 But Charles Bieler is an alumni with theCUBE. He's also a general partner at El Dorado Venture Capital Firm. Is it El Dorado Partners? What's the official? El Dorado Ventures. El Dorado Ventures. Charles is one of the rising stars in venture capital, especially in the converged networking areas. Obviously had a huge success. Will exit with Compellant recently when public got acquired by Dell. And just overall you got your hands in a lot of the stuff that quite frankly wasn't fashionable 10 years ago or a few years ago and now it's hot. Storage is sexy exploding. Data is now the next big thing and obviously data kind of implies storage. Also is the heart of the cloud, heart of mobility. So welcome to Inside theCUBE with Dave Vellante. So we just want to talk to you about just the market trends that you're seeing and also you finance a lot of growing startups and you're involved in follow on financings. Tell us what you're seeing out there. At first I should apologize to you guys because last time we sat here I had been going back and forth between phone calls with Compellant and Dell and other folks but wasn't quite able to talk about it. We're really sorry you had to do that. Oh, why three part was being bought. Oh, wow, three part was being bought. And then though you had Phil on that same day and I'm watching Phil down there and that guy is, he is stoned. He was stoned. Nothing's going on. We were asking us, so what's the story? You're gonna get, you know, he's like, oh, it was a happy new soda. I was just saying. Yeah, it was a great outcome with Phil. He's a, what a phenomenal CEO. You guys have spent some time with the company. It was a great company. It was a great exit but, you know, honestly, this is the part about the venture where you spend a lot of time working with sort of behind the scenes, helping companies, trying to make them successful and the reward, yeah, there's great return but the reward is looking back with those guys. We funded them an O2, first venture round. My partner Jeff Hink and I did that deal together when he was at a different firm and seeing that company go from three people to 500 people, go public, stick with it after the fact. That's really where this whole business comes together. When you look back over your career at the points that you really remember, it's not, I made X on this deal. I got to work with these guys. I got to see them actually build something and point back to it and so. We were in love with Larry Asman, who's a tremendous individual. Those three founders are unbelievable, right? I mean, two for two in deals. The other one, what NetNet, after selling it, was worth about 500 million post the transaction and then compelling on the heels of that and these are people, I mean, no one out here knows who these guys are. So anyway, what's going on? Well, first of all, tell us what you've invested in. What are the new hot deals? Yeah, so you're a rising star with Compellent and you all the big exits, you make a lot of money for your firm and yourself. You certainly feel old, so I like you calling me a rising star. Keeps me back. The one from the Midwest and you know, you're out in Silicon Valley and nice guys do finish first. 12 years now. 12 years. So the most recent one I did, that we can talk about, we've got a few that we've done recently that including some kind of big data deals that you guys will be the first to hear about when we start talking about. But it was Atlantis computing, which you and I think catch up on it sometime. I wouldn't put it in the big data area, but it's really focused on virtual desktop and it goes back to your storage point. We a few years ago started really looking at virtual desktop and saying, is this a market that truly has an opportunity to take off beyond kind of call center operations or sort of thing. Is there a possibility that, you know, the CEO of a large company, say JP Morgan is actually going to have a virtual desktop sitting on their desk that they interact with as though it's their, if it's their PC events. They're competing. I mean, it's a no brainer. I mean, everyone sees that. Where's, what do you have? Everyone can see it. The problem was. Where's the state of the unit on this? What you've really looked at where the technology is with. You see Citrix come along quickly, VMware. Frankly, I still think on the desktop side playing catch up, but those two, you know, most of the combinations we're seeing is in desktop running on VMware server stuff. So we're seeing it come along and so that's not the problem, right? The terminals are not the problem. There are other bottlenecks that relate specifically to, and we talked about this with the Wikibon stuff you guys just put out in that post you were just mentioning, the issue where the bottlenecks that happened that are unique to virtual desktop, we saw storage as the primary bottleneck. And it's not, it's not storage as fault. It's actually, you know, frankly, Microsoft's fault, although it's hard to blame them too. It's Oracle's fault. Yeah. Oracle and Microsoft. It's easy to blame Oracle. You can't go wrong, just blame Oracle and Microsoft. Well, if