 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE. Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for EMC World. It's the Cube, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Joe, my co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org and our next guest is Ahud Ruka, who's the co-founder of EMC's Extreme I.O. Pleasure to have you inside the Cube. Great to be here, thank you. Dave and I, we just love the acquisition because it was so much controversy around Flash going back on the day. What's it going to be? The memory's cheap, it sucks, it's not going to work, it's never going to ship. So much has changed, two years. Well, congratulations on the journey, but now it's all Flash, all the time, in line, all the time, great stuff. Clearly, clear the runway, as they say. The plane is up and cruising out. How do you feel about that? Well, it feels great, we've taken off. Obviously, we were aware of the concerns. It's always less concerning when you are in the driver's seat because you know what's going on. People from the outside are waiting. We had, of course, our launch, GA, in the last quarter of last year. And 2014 is our first full year of shipping, and it seems to be working fantastically. Great support from EMC, and great team on the Extreme I.O. side, and we are just winning it. So the sales guys sitting there, licking their chops, going, give me the product. Absolutely, and more important than sales guys, customers are saying the same. So a lot of demand. So what's new in Extreme I.O. for 2014? You had one year under the book, so first couple mulligans under your belt, got the development, you had the direct availability, very successful. Now you had the full throttle, pedal to the metal, we heard from Josh earlier. What's new for 2014 that's going to power you up this year? So I think a number of things. First, there is a great roadmap. We are launching its first part for the year, this month, May, with a lot of great capabilities, snapshots, and encryption, and the whole range of features. And there is more to come this year. So we are very excited on the product side. And no less important, and maybe even more important for this year, enablements of the full power and capability of the EMC sales machine, services machine, manufacturing machine, ramping up, being trained, being coming extremely productive. You got that machine working right now, Keynote offering a million dollar guarantee, and the rescue program. And rescue, yes. Describe that real quick. What does that mean? What's the million dollars mean? Is that a gimmick? Is that real? Will anyone do that? You're not going to pay that out. So I don't worry about that. You're your friend in there, source code, hey, I put a nice back door in for you. Buy a house. I already made millions of dollars. You already made millions of dollars, right? Maybe an engineer somewhere is thinking of a way to make an easy million. But we don't plan on paying it, not because we are being dishonest, because we stand behind what we guarantee here. So the guarantee itself, of course, it's a way to attract the attention of customers everywhere, to the fact that ExtremeIO guarantees all its services to be absolutely in line all the time under all conditions. You fill the array. You put very stressing workloads, whatever you do. And that's very important. It's not just a technical fact. It's very important because what it means is we can guarantee performance. We can guarantee performance consistency and we can guarantee effective use of all data services at the same time. It's a great way to highlight the value proposition, the differentiation. But I got to tell you, I was in the audience and all the IT guys, you can see who the IT guys are because they'll go, oh, that gets my attention. Because they'll all say, hmm, they're probably, the wheels start turning, right? It's like, can we make a million here? And if you guys know you got that in the bag, that's a beautiful thing. Absolutely, and that's the thing we want to encourage people to think about these things, think about these capabilities, whether they exist or not in a product, in ExtremeIO, in other products they evaluate, and let them try win it. I think we'll win along the way. Hey, Hoot, can we go back in time a little bit? So 2012 is obviously the acquisition. We had Pat Gelsinger on and we had a good discussion with him. I want to go back even before that. So when Flash first came out, it was EMC who landed the haymaker, they were stuffing Flash inside of a Symetrix. And so we said, wow, okay, this is interesting. So we started thinking about it. And then at the same, right around the same time, you had FusionIO at the other end of the spectrum with PCIe cards. And then, so I'm trying to understand when you founded ExtremeIO, sort of, what was your thinking? What was the problem in the opportunity that you saw there? Take us back. Yeah, so surprisingly enough, I think, looking today at retrospect, the vision we had back in 2009, my partners and myself, is very much the same as what we are seeing today. Quite amazing. We are seeing the things we were envisioning back then actually materializing. I think it was the understanding that performance is important and there is the famous performance gap between processing and storage that's only widening and there is a need to close it and Flash is the right way to do it. But also the understanding that with Flash being a very different, much more flexible media