differentiator on the network. It's something that I think people intuitively understand, but the depth and breadth of our networking expertise has been unbelievable. As opposed to most cloud vendors, we want to get the data, we want to get the bits onto our network as quickly as possible because we keep it on our network because we're so efficient in being able to move the bits from point A to point B. And I think that's really the big differentiator of why you see such better response, such lower latencies. And it's not just about the latency, it's also about the predictability of those. And so just to clarify, so once it gets into the Google network, wherever that point of access is, then it's contained within the Google network. Right, right, so we've innovated around networking for since our early days, things like OpenFlow and software-defined networking are things that have great genesis inside of Google. And so for us to move that data onto our network is just more, again, faster and more reliable for our customers and for our own data. We're able to leverage our own infrastructure for our own services. I think we have seven services now with over a billion customers. And just out of sheer necessity, we've had to innovate in and around networking. Right, and we've done a couple of peer shows where it just reinforces the fact you want to get off the public backbone as quickly as you can, depending on however you need to communicate with either your own internal stuff or with somebody else. And then, Dave, this is kind of a signal that you guys will be bringing in other products, obviously, not necessarily competing software, software-defined product, but just other kind of enterprise-y type solutions to offer your customers in pursuit of this kind of ongoing enterprise path. Yeah, I think that there are a lot of similarities if I were to draw the Venn diagram between what a high-performance, successful customer like Snapchat, one of our larger customers, Spotify, what they require and what some of the larger enterprises or even smaller enterprises with just very, very large compute-intensive, storage-intensive requirements are. So there is a Venn diagram, there's a lot of overlap and we continue to leverage our own internal investments in things like live migration of compute instances, things around innovative pricing to really drive home the low cost of cloud and the agility of cloud, things like customizable VMs, so you only get the actual machine that you need. So we're going to continue to innovate around that and be able to make sure that both enterprise customers and sort of the high-flying startups still have the ability to take advantage of it. Right, right, and is that new information for you guys that you can leverage? Because clearly, like a Snapchat, which uses massive amount of data, you have massive growth rates, I mean you have these, we talk a lot about the consumerization of IT in terms of the experience of interacting with an application on your phone that you want to be like when you interact with Snapchat, although I can never figure Snapchat out, so I'm left, so I'm right, but where you can start to use some of those lessons that you guys have learned in your broader application experience to bring to bear with your solution as well as for your customers. Exactly, so we have two goals in this relationship. One is to help the existing customers of the Google Cloud Platform do more, so that means I take the existing applications and maybe they can benefit in terms of better performance reliability, so do more also means to bring new applications into the Google Cloud Platform. Maybe the customer moved some early applications over into the cloud but left others on-prem, we'd like to see those move into the cloud as well, and then the remaining goal is to move customers who are not at all in the cloud into Google Cloud. Right. And by providing these capabilities, we think that's the last impediment. The customer may sit there and say yes, the compute capabilities are fantastic, I trust them, the network capabilities, we just talked about them, they're world-leading storage, I'm not sure I have what I need, I don't know if I have the IOPS that I need, I don't know if I have the uptime that I need, or even protocol support or features disaster recovery, Snapchat, Snap shots, et cetera. But now they're there, so there's no reason not to go. Yeah, it's exciting time, so congratulations. Really a big announcement, obviously, tremendous infrastructure by partnering with Google, I don't know that there's anything quite like it developed over all these years, I talked to some of the others, I'm like, how many Google, where are Google? 65,000, I'm like, wow, it's not the little startup that we think of over in Mountain View anymore, and congratulations, Dave too, to really make an aggressive move on the enterprise with really putting a flag in the ground, if you will. Well, I think we're just at the beginning, I think the next several years, in fact, next decade or so, it's going to be a pretty exciting time. All right, well thanks for stopping by the Palo Alto offices of theCUBE, good to see you, good to see you too. Thank you. All right, Dave Elliott, Noam Shendar, Jeff Rick, you're watching theCUBE, we'll catch you next time, thanks for watching.