they're next to Microsoft, they didn't design their OS with the idea that people would be running the compute remotely and having a shared storage environment. They built their OS to sit on a PC with a hard drive that sat there that the OS essentially owned. So anytime there wasn't something going on, the OS could say, hey, let's do a little defrager and you know, answer this quick question for me. Do a quick call and it wasn't an issue. You take that same OS and you run it in a server where it's hosting, you know, working with thousands of different end users and then you share the storage so that the OS doesn't actually know and can't really know when the storage is being used or not being used. And it just says, well, hey, my user's not doing anything. So I'll just drop down and hang out and play in the storage for a while. It creates massive, massive IO bottlenecks. And so what you're seeing, and I think Peggler said it right, you know, it's sort of every dollar that you spend on the front of the server spending three to $10 on the back end of the storage where I would dispute his view is they're saying, well, now you just need to optimize the workloads to spend a little less. Our view is that there's an opportunity to frankly eliminate storage from that environment to a large degree and really only use your storage environment for what it should be used for, which is user data, application data. Everything related to the OS don't even stick it down in the storage area network. Put it closer to the server. Put it closer, put it into the VM, have software handling it at the VML. And so we've been trolling around looking for this. The VM were guys actually were great. They pointed us to a couple of companies they thought were interesting and Lannis was one of them. The founder, Chaitan Venkatesh is a guy you should definitely get to know, not very well known, outside of the virtual desktop world, brilliant, brilliant engineer, great CTO, presenting incredible customers. What's the employee account for those guys right now? Oh, God, it's real quick. We're probably close to 40 now. And they're headquartered in? Headquartered in Mountain View. CEO Bernard Hagen-Deghi, which you'll have to practice. We know Bernard. We got some photos of Bernard from VMworld. He didn't actually make it on the queue, but. Old pro, a lot of background experience. One of the most hardworking guys I've ever seen. So essentially what Lannis does is it sits, you can put it in a VM, it's just software, you can run it on a plant, and it offloads all the OS specific stuff for virtual desktops. It's as good as putting out a white paper that ran an environment with Citrix on VMware server, Zen desktop, obviously, with a big net app box, and then they put the Lannis software in. And what they got out of it and they published was 90 to 92% offload of reads and writes. So if you think of literally 90% reduction in the IO going into storage, and clearly virtual desktop storage is IO bound. There's nothing to do with capacity. It's all IO issues. So you suddenly reduce by a factor of 10, the amount of data storage that you actually need to run this stuff. It's a pretty compelling story. And so anyway, we looked at it, we liked it, we talked to some people. The most important guys we talked to were JP Morgan, who's a big customer. And they were very positive on it, walked us through what they'd done with the technology, walked us through what they'd done to help it along and jumped in. So that was- So does Jamie Dimon have a virtual desktop? He does, he does. And the first guy to use it was Guy Cirella, who's the CIO there. They'd been running a sort of what they call a version one of their virtual desktop. And so my understanding, this is from the JP Morgan has, the guy was the first one to use it. He said, if I'm not using it, it's gonna be hard for me to pitch senior investment bankers to use it. And I actually just talked to a very senior executive, the investment banking group, unrelated to this and asked, hey, do you know, what do you have on your desk? Is it a virtual machine? And he goes, no, it's virtual. And he goes, it's awesome, it screams. The performance out of the stuff is so much better than what they were getting from the desktops. And they're doing it cheaper than what they're paying for their pieces. So to your first point about, can we get out of the niche of call centers or specific military or government niches? Yep. Now, you're right. The big issue when you talk to VMware, you talk to customers, it's always been sort of the TCO. The big storage is the big culprit. So if you solve that, one of the theories that we put forth at VMworld was, you know what, maybe the whole notion of desktop needs to change. Maybe it needs to include mobile devices. It really should be about the virtual user and the data and the applications. Does it have to get there or do you feel like this bit flip that Atlantis and guys like that are putting forth is enough to really start adoption movement? I think, and I would rarely say this about companies. I think Atlantis and other people playing around with this have