than disk in many ways, mostly being a random access machine, allows us to build a much better storage solution. So it's not only about performance, although performance is absolutely a key pillar and we excel and I think we lead on that front, but the ability to offer other capabilities make the whole storage solution and related IT solution environment simpler, more agile, more easier to use. How much did Steve Jobs influence you to quit your job and start Extreme I.O., right? I mean, I'm talking about the consumer, it's the choice to put Flash inside these devices, which at the time was replacing iPods, spinning disk and iPod. Yeah, absolutely, we can't ignore the fact that we see the move from disk to Flash. We had disk-based iPods back in the time. I still have one. So absolutely, it's the kind of trends and thinking that definitely creates a thought in your mind, but then there are the obvious challenges of the enterprise environment that are very different from the stress and the requirements that the Flash device in a consumer environment is. Do you feel like Flash has long legs here? Do you care? I mean, there's a lot of alternatives that are being proposed. Do you see, what's your forecast? I know our own David Floyer has his opinion and it's because of the consumer side that he feels like this has long legs, but other technologists disagree and it doesn't matter to you. Right, so in many ways it does not matter. What we have built is a software stack and an architecture that excel and are optimized for any media that's random access media. And looking at alternative technologies, they all share the same capability being of random access nature. So the technology that we have built will be able to leverage new technologies as they become available and cost effective. Although I personally feel that Flash is here to stay for a long time with new generations, new advancements obviously, cost reduction that we are seeing, being aggressively pursued all the time. But if something else comes up, we don't really care. What have you learned in your journey as an entrepreneur than being acquired by the big EMC which has done a great track, has a great track record in acquisitions, you've seen data domain and others. What have you learned and what could you do over or what would you share as learning experience for other entrepreneurs and other executives out there? Sure. Well, I must say I was, I don't know if it's a good or bad thing to say, I was positively surprised with the acquisition and integration process. I think I always repeat saying this EMC, as far as I could tell, they do not have an acquisition or integration textbook. They don't come in day one, day two, and tell you, okay, this is what we need to do now. They look at the team, they look at the product, they look at the market, and together with us, with a lot of listening on the EMC side and a lot of flexibility, build the right plan for the business. And as long as everyone is working to promote the business, it's really a completely consistent mutual interest for everybody. What are you doing now? What's your role now, Ashley? It's always like, sometimes you see it, sometimes you don't, founders go, they vest, they get the cash, they bolt, they hang some stay around, go the distance. What are you doing now? So in many ways, my role did not change. In some ways, it definitely did change being part of EMC now from a CEO of a startup company to a general manager of a business that leverages many of the EMC functions. But the role bottom line is the same. Do whatever is needed to win in the market. And frankly, being part of EMC makes it somewhat easier and makes the goal of being number one more than realistic. It's still being a leader, but different elements, right? You still got to do the leadership. Absolutely. You have more resources, maybe more meetings. Or maybe... Somewhat more meetings, yes, more people to meet. But you have more gas in the tank. Absolutely, resources, support, a great team of talent on the EMC side that's helping us. And the sales machine, that's unbelievable. Edward, how should we look at the DSSD acquisition in the context of the flash hierarchy emerging? So I know some people may ask, hey, why do you need another flesh product? But keep in mind, flesh is a technology. Just like no one is asking, why do you need more than one disk-based product? I think the requirements of different environments, different architectures, different applications are such that there is a justification for a range of products. And the transition to flesh only makes the need for more than one new platform much more visible. So the DSSD is, I believe, not much information has been disclosed, not too much detail. A very different platform relative to ExtremeIO, a very complementary one. And when we look at the huge range of use cases out there, we will be very complementary. John, horses for courses, another British term. There you go. Thank you for coming on the queue. It's been a pleasure, real big fans of your success. It's always fun to watch entrepreneurs really make it, have an exit, an acquisition, and now your current growth is a great, great trend. Certainly the trend is your friend, you know, very infrastructure, more mobile, social cloud, God bless technology. Good time for being in the software business. Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. Appreciate it. This is the queue, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.