 Hi, welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Cube Conversations is a regular program where we're having conversations across the industry about some of the challenges and the opportunities for practitioners in the industry. Joining me for this segment is Peter Smith, who's the Director of Product Management from Infineo. Infineo's a local startup. Glad always to bring in the conversation. Peter, thanks for joining us here. Thanks for having us too. Good to be here. Absolutely, so we've seen you around some of the virtualization events, both locally and nationally. Can you tell us a little bit about who Infineo is? Sure, yeah. Infineo is a startup that builds a server-side caching solution for VMware environments, 4.1 to 5.5. And for a server-side cache, we're a software-only solution. You can download our software, no need for additional hardware, and our software will offload from your backend storage system, delivering you improved storage performance, independent of having to buy additional storage capacity. Okay, so Peter, we're definitely going to unpack this quite a bit, but just to make sure I understand where you fit. Because when VMware especially was put into environments in many cases, it helped the efficiency on the server-side, but it often made things less efficient or harder to manage, and performance was definitely a key concern when you talk about both the storage and the networking, and now people are talking about things like software-defined storage to help solve that picture. Would you consider yourselves part of that software-defined storage umbrella then? Yeah, yeah, we are, but I would say that we deliver a very specific solution, the simplest way to deliver storage performance outside of buying disks. Okay, so great, you're a piece of software. I don't have a requirement to have, say, flash in each server or anything like that. You're purely at the software piece. Exactly, and by doing that, it means that from an operational perspective, there's virtually no change to your environment. Our software fully automates the installation process, there's no plugins in the hypervisor, no plugins in the operating system, you don't have to reboot a host, you don't even need to put a host into maintenance mode. You just download our software, hit go, six next buttons, and we slip ourselves into the IO stream. The only thing your workload nodes that happens is it got faster. Okay, so when we look at performance, there's IO and there's latency, and the big areas that Wikibon has looked at and talked to customers about, definitely database is an area where latency and predictable performance is a huge issue, and VDI is another one where, typically if performance doesn't meet what I thought it would, I need to just throw more money at storage and buy more hardware, so those areas that you're finding your solution fitting into, what are the big use cases for you guys? Yeah, so exactly. As far as latency is concerned, in the first use case with databases, to the extent that we reduce latency and there's a sufficient backlog of work, we can actually increase the effective IOPS that your storage system can support. Now on the VDI front, users are very sensitive to fluctuations in performance. They're used to having a dedicated laptop with a dedicated hard drive. The workload that they generate alone affects performance, and all of a sudden they're thrown into this environment where they're neighboring virtual machines by one of their coworkers, is actually affecting the performance of their experience in VDI. And what Infineo can do is smooth out that IO profile so that everybody gets a nice, smooth, consistent performance. So you don't have to over provision your storage system at significant cost. Okay, so there's been a lot of new conversations in storage, especially over the last five years. Flash has been one of the largest, we think, over the last five years, it's done a ton to really revolutionize storage architectures. We think there'll be more innovation over the next five years than there were in the last five. You know, software components, really attacking these pieces. You know, a hot one that's on a lot of people's discussion these days is what VMware did with the virtual SAN or VSAN solution. So that's a software-based solution that scales out both compute and storage, what we at Wikibon call server SAN, and that's a whole class of solutions that fit not only what VMware's doing with VSAN, but some of the hyper-converged players like Nutanix and SimpliVity. And then there's a whole host of companies like yourselves that are just attacking the performance issues, you know, IO's in your name and Infineo. So, you know, we understand that's where you live. You know, this is a lot for customers to kind of figure out. Are customers coming to you because they're saying, hey, I've got a performance issue and I don't know how to fix it? You know, how are you getting those customer calls and you know, walk us through kind of a typical to customer engagement if you would. Sure, so first of all, I'd say that the trend that you're pointing out with VSAN, it's a trend that we've seen in the past. We see it with Icelon, for instance, a fantastic product from EMC, but scale out alone doesn't necessarily solve the problem. The approach that Infineo takes is a scale out approach, but it's implemented so that the nodes actually coordinate with each other so that you can get more effective cache, more effective offload, more effective performance. As far as the interaction with the customer is concerned, typically the way that works is that we'll get a lead and they'll contact us about the software, we'll give them a download link and they download the software. The expectation is that during the first call, they're gonna go through the installation process and what we find is in most cases, the customer has actually already installed their software on their own because it literally is just that simple. So our first call actually turns into a results call where they've actually had our software running in their environment, they've collected some meaningful statistics over that period and we're actually going through and saying, look, what is the