 Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. So here we are again. Last year we were at the cube in the Moscone Center. Amazing venue here in Vegas. A little different vibe this year, but... A little hotter. Yeah, a little hotter, but the ecosystem continues to grow, doesn't it? It's heating up. It's a big cumulus cloud. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, so we're here inside this vendor pavilion surrounded by Greenery last year, as you recall. We were sort of in the open at Moscone, but 19,000 people, I think this is the biggest tech show other than the show like an Oracle Open World that's sort of all Oracle, right? Right, right. Well, this is a lot more, I'd say, heterogeneous than an Oracle or an EMC world, isn't it? And that's a good word. The one that you, as the CEO of Falcon Store, near and dear to your heart, the fundamental strategy is to take this mess out there and bring it together. We're an equal opportunity provider of technology. Yeah, we believe in the whole platform, but it is a fantastic show. The quality of the customer base that we're seeing here, the education level, the intensity, they're bringing us ideas, they're bringing projects, they've got budget, they've got time, they want to get things done, and this is the best VM world we've ever attended. I'm really excited. I think it's been a great investment and a good show. Yeah, the quality of the customer is good and the diversity is there. So the reason I was bringing up last year is, we put forth a vision on theCUBE last year at VMworld about this notion, and I think you coined it, time machine for the enterprise. Right. And after that event, I did a lot of thinking about it, I've done a lot of writing on this, published a number of tomes, and just thinking about the whole notion of backup, how backup is broken, and storage as a service, and backup as a service, data protection as a service is really the fix. And I thought that was a great vision. So I want to talk to you about that vision and talk about how FalconStore is executing what you're actually doing there and where we're at. So let's start with this notion that backup is broken. Well, yeah, I think, why is it? There's a great debate around it, but you know actually, we had a big debate last year. Most of the naysayers have kind of gone off into the distance because I think it's predominantly viewed that tape has a very specific application and it's no longer to provide quick recovery of lost data. It's just not efficiently built for that. If you're looking to return data to active use quickly, you're going to need to use a snapshot of replication technology. There's really no more debate in that category. If your RTO and RPO is your target and you need to get up fast, you better not be going to tape. So that's a big part of why backup is broken because backup historically has been tape. And you've said it very clearly, Dave. Backup was traditionally a batch job. They used the spare cycles inside of the environment to get its job done. And today, so many of our customers out there and many VMworld and VMware attendees are very conscious of the fact that VM virtualization increases utilization and it sucks up all those excess free cycles, they're gone. So you need something that lives within the fabric of your environment that can coincide and coexist with virtualization and collect data as it is created, not just perform some big massive data move at the end of every day. So there's a lot of things that affect the way backup works and we believe that a sound solution in either the physical or especially the virtual space is something that collects the new data all the time repeatedly and so that's when we get into this conversation about time machine for the enterprise because what customers really want is they want a solution that is going to recover their data in the shortest period possible. That's always the goal. The newer the data, the more value the data and as it gets older, it's going to decrease in value and so it might take a little longer if you want to do it that way. But right now, we believe that replication and snapshot technology is the perfect way to do it. Disk to disk, disk to disk to data center, disk to disk to cloud. That's a great way to get it off site without worrying about tape. And ultimately, if you want to go to long-term storage, you can do archive to tape. So we're well down that path. Okay, so I mean, I love the vision and you're a visionary. You know, you actually at Cheyenne, you guys made a really interesting impact on the marketplace. You come into Falcon Store. My friend Ed Walsh, who has of course taken over a number of existing companies and done very well, said to me one time, you know, the first thing you do is a new CEO when you're taking over an existing company, you immediately figure out where the skeletons are and then you just be honest about it. You go to the board and you say, look, this is the deal and this is what I'm going to do about it. Talk to me about when you took over at Falcon Store, what you found out that you didn't know, what you did about it and then we'll talk about where you are today and how you're executing. Wow, that's a tough question, Dave. What I found out was that the company had been in the business of delivering high value technology to a number of important constituents, some of which were EMC, some of which were Sun, large players, IBM. And because of that, you get moved in a lot of different directions. These companies are not trying to do everything the same way. Quite the opposite. They want to do things very differently. We had to figure out how to reconcile those individual unique relationships in terms of code and move to a product line that was consistent, focused and supportable and repeatable. We started a program going back to Q4 of last year called RUM, which was the Reliability, Usability, Manageability Release and it was to build quality into the product, to harden the core of our technology to make sure that it was very, very scalable and easily managed because we're going to build on top of that this vision of the time machine for the enterprise, this vision of service-oriented data protection. So you've got to really shore up your foundation, make sure it's rock solid, that you integrate well with the environment that you're in such as VMware and you're ready to go forward. So the culmination of that effort took place just this last week when we launched V7 for CDP for NSS and DTL across the board. It's the highest quality, highest performance, most scalable product we've ever built and it just happens to be the only product in the industry that supports 1,000 snapshots, 64 terabytes per LUN of storage space and it delivers a time machine for the enterprise and so that's a step forward but it's also more importantly, the basis upon which we're building our next generation product which is going to really deliver on the second part of this conversation which is automation, automation, automation, for the whole enterprise. Okay, so you were in a spot where you were doing a lot of custom stuff, it's hard to leverage and hard to scale so you made that change and that had to be tough. Actually, you've held revenues pretty well considering that transition, haven't you? Well, yeah, we had a significant decline in OEM revenue over the loss of EMC and Sun and the like, Huawei, 3Com and we've managed to keep the top line fairly flat because we're building and growing in the channel so the first six months of this year we're 60% growth over the first six months of last year so we're growing the business, we're growing it in the channel space and so as we now have kind of absorbed the