the potential to change the cost of operating and implementing and operating a virtual desktop infrastructure so significantly that that alone could change the adoption cycles. We're seeing a lot of companies out there doing proof of concepts that die on the vine and we're hearing from really, really big partners that their biggest issue with their virtual desktop work is they're getting guys to try it but they can't get in the scale past a few hundred users because they start doing the math on the storage in particular and it's just way too expensive to adjust. Everybody's looking at it. There's no question about it. I think the software's there to the point where it works just fine. It's can you actually implement this in a way where it's cost effective? And the argument today is hey, the high end guys are only going for performance. They don't care about anything else. It's true in certain circumstances but mostly if you want to see adoption it's got to be cost justified. And so yeah, I think that happens but the software's already to the point where you can run, and if you're a J. Morgan you can run your entire desktop on an iPad. It's already there. You just need to be able to implement the system so you can actually go and take advantage of that. So I think that the key drivers are one you got to solve those problems and two is people start to think you're right beyond the desktop compute environment to say where are the other places I'd want to access this application or be able to hop onto my desktop quickly. That starts to open the doors to say okay it's a cost competitive solution but the opportunities it creates are so much greater than sitting there with a PC. And I think we're there. I mean I think we're there. It's going to take time to adopt. Gartner's telling us it's a $40 billion market next year. I don't believe it. It will take- Gartner? Yeah. Who? Yeah. They got a lot of attention two years ago when they said it was going to be multiple. Yeah and they repeated it and they delayed it a year kind of thing. But their fundamental reasoning is sound which is people have a problem and in concept this solves it. I think so. What was interesting when I talked to those guys is their storage team when that report came out knew of the report and had not done anything on the virtual desktop set. I asked them their view on it and they said we haven't really looked at storage and implication in anything else. And I know they've done a lot. Big iron, baby. They've done a lot since then. But no, I think it's a big opportunity. It's a big opportunity for the compute guys, for the storage guys. It's a new market. Well let's talk about what you're looking at in terms of your investment thesis. What kinds of deals are you looking at? I was just at a talk in Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. Ton of people and not just young kids going to Y Combinator. We're talking about serious computer scientists, data scientists doing some work. You know, what is? Yeah, we're seeing, John, we're seeing a return to what I would call the enterprise return infrastructure. Don't get me wrong, the consumer side of the venture business has been a phenomenal area for a long time. Not an area I spend a lot of time on. I certainly wish I were in six deals that we can all think off the top of our head. But I've been talking to some consumer guys, some late stage funds who are directing the partners to get more backing to this kind of big data stuff in the enterprise. I think some of the exits that you look at, Compound certainly being one. Obviously, Isilon and Threepar and Teza. There's some phenomenal outcomes here for really compelling companies. And so people are realizing that we are in a new shift and I think Warner Vogel said it very well today. We're kind of day one of this concept of bringing big data, leveraging the cloud to really do analysis around it. And there's going to be over, and the catalyst guys, if you ask Frank Petrone to go through a presentation, he'll talk you through how he sees this sort of wave of consolidation and the wave of innovation that they're seeing today that they've been a big part of. So is that the question? That's a good question. So two questions. On the M&A, Dave and I were talking earlier about how the big company's going to have a big data store buying AMC, bought Green Plum, they bought Isilon, also you've been involved in some big M&A's. So one, we'll talk about the M&A side of it, but also let's talk about what a company needs to do to get sold. So Compound went public, Threepar went public. Do these big storage companies have to go public first to get their valuation up? That's just a legitimate question, or can they get sold for $1 billion as a private company? They can. Ecologics are a great example, right? I mean, it's a couple years old, but it's no different. Just about to go public, I'm going to tell you. Right, and they got a public company deal, no escrow structured as a public acquisition as a private company. And their whole point was, look, we're going to go public and you can see the comps right now, Isilon, Compound, these guys are