benefit here and evaluating how much IOPS improvement they realized without any addition of additional hardware. Okay, great. Then I guess we should talk a little bit about your offering. Is that a beta that they get? Do I get a trial version? You know, how do you license? Yeah, so they get the full blown software. It's downloadable as a 40 megabyte installer, a very lightweight, they can, as I said earlier, just six clicks to the next button and they're in the installation process 30 minutes later, they have an entire cluster outfitted with Infineo. The software is licensed by the socket. It's $499 per server socket, including the first year of maintenance and we even make the removal process easy. If we don't show our value, you can actually click one button and the entire thing uninstalls in five minutes without any downtime, no interruption, no hardware to remove, no plugins to remove, it's just automated. Okay, great. It's nice that it's simple to install, simple to remove if, of course, your customers aren't going to remove it, I'm sure. None of them do. Yeah, and it fits into your existing environments today, my understanding of your solutions only for VMware environments. It is, yeah, that's true. But it doesn't matter what sits on top of that from the guest OS or the application standpoint. It does not matter. But you have certain sweet spots that you fit certain use cases better than others. Yeah, yeah, VDI is a great example of that. And I just want to be clear that the solution is for broad workloads. It's not specific to VDI, VDI is a workload that's highly amenable to the strategy that we take. And just bear with me as I just want to highlight a couple points about how the technology works. We're a distributed cache and it's fully deduplicated across the entire cluster. And the reason why that's important is because there are certain workloads that are highly amenable to deduplication, VDI being one of them. So as far as VDI is concerned, you have a lot of operating system images, you have a lot of common workloads that are running on these systems. And our cache actually identifies that commonality and makes it so that one workload seeing a given piece of information offloads from another node. So that's one workload where we just really shine. Yeah, and one thing, looking at a lot of solutions in this space, often if there was a troublesome workload, if you help fix that workload, everything else is gonna work better even if it wasn't necessarily one that was a problem. Yeah, all both rise with the tide. Yeah, can you speak in general? VDI has been one of those tough ones. The joke amongst the pundits out there is next year is the year of VDI because there's been this promise of VDI, but it's been real slow. It's been in certain environments. There's been the long going battle between what Citrix is doing and what VMware's doing. VMware's completely redone their mobile strategies. So is VDI a big market going forward, do you think? I think it is, yeah. When you look at some of the happenings in the security space in particular, that loss prevention is top of mind. It's becoming highly public when credit card information is leaked and otherwise. And centralization of those resources that represent the point of leakage in many cases, it is laptops, laptops left on trains, laptops that are insecure for whatever reason because of the operational burden of securing remote devices. So centralizing that into a VDI framework allows you to actually manage security to a degree that you couldn't previously. So I think that is a driving force behind the adoption of VDI as well as the bring your own device sort of wave that seems to be coming over us with iPads and the like. So I think there's a lot of different directions that are driving adoption of VDI and we've really reached ahead at this point. Okay, can you talk to us a little bit about kind of company's momentum? So you have actual paying customers today. I do. What can you tell us about kind of at a broad standpoint kind of customer adoption? And do you have any specific examples you can give of a customer and what they've learned? You know, I'll give very specific information. So we've been selling the product for just over a quarter. In that time, we have 15 paying customers across eight totally distinct industries from mining to financial services to logistics and transportation, software and development. And you know, I would say that what that tells us is that there's a broad range of workloads that are highly amenable to the type of caching that Infineo delivers. We couldn't be happier. And so we're broadening the program right now by bringing on additional hypervisor support for 5.5. And then we'll talk a little bit later about a lab program to expand the penetration of the product. Okay, great. Why don't you mention that lab program now since you brought it up? Yeah, so the lab program is really just free licenses. So you can go to our website and fill out a survey and we'll give you licenses that you can use, free to use in your lab for indefinitely. They just aren't appropriate for production use, but feel free to use them for any lab workloads you might have. Okay, great. And can you talk, we've talked a little bit about your pricing. What is that transition point between when they get to do it for free and when they buy it? It's really around production use. So the moment you're gonna use Infineo in production, that's really when you would become a paying customer. Okay, great. So you know. And it is a 30 day free trial I should note. Okay, excellent. So Peter, talk to us about where this sits in customers kind of hierarchy of problems. Is this stopping them from doing business? Is this, where on the kind of the CIO tech list is this kind of performance problem? Well, I'd say what we're in the business of doing is meeting companies SLAs for delivery of services. And in most organizations, that's pretty high on the CIO's list. Oftentimes when you come into struggling with IOPS performance, it brings the entire business down. Most modern storage systems are a shared aggregate layer where a lot of different volumes are provisioned on top of a pool of disks. So as those disks degrade in