 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm here in Massachusetts. My colleagues, John Furrier and David Floyer, are live in our bi-coastal Palo Alto studios. We've got Steve Mills from IBM coming up next, but John and David, before we go into that, one of the big things we've seen is lately the big whales making acquisitions. We've seen two big acquisitions. One from IBM, most recently, the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems, and then last year we saw EMC acquire, sorry, Extreme I.O., company out of Israel. Those moves are allowing these companies to essentially catch up. And Dave Floyer, I want to get your take on what's happening here. We had, actually John, we had Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE. You might remember, he said, hey, we're behind. This was well over a year ago. He said, we're going to catch up. They went out and made a big acquisition. The whisper number was somewhere around 350 to 400 million. IBM made an acquisition of Texas Memory Systems. Nobody really knows what they paid. I had heard 100 million. I can almost guarantee they paid well over that. I think the asset was worth much more than that several hundred million would be my guess. But David Floyer, what's your take on these companies bringing these capabilities into their portfolio? It's absolutely essential for them to do it. This marketplace is going so fast. You heard from Brian that in four years they've been able to develop a new database, a new streaming database, bring on customers, get very, get tackling areas which have never been tackled before. So the rate of change in this marketplace, particularly the database marketplace, is phenomenal. So companies like EMC, like IBM, have to bring on technology in order to deal with this. If the limitation, if you're thinking in the same way as you've thought about databases and you've thought about data structures, if you are thinking about those ways of doing it and just using Flash as a way of slightly improving it, Brian is absolutely right. If you get a 2x improvement, you can run my SQL twice as fast. Well, that's nothing. You've got to be able to re-architect it, redesign, look for new ways that you can impact the marketplace and make a profit from it. So this is a fantastic time for the new companies coming through. Customer potential buyers like IBM, like EMC, like NetApp desperately need these in order to keep the rate of change going. One of the pieces and uses that I couldn't understand was why IBM was thinking about selling its x86 architecture server business with storage going into the servers, with the integration of storage into the server itself, the requirement for new architectures that are going to be to use these Flash things close to the network, clusters of servers. This seems to me the very last thing they should be doing is selling that off. They should be taking advantage of their expertise, combining it with the Flash, combining it with the database, bringing in new companies and start to make a real difference. You think that would be a bad move? Hopefully, Ginny Romney's watching this Flash Cube and is listening hard. John Furrier, I want to bring you into this discussion. You're in the valley. You've seen disruption time and time again. It seems to me that the folks that aren't positioned well for Flash, the guys who really are relying on the spinning disk business, really have to be concerned right now. What's your take on the disruption here? Well, I think what David Floyer was just talking about is I think one of those things that you need to unpack and look at it heavily because what he's teasing out is he's talking about IBM not selling. And this is something that I was critical of HP on when they even thought about selling some of their PC division. And this is the bottom line. With Flash, this is just one market data point that points to a complete reach angel was I was mentioning earlier. This means that hardware supply chain expertise is critical more than ever. And I think HP, IBM, Dell, these are companies that have core competencies in managing supply chain. And when you look at the kind of new supplies that are going to be coming onto the market, Flash, for instance, managing these kinds of components, the new components, dealing with software-led infrastructure, a competitive advantage could be the difference between managing a supply chain, getting a product out four months faster than the competitor. And that is a strategic advantage. And I think HP and Dell, for instance, will win there. Getting back on the M&A question, I think what we're seeing in Silicon Valley is a couple schools of thought. You have folks that are laggards, they're not really in the investment community and the vendors, they're laggers in the sense that they're kind of behind the times and they need to get back in the race. It's like the NASCAR race. They're in the track and they got to get out front. And the only way to get there, Dave, is to buy their way in. They really have no roadmap, they have no real R&D, and they have to get out front. And even if they had the R&D, it might be irrelevant in this new architecture. So what you're seeing is two types of M&A deals that people are looking at. As you say, Tuck Unders sub 500 million. They just kind of bring it in by the team, by the technology and quickly integrate into their existing channel. You see IBM's great at that, EMC's done a few of those. And then you see in the big monster acquisitions, let the market get validated and come in and buy those. Those suspects are violin, for instance. Before they go public, that might be a nice acquisition in the billions of dollars. So that's the two types of deals that we're seeing. And then anyone coming out of the woodwork with tech, whether it's coming from Israel or some other area around the world, if they have expertise in software on a flash architecture, they might come in at a 50 to $150 million level. So that's the kind of data that I'm hearing in the field and the bankers are looking at essentially those three buckets of deals. Sub 150, 150 to 500, and then I'll see over a billion dollars in the big monster deals where it's validated and the market space has been validated. Excellent. Now, last week, actually two weeks ago now, I was down at 590 Madison Avenue. IBM announced that it's investing a billion dollars in flash. And I had an opportunity to talk to a number of executives. Alex Wilcox and I were there. We brought the camera. We wanted to cover it on the ground. So I had the opportunity to talk to Steve Mills, specifically about that billion dollar investment. And I know there were several other billion dollar investments that he's made. One was in open source, one was in analytics. The analytics business he announced in 2005 or 2006, we're gonna invest a billion. They ended up investing 10 billion. Interestingly enough, Ambuj Goyal, who now runs the storage business was largely responsible for that transition in those acquisitions in analytics. He's now running the storage business. He's, in my view, has some latitude to go out and make strategic acquisitions. Obviously they've made one with TMS. So let's watch Steve Mills down at 590 Madison Avenue. And then John and Dave and I'll come back and talk about what we heard.