worth X. It's going to be worth this much money. Why not save yourself a little bit today? I don't think you need to. In reality, I think people talk about, you go public, you get exposure to the markets. If you haven't gone out and gotten to know the potential acquires and possible partners beforehand, you probably haven't done a really great job, right? There's a big corp definition. We tell our companies this all the time, grow to try to be a public company. But along the way, you've got to make sure that the people out there know you, yeah, EMC's lost a few deals to you, but they don't really know who you are, what you're about, where you're going, unless you go in and sit down and talk to them. And I think too many startups are really reluctant to go in and at least share a little bit with their erstwhile competitors around, here's what we're doing and here's why. And so we- So they're not doing any kind of marketing around the success of the buyout somebody? You get noticed more when you go public, obviously. For the acquires, in reality, it's a real pain in the ass when it's going public. I mean, look at Dell with three part, right? Look at NetApp with Data Domain. If those had been private companies when they made those acquisitions, there would never have been competition because they could have locked them up in a much more solid way than you can. Once you go public, you can't- Well, Frank Quachrone doesn't want to lock up because he loves the bidding process. Frank loves the bidding process, but I think they'd be the first to admit that, you know, when they signed the deals that they did with Dell, when they signed the deals on, well, Data Domain was a different structure in terms of how to- But Frank Sluutman didn't mind it either too much, right? Sluutman didn't mind it at all. No, Sluutman was happy. But they truly signed the deal with Dell, not thinking it was going to be an interloper, right? They signed that deal, thinking it was the best deal they were going to get. They were pleasantly surprised to see HP come back in and obviously the timing of the home market or departure was interesting in that I think the enable of those guys to come back. Yeah, that might not have happened. But then that's where the catalyst guys and other bankers who do it, jump back in and really can help drive a digital value. But if you think about, you know, then losers on those, NetApp made the first bid and then lost Data Domain. Dell made the first bid as three-part, lost three-part, which by the way is going to be great for Dell. They're going to be so much happier that they own Component than they would be if they own three-part. I think you're biased, but that's okay. Michael Dell talked about it, Davos, which is not something else. That's your company can tell us. I'm biased, but I also knowing what they need as a company and the fit, it's a great fit for that company. Yeah, it's a big jump to three-part. It's a jump between where they are now and leaves a gap in the Clarion product line where you can argue they're going to keep using Clarion. I don't work at Dell, I can't tell you, but there's a much better overlap for their customer base, frankly, with where Component is. And if you see where Component's been going continually, it's up. Three-part has been talking about what they've got coming down a bit, but also going up. I just, honestly, I think it's a better fit. Well, I think three-part is a much better fit for HP as well. Yeah, I do. I think so, although I sometimes have a hard time fully understanding that HP storage grew. Donna Telly should, I assume, make pretty good work on the next year or two of kind of cleaning that up in a way where people can really understand what the products are, where they fit and what they're trying to push. But back to this, so if NetApp had bought Data Demand as a private company, they could have locked them up in a way there's no way someone else could have come in and bought them. They would not have lost up the deal. If you look at NetApp has not tried to make a public acquisition since then, and I've heard from people that they don't know that they ever will again because they feel like... Is NetApp the last standing independent? I mean, we talk about them being a niche player. Obviously, they are in storage relative to the new definition of storage, but I mean, they're a $5 billion niche. They're the last big one. I mean, do they have to buy? Can they do the organic? Will the market move too fast for them? Can they remain independent? And can they... I think they certainly can. The market appears to believe that they will not, given where that company is valued today compared to where it was 18 months ago. I actually think NetApp, when you look at the large storage companies, has probably done more to differentiate themselves and focus on specific solutions. So for instance, NetApp and Virtual Desktop, I'd say has gone further than any of the other big storage vendors to actually try to develop solutions to address this problem that we were talking about. We had the CTO and one of the senior architects from NetApp in, I don't know, six months ago talking about what they're doing, and they're literally talking about very specific use cases in big markets that they're trying to go out and address. So I think they certainly could be a standalone, but going back to the consolidation rate, it's hard to bet on that if someone who has enough capital on it enough... Yeah, we were talking to Zio-Tec, they were in town last week in Cleversafe. Good friends of yours. Another Midwest company, Cleversafe from Chicago, MIT guys, so you know... I'm a little Cleversafe guy, I suspect. Yeah, Zio. Do you know those guys or no? I don't know Cleversafe. Pretty interesting technology. They do this dispersed storage. They basically slice it up and sort of goes beyond RAID. It kills RAID. Cloud RAID, they slice it up and if you lose a slice, you can recreate it, but if you steal the slice, you can't do anything with it. It's encrypted. It's very interesting technology. Did you take a look at it? It's very... Is it your company? Yeah. It's very clever. It's never saved. Jeff, take a look at it. It's a good take, for sure. But these guys are all private companies and they're all doing well on the revenue side. Again, private, so... Yeah, and Zio, I don't know what their revenue is. I know what it was seven years ago, and my understanding is... It's apparently smashing out of the park with the new product they just launched. They've changed a lot. The ICE stuff that they got out of Seagate gave them kind of a new life. I don't know the new team, frankly, but my sense is it's probably a better fit for that company. They've got a new CEO who knows the market. Moved to where the whole development team for the ICE stuff is in Colorado. Well, you know the story in Zio Tech and they lost their way a while ago when they tried to get into information management. They forgot about storage. It's too compelling. They innovated a lot of this stuff early on. Well, what's interesting... Compellent and three-par and everybody else took up. What's interesting, though, I mean, if you think about Zio Tech, the first, you know, so John Phil and Larry started the company, right? And really John and Larry, in terms of their technical vision on what that could be, they built it, great success, sold it to Seagate. I think they were very excited about the opportunity to build the next generation of that. And it's a big company, things change, and ended up not being an opportunity that was there for them. So they went away from that and looked back at what Zio Tech had, which is a really compelling technology and thought there's still a better way to do it, which is how compelling it came about. So I think the challenge for Zio Tech is when it went into Seagate, you know, it was a small business. I think soon after it was bought, they kind of looked at it and said, and I know because I've heard from EMC guys and others and a senior Seagate guy said, he was starting to get in calls from our big customers saying, what are you doing? You just bought a competitor and you want me to spend, you know, $80 million on a disc with you. It looks super sensitive to that. Yeah, and then he should be. What's the point? It kind of got pushed down quickly and as a result, the technology didn't go anywhere for a while. The Oak guys took it out. And I think they're out, it just took time to get people around to the idea of, hey, it was a great technology, it still sells, but you got to do something different. And, you know, so I think the ICE thing, it's a good move. Honestly, I don't know enough about it. The question that I keep hearing from people is question of whether, is it really that compelling or is it a little bit gimmicky? Because it's a different way to think about storage, but the guys I've talked to who've looked at it have said, it's a different way to look at it so much so that it can potentially bring out some challenges around, you know, you're putting disc in there and guaranteeing them for five years and these things typically fail in three. And do you end up building a huge liability behind it? And I think Pegger and these guys would explain it probably much better than I could and tell me why I'm wrong. But that's my only question on Zara. Well, I mean, for them, they're trying to come out of something different, different than thin provisioning, sort of miss that, that way. And credit to them because they- The virtualization wave, so they got to try something different and the performance results look pretty interesting. I wanted to say one thing about Compellent. I left the storage business for 10 years and I think you guys made such a great call investing in that company. When I saw it, John, when I came back after 10 years and I saw what Compellent had, I was on a briefing with Larry Esmond. I said, does this stuff really work? Because if this really works, you guys are going to hit a huge home run. And sure enough, I mean that whole automated tiering thing, just absolutely brilliant, elegant, simple and now the whole world, EMC, HP, IBM, is sort of copying it. Now, of course, if they heard me say that, it's in ours, it's different to ours. It's the same fundamental concepts that Compellent made out of. And I don't know if you had Gary Ornstein on later. He was on earlier. So Gary was the first VP marketing over at Compellent. And he's now at Fusion.io, which I talked about a company which I was in. Yeah, yeah, right, the smoke and hot. Gary did a phenomenal job taking new concepts and getting them set up in a way where you could explain them to a market that really had that same question. Does this really work and why do I need to use it? It was such an impressive transition to take that technology build to talk to you. Gary was hanging out in our offices for four or five months before the Fusion.io gig and really just looking at a bunch of stuff with us and bringing companies through and he came in and said, you know, these guys call me and everyone he asked about Fusion.io, the answer was you're crazy if you don't go over there. And everything I've heard about the company and seen is it's doing great. They're doing great. It's really well with what these guys are doing here. So, but back to your original question. Well, he emanates. So what's the distribution of M&As? Is there opportunities for kind of what I'd say low-end M&A, you know, 15 to 50 million, 100 to 300. Is there now an opportunity especially in the data space because the trend is everyone wants a big data story. But no one really knows what that means. I think if you look at most of the acquisitions happening they're the smaller deals, right? I mean, the deals that are really getting announced on a regular basis are the kind of 50 to 500 private company acquisitions. It still will, from an acquisition perspective, from the venture business, be the bread and butter of returns, IPOs, rare, but when they happen they're great. Venture guys don't often look at post-IPO acquisitions as an outcome. We held on to a lot of our compound stock because we believed in it. So did our co-investor there. You look at Iceland guys, Koya guys, I believe held on to everything they held in it because they believed in it. That's a hard thing to do in the public markets as a venture investor. Most of the exits from an acquisition side you're seeing pre-public. But to answer your question, going back to some of the catalyst guys walked through, they believe that with the announcement by Cisco of the UCS platform, where Cisco essentially announced we're going into compute, we're gonna compete with a bunch of guys we've been partners and friends with forever, it sent off alarm bells and all the other major vendors, HP obviously, Dell and others who said, we can no longer rely on our little market being the market or big market being the market we own and Cisco doing their thing and Oracle doing their thing and Oracle buying sun certainly didn't help. And since, if you go back to that announcement and then look at the acquisitions that have happened since then, I think it rings out very true. And by the way, this is something that those guys said to us before the three-part deal ever came about. So this is something last spring, they're saying we think there's gonna be a massive wave here and we think it's a 10-year wave. We think that these companies are looking to become individually capable of doing compute, network, store, the virtualization piece where EMC has a huge leg up given their ownership of VMware. These are areas where all these companies are now starting to consolidate because they can't be a long-term partner with the other players around the table to multibillion our companies. And so from a startup perspective, that's an exciting thing because these guys certainly they innovate and to your point on the components up, they make announcements but invariably when you really look at the technologies that have changed those businesses over time, it's been through acquisition. Green Plum where Tucci's been out talking about it for good reason, those guys are here. Obviously they're very, very happy with what they got out of data domain. So the belief is that on the enterprise side, infrastructure side, we could over the next 10 years to see a continued sort of steady flow of opportunity. If you're a smart founder, understands it, knows a market that you can go and build something in, you may not have to go very far before one of these guys says, I know if I own that product or I own that technology and put it through my ecosystem, it goes from a 10 million dollar a year business to 200. And I want to own it before the five other guys out there do and to close on that point, the other piece that's compelling and I think there's a lot to be said about these evaluations being paid for these deals is and what's good I think for entrepreneurs and for the venture guys, it's not like there's one buyer, right? There's not one company that might acquire it. You're talking Cisco, EMC, VMware, potentially separately in some of these things. You're looking at clearly NetApp and Dell and HP and Oracle and IBM. He's driving the price up. So you've got six or seven very viable major companies that are going to start competing to not look up for these resources. Basically. Absolutely. And so as a