performance, it's not just bringing down one or two applications. It's bringing down the performance of a whole litany of applications that your business is dependent on. In one case, for instance, we actually wrote a case study about it, Hancock Fabrics, which is 3,000 employees. They're a textile reseller. With these 3,000 employees, a single centralized storage system with a number of web applications, database driven web applications. When the performance degraded, everybody felt that pain. The business felt the pain. And after Infineo was inserted into their IO stack, people were so relieved with the benefit that they literally came up to the VP of IT and said, what did you do to make things better? And the answer is Infineo. Awesome. It's always great when you can make IT a hero rather than, you know, the vein of there. Exactly. How many of... And it's worth noting that they became a hero over what amounts to a lunch break, right? An hour's time went from problem to solution. Excellent. How many of your customers are just taking their existing storage environment and really kind of extending the life versus customers that are deploying a new solution, say, as VDI, realizing that it's not meeting what they need and using you to help, you know, solve it? Most of the customers are brownfield deployments. There are certainly interest greenfield deployments of a sort of hybrid array type approach using Infineo, but the majority of sales are for brownfield deployments. Okay, great. The other question I had is since, you know, the result is really seen at the application layer when curious about kind of the organizational dynamics. You know, if we've talked about VMware vSAN a little bit earlier, and that really is not targeted initially at the storage buyer. Storage might be involved in, you know, obviously there's storage in the solution, but it tends to be the virtualization admin that takes care of that. So, you know, when I look at the storage admin, the virtualization admin, and the application admin, how does your solution fit into that ecosystem? So our solution was specifically designed to be able to be implemented by the virtualization admin. It requires no involvement of the network admin or the storage admin. To that extent, the transparency model that we use, and what I mean by that is that we can slip into the active IO stream without either devices, the server or the storage system knowing that we're in the middle. It doesn't require any changes to the storage system's configuration. No ACL changes, no, you know, share permissions or anything like that. So to that extent, the administrator who has admin access to vCenter is the person who can deploy Infineo in 30 minutes. Okay, and is there just a tab in vCenter then to manage everything you're doing? It's actually a separate console. We really pride ourselves in sort of the way we present the benefit to the customer. And we spent considerable time on an analytics platform that can really look at this data and raise to you the very specific benefits that you're getting. And to do that in a plugin within vCenter would really undermine some of the value that we offer in the console. Okay, great. So I wonder if we could just step back, talk about Infineo as a company. You know, how big's the company today? How many employees? And, you know, let's talk a little bit about how you go to market. So we have 40 employees today, the majority of whom are engineers. We've raised $24 million to date. And our go-to-market strategy is direct sales. Soon it will be a downloadable solution, but today we do require that people fill out a form which is your name, email address, and phone number, a salesperson contacts you promptly and gives you a download link. At that point, you're free to install it on your own but we do set up an install call. And as I said earlier, the majority of our customers just forge ahead without us and install the software. Okay, so I guess if I think about the typical VMware environment, a lot of that is driven through kind of the channel. And there's large networks of people doing that. Is it just because you guys are relatively new and it's so easy to deploy your solution that you're not leveraging the channel? Is that kind of a future direction or can you speak to that a little bit? So we do partner with the channel. We certainly have a referral bonus of 15%, which any channel partner could certainly purchase about. As far as the direct sales model is concerned, the solution is really just that simple. It doesn't require necessarily expert installation. And we've tried to make a system that isn't an expert tool. It can be installed by any admin with the appropriate credentials, sort of a wizard-like installation process. And as I said earlier, it truly is a 100% fully automated installation and removal process. And in fact, the only configuration that's necessary is a single button click on a blue button that says Accelerate. You click the Accelerate button and it systematically installs itself. It doesn't matter if it's a three node cluster or a 32 node cluster. It'll install itself automatically. Okay, well, Peter, the story is pretty compelling. Simple to use, simple to get results pretty fast. You know whether or not it's gonna do what you have. So I guess, what's the biggest thing holding you guys back from just being installed in every VMware environment? Getting the word out. And we appreciate your time here, helping us sort of share our story. And I think when you look at the customers who have used our software, they're overwhelmingly positive on the value they get for $499 a socket. And we see no reason why the more people that come to us, they'll see the same. Okay, well Peter, thank you so much for joining us, educating you on your product and solution set. Definitely software is leading the way to tackle some of the challenges that administrators have been having for years. So definitely check out Infineo. Check out the link that we have on the screen for their lab tests that they've got going on. And Peter, we appreciate you coming into our studio here. Always great to check out the local startups and appreciate you joining. And we will see you next time. Thank you very much.