blow of moving out of the OEM business, where we're starting to normalize and now we're going in the right trajectory. How about key employee retention? Was that difficult during that time and were you able to navigate through that? No, no, it hasn't been difficult retaining the people that we wanted to retain at all. I think that once you get a group of people together around a shared vision, a shared set of values and you build a desired culture, a place where people want to participate and we're all pulling on the oars in the same direction, it creates a great deal of excitement and buzz and if you go over to the Falcon Store booth I think you'll see that's exactly what's going on and it's affecting our customers and their enthusiasm in what we're doing. Now the other thing you've talked about on your earnings calls is you weren't really happy with the quality and you've put in some programs in place. Can you talk about that a little bit, what you've done there and what the result has been? Well, it's interesting, when I sit down and talk to customers and I ask them what's missing in terms of your storage management, your data protection space, the thing that they come to me with is automation. Jim, we really need to be able to manage this stuff through vSphere, through vCloud Director, give me a single pane of glass, automate, automate, automate and when I talk to my engineers and I say, how are we gonna bake in quality, make it part of our core process, be able to do regression testing and repeat it every single time and get through the six to 7,000 test cases we have to get through, they give me the same answer, automate, automate, automate. Well, we gotta do this. So we've invested heavily in test systems and automation solutions in engineering which enabled us to get through that very arduous QA cycle that we created for v7 and it carries forward. So we've changed the way we architect products, we're more in agile development environment now, we do a build every day, we test and we test and we test as we're developing the code. So it's a big shift in the way we build stuff. So I look at v7 that you've renounced recently as some of the substrate of this vision that we've been talking about. It enables the time machine for the enterprise. You've given glimpses of what's called Bluestone. What can you tell us about that? Can you show a little leg, put forth a vision, what can people expect? Yeah, most everything we do is not really rocket science, it's based on customer demand requirements and sometimes customers can tell you a story about what they're dealing with and they don't necessarily articulate the solution but they share the problem and the pain and it's our job to figure it out. In such a conversation, I was dealing with one particularly large company with about 135 data centers and they said, Jim, your stuff is really great, the replication is fantastic, database refresh is working wonderfully, WAN optimization is awesome. I said, great, deployed across the enterprise, I said, there's one problem, we're not gonna be able to scale it. And I said, why? They said, well, because we're gonna be managing millions and millions of objects. So how do you do that? And so my question to them was, well, how do you do it today? How do you manage this huge enterprise? They said, well, obviously we have an exchange service, we have a database service, we have a web portal service, everything is managed and accounted for and controlled on a service level. Well, obviously that's what we're doing here. I mean, anyone who's spinning up a VMware machine has a use for it and it's generally going to be delivering some sort of service. The data protection space has not tracked with the business need. So we need an operating model that matches their deployment model and that's what we're doing. So service oriented data protection is the ability to look at a service inside of an environment and move that service in formation. So you have data coherency. You're creating a consistency group. So whether you're backing it up to protect it or you're moving it from New York to Chicago, you have the ability to do that because everything is controlled at the same level. So a single policy, a single pane of glass across a complex set of applications that have a relationship. That's what we need to do. It's kind of the Humpty Dumpty thing. We need to keep everything together in one piece to be able to move it back and forth. The reason people never want systems to go down is because when they fall down and they break, it's so hard to put them back together again. So our job is to understand the relationships of all these different applications and keep them in a single solid piece. That's service oriented data protection and that's what we're building right now. And that's a big software challenge obviously and that's really where you must be putting a lot of emphasis. And you know, I would say that our thinking is a little bit different today than it was when you and I first sat down and talked about it. And maybe it's because, you know, I got the bill from the engineering team that said, yeah, your 15,000 square foot house is going to cost you $15 million. And so I said, well, maybe we could start with a cottage. So we are scaling back a little bit of the vision but it's actually, I think, going to be far more effective because we're going to be delivering a much more concise user experience. One that enables them to present their environment and we're going to be able to say, hey, look it, here's an entire tree of VMware servers. We can back them up with one click and you can set one policy and you can do it all day long. It's going to be extraordinarily powerful and in Q1 of next year, we're going to be showing it. Good, I'm very excited about that because I mean this vision and plot, I mean, you know, we've talked about this a lot that backup is when one size fits all really two sizes fits all, right? If you got a zillion dollars to spend in a high value application, go SRDF it. And then do a daily incremental and a weekly full for everything else. That's your backup. That's it, that's your choice. And so what you're describing is something that's very a business view, understanding the value of, as a business owner, I know what the value of my information is and okay, great, I want to turn it up or down based on that value and be charged accordingly. That's the vision that you're putting forth. And I think if you want a report that is going to tell you without a great deal of detail that you've got a green light, that you can recover any service in your environment in less than 10 minutes. What we're showing here at the show today is FalconStore's CDP solution has the best RTO and RPO in the industry. There's no quicker or faster way to recover data than what we're doing. As you said, that's the substrate that we're building Bluestone upon. So it doesn't matter how well automated and how elegant and how beautiful your interface is and how cool it is in a browser if it doesn't have the hardcore heavy lifting technology underneath it. And that's what we've been investing in the past year. So I'm excited about what's coming and I'm also excited about the fact that we're delivering rock solid solutions to our customers today and we're giving them a path going forward. So that's a Q1 announcement? It's a Q1 announcement, yeah. Great, looking forward to that, Jim. Well listen, appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Dave, it's always a pleasure. We could go on and on. We got a very tight schedule today. This is the big day, so we appreciate you making some time for us. Thank you very much, Dave. Have a good show. Thank you, Jim.