startup, going back to what we talked about pre-IPO, you should do everything you can to be out in front of as many of those guys as possible. Make sure they know what you're doing. Find places to partner with them. Make sure that they're seeing you in the market. Not just because you're beating them and you're sort of needling them from behind as NetApp used to call the storage guys, the tech component, the ankle biters, but literally they understand why you're beating them. What's your technology? Don't tell them, what do you guys do that's different? How are you winning these customers? That's the way, if you get noticed by a few of these folks, if you think that's the way you want to exit, that's the best opportunity to be exposed in a way where when they're sitting around talking about what do we want to buy in the next 12 months, your name's likely to come up. So you saw this wave of innovation seven years ago with the automated tiering, the thin provisioning, the virtualization, and that's basically done now. You're seeing a lot of money go into these cloud on-ramp guys and even cloud, so you see Nassuni and Serda sucking up a bunch of money, some others. You're seeing Nirvonix as a new CEO. Is that sort of the next wave here in storage? Is the cloud on-ramp in the cloud itself and is that potentially disruptive to the guys who are selling, here pay me $10 million in CapEx up front, pay me a maintenance versus the whole pay-as-you-go elastic model? What are your thoughts on that? It's the billion dollar question, right? And I think the answer is, it's a little bit in the middle. Yes, it partly depends, and it partly depends on who the customers are, but it also depends on what some of these storage guys end up doing over the next couple of years. When Serda's and the founder of that had started a company called Jive Networks years ago it wasn't a successful deal, Dan DeCasper, but I think it was a great experience for him to then go and build Serda's on, and we're not involved in Serda's, but we've heard great things about the company. There's no reason that the storage guys, in particular if you think about the big storage guys who now provide compute, provide network, provide storage, there's no reason those guys can't provide an on-ramp to a cloud, and it doesn't have to be their cloud, it could be the public cloud and anyone's right. So there's no reason that that market isn't something that can be included in their business. I think it's highly likely that most of them acquire that capability. I think the Serda's guys would argue, which is probably a decent argument, that you wanna be able to be vendor-neutral in your decisions, both in terms of what you have on-site and what you're then loading off to. And then my personal view on cloud storage is that, and I don't think it's a controversial one by any stretch of the imagination, it's certainly gonna take time. There are things that will be offloaded sooner rather than later. There will clearly be companies who use it as kind of overflow, especially in certain application areas where, okay, on the email side, I've got a bunch of old emails that are sitting there. If I get to a point where I start to spike and I need more capacity, I can take some of that stuff and throw it off. I mean, it's effectively near-line storage and I'll just treat it that way. Clearly the big data piece where you're taking huge chunks of data that maybe you wanna run a lot of analysis on one time or just stick somewhere where you don't wanna pay a lot for it, but you don't wanna clogging up your sand because you're not accessing it every day, makes a lot of sense. But it's not, I personally don't think it's gonna be an overnight shift where suddenly all the enterprises stop buying storage and just shift out to the cloud. I mean, two thirds of the enterprise data, according to the estimates that I've seen, you talked to guys in the Wikibon community, about two thirds of it is sort of tier three or higher. I think that's, yeah. You know, tier two and a half or tier three, and those are the candidates for it. And you think about these automated tiering systems like those that are compelling popularized, why not have a tier that goes to the cloud? Now, how disruptive is that? I don't know, if the core stuff still stays on premise. But people wanna buy that whole IT as a service model and they can't get it today. And so, it looks like it has some legs from your standpoint, I mean, from the VC standpoint and whether or not it's disruptive, I don't know yet. I haven't seen it yet. I agree, and I think the challenge that you're gonna see on the cloud stuff is, so that tier three data is very, it has very little value to the enterprise. So, the cloud guys who wanna start handling that are going to need to come up with pricing numbers in terms of what's a cost per gig or however you wanna handle it, that make it worthwhile for me to throw it out there and pay on a monthly basis to have it out there. Cause if they've already got the storage capacity in-house, they could literally drop it to the, whatever tier they want in terms of whatever they're running it on, if that's gonna be cheaper, because they don't think, anyone's ever gonna access it again or once in a blue moon, is that going to be cheaper than putting it out to an external resource or the paying on a regular basis? And I think, you know, Savas is clearly trying to do it. You'll see others. They're going to have to figure out how to separate out their storage offerings between a, hey, you've got the stuff that you want access to, it's high availability, and we're gonna give you just the cheapest, cheapest possible way to throw this stuff out, sort of fire and forget that it's there until that guy comes in and wants to see an email from 10 years ago and you'll have, it's gonna take him a little time, but for the savings you're gonna get, it's worth it to leave it out there. And that's going to be, to me, that's going to be the question. Can I just take old resources I have for the next few years and keep dropping into that before I start to think about paying someone on a monthly basis? But I do agree. I think that's an opportunity. I think more compelling is the opportunity over time to start taking much more important data, you know, the tier one and tier two kind of stuff and figuring out how to get customers comfortable, enterprises comfortable, that putting out in the cloud does make sense. For all the reasons that people are arguing about here for big data, it makes sense. You just have to be willing to take the leap of faith and try it a little bit over time. Yeah, and there may not be enough of that type of data today that was mission critical if you want to call it that, that's sort of candidates for the cloud. So we'll see. I have a question on just big data in general and investment opportunities. I mean, you saw it with Web 2.0, we were talking about the consumer place before. You know, when you get a market like this that has a lot of hype to it, how do you squint through that and determine, okay, you know, is this real? Does it matter to you and your business? And you know, what's your telescope telling you or even microscope telling you about this trend? I mean, clearly, Hadoop is overkill for a lot of situations, but people are going for it anyway because they want the experience with it. It's also just fun to say. That's great to say and there's some cool people here. Is it, how real is this? Is it overhyped? Does it matter from a VC perspective? It's always overhyped, right? Yeah, of course. Which is important because a lot of companies make a significant amount of money on overhyping. So we're sort of breaking big data into a few different areas, as it were. And I thought, again, I thought Wernher did a really good job of outlining this to some degree. There's the infrastructure piece. I mean, there are guys in there selling the guts, right? Whether it's hardware or software, often a combination of that, to enable you to run analytics to use kind of the big data concept. Whether you do it in-house or whether it's a cloud-based thing, I mean, they're happy to sell to Amazon if they would ever buy something externally. But Tim O'Reilly's here. She's getting a hug. I'm going to come back later. I'll answer this question later. Oh, no, finish up, go ahead. Bring Tim over, we'll have him join. So anyway, that's one area. The next is really the capabilities to then leverage that. So additional tools and technology to say, okay, I've got all this stuff. What's the software that I need for my specific use case where I want to apply it? Then it's the providers, the cloud guys, other guys who want to run this stuff for you. And finally, it's the companies that say, okay, how can I take this big data and make a ton of money off it? So we divide it in those four categories. I think, come on, I'm getting out of the way. You can tell me you disagree with my thesis. It would be helpful. We look at it in those four ways. I'll come back and tell you more about it later, but that's how we're dividing the buckets up. Some of those areas are, I think, overhyped. Others are completely underappreciated, in particular the end use, which is the people that no one knows yet who are going to look at this and say, wait a minute, you're telling me I can take that amount of information, process it through and answer a question that I've always wondered. And they're going to be the ones who literally change the world in certain areas. The healthcare thing they're talking about today this morning was really compelling. And there's some that we've seen already that are really interesting. Those are the guys who at the end of the day are going to make this real, but it's going to take some time to catch up clearly with the discussion that we're having today around how big this is. So how long before we hear something from you in this space? Are we talking weeks, months, days, hours? I figure out, six months before this one probably announces anything. And the other one, a little bit of time. But hey, this is an area we're spending a lot of time in, so we may jump into something that's here today and you'll hear about it in a week. I'm out of here. I'm out of here. Thanks very much. Great to see you.