 Hey, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Western Digital Office in MoPedas, California at a really interesting event. It's the Autotech Councils, the organization, Innovation in Motion, and it's their mapping and navigation event. So they've got a bunch of big suppliers to the automotive industry, as well as a bunch of interesting startups talking about navigation specifically in the context of autonomous vehicles. And we're really excited to have our next guest. He's Colm Lysett. He's the VP Corporate Strategy and Innovation for Western Digital. Colm, first off, welcome. Thank you very much. Absolutely. So you guys are doing a lot of, Western Digital's doing a lot of interesting things around all kinds of different verticals. We're at NAB talking about media and entertainment. We've got some other interesting things coming up in the food space and obviously autonomous vehicles and IoT. Why are you sponsoring all these kind of fun little events that at first glance people might not kind of put two and two together? Well, there's a data explosion that's happening all around us and the automotive industry is being fundamentally disrupted. And what's disrupting it is data and the availability of autonomous capability to drive cars for us. It's a huge shift. And we're very happy to provide the solutions that make that happen and make people safe and have a system that is reliable and even better than having human drivers. Right. And it's interesting that what's so fun about autonomous vehicles is they incorporate so much of the big megatrends that we see in the IT industry with cloud, with big data, with fast networks, with edge computing, you know, and analytics and latency and do you process that device? Do you process at the edge? And usually it's a combination of all the above. So it's, and it's a fun platform that people can really understand. Exactly. It's an exciting time because these different technologies, as you say, are coming together and now that capability is real. It's very exciting. And we just talked to a guy from Caterpillar the other day and again, people, they've been running autonomous mining vehicles for a very, very long time in unmapped environments. A little bit more controlled obviously than kind of the wilds of the streets. But the autonomous vehicle thing is here. I think, I don't know if enough people really know how real it is, but data is a huge piece of it and crunching data quickly is a critically important piece. Yeah, there's so many simple applications where a device can be completely autonomous for days at a time and with GPS tracking and data transfer back and forth, somebody can completely let it go and it will do a lot of work in a long time unsupervised. It's a big labor-saving technology. And then you guys are sitting in the Catbird seat because not only is there more data in these big applications and big data driving these things, but now really because of mobile and the price performance of all the component pieces of a mobile phone, including sensors and cameras and all these other things that are now going into all these other devices beyond phones, all those things are kicking off tons and tons of data. That's right, the technology is affordable and that's very important. The internet of things isn't possible unless the price point is at the right place. And Western Digital has a long history of making systems that are highly reliable and that won't lose data. So we can take our capability and flash memory and apply it to this space and others to provide highly reliable systems at an affordable price and that's what's necessary, certainly in autonomous driving in order for it to work. Right, I love your perspective. You've been in the business long time. How important was flash as a piece of this puzzle to remove the physical barriers of spinning disk to enable much faster higher performance storage to be the backbone of all this computing networking? Flash is highly disruptive. It's a technology that has eaten away into both DRAM and hard disk drive over time and as Moore's Law makes it cheaper and cheaper to produce, there are just more and more applications that open up. So it has been a fundamental disrupter of digital film, the whole digital camera space and then really enabled smartphones. The original mobile phones didn't need NAND flash but once smartphones came along, they're basically a computer, they need storage but a spinning disk won't work. So flash memory enabled that whole explosion. It's a very powerful disrupter and that will continue in the future as we continue to scale and now we're making 3D flash so we're stacking layers on top and continuing to offer more bits at a lower price. This opens up great opportunities for data to be available anytime, anyplace and be rugged, low power. All of these attributes make the applications manyfold. There are just new applications opening up all the time. Right, so as you look forward, you're sitting in the strategy position. What are some of the things that you kind of got your eye on that maybe most people haven't kind of entered their radar yet? Well certainly cloud and mobile are massive drivers of flash memory. Cloud because people are using cloud computing for instantaneous workloads so they need fast storage and flash is growing more and more in that space. There's also capacity enterprise so hard disk drives, high capacity in the enterprise it's growing massively because there's so much data needed to be stored there. And then mobile of course continues and flash memory is growing into the PC space where solid state drives are displacing disk there. Mobile devices are blurring between smartphones, tablets, two and ones. We expect data to be available to us no matter where we turn. Now flash memory is central to making that seamless, making it portable, making it fast. It's funny when flash first came out, it was so expensive and people thought only for the super high value applications the super low, basically financial trading was kind of the only application. As the prices come down and then kind of the second what's fascinating to me is kind of the second order impacts because now you can basically change the way you write an application and that's where you get these massive disruptions because I'm not just doing the same thing faster I'm actually doing it differently. That's right, we're very excited about what we can do in moving up the stack and by applying software and firmware throughout the layers really gain more advantage from what the technology can offer. And in the coming years we'll do more for our customers to give them even more value more insight from the data and that's an exciting area for us to continue to explore. All right, Cornwall, congratulations on your success and you guys are certainly sitting in a very central position as this wave continues to move forward. Thanks very much. All right, he's Cornwall, I said I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching.