 and brings in a number of VMware executives. Pat Gelsinger's here as last year wearing a baseball shirt. Last year we captured Pat on the pitchers mound. John Furrier is actually talking to Pat right now, trying to drag him into the cube. Raja Desgupta is here. He is the director of IT at ExoStar, a NetApp customer. Raja, welcome to the cube. Welcome to the team. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. So you just came here, right? I just got here. I walked here from my hotel, actually. The traffic's pretty tough. The traffic was too jammed. I said, you know what? I'll just walk over here. But what do you think of the venue? It's fantastic. Fantastic. The once in a lifetime type. Yeah, this is a fantastic facility. The ballpark here is great. Have you ever seen a game at AT&T? I have not. I'm from Virginia, so we've, you know, Washington Nationals, Baltimore Orioles. We never really have a team that wins, so we try to, you know, switch back and forth every year. Well, I'm older than you. I remember when the Orioles used to win. So anyway, tell us a little bit about ExoStar and what's going on there. So ExoStar is a SaaS provider of solutions in the cloud for aerospace and defense, and also for life sciences. So our focus is things like identity management, collaboration, secure collaboration, and supply chain solutions in the cloud. Okay, so you've got some pretty intense security and privacy requirements going on over there. Well, tell me a little bit about the history of the company and its offering. So ExoStar was founded back in 2000, the kind of the dot-com heyday, and the idea was that you'd bring the biggest aerospace and defense companies together, and they'd form this big exchange, this business-to-business exchange, where billions of dollars would flow through the systems. And, you know, finally, after, you know, 10, 12 years, we've kind of realized that vision. You hit critical mass? We hit critical mass. So now we're kind of looking at other verticals like life sciences, you know, big drug-type companies. And so, you know, it's been a fun ride for us in terms of, you know, working with our vendors to deliver these solutions in the cloud. Well, we've seen this in a number of industries. I mean, obviously you've got Amazon's the big gorilla in the cloud business, but you know, John always calls it a race to zero. It's an infrastructure play, but we've seen, you know, exchanges, industries gathered together, multiple customers coming together within an industry. And the key there is, and I wonder if this is what's going on with ExoStars, you start to get birds of a feather, you get best practice, you get data, there's certain analytics to go, and you now start to get this flywheel effect, this critical mass. I wonder if you could talk about that specifically in the defense sector, and then maybe we could talk a little bit more about life sciences. Right, so for us, there's definitely economies of scale, so companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Rolls-Royce, BAE, these are the biggest aerospace and defense companies. So there's definitely economies of scale in terms of understanding their best practices, deploying their best practices in our solutions, and what we've done over time is basically get to a point now that we're kind of seeing the exponential 30, 40, 50% year over year growth in terms of our technology footprint, and we want to basically go with the best of breed to scale as we grow. And they want to be with a company, with a provider that understands their business, so that's an advantage for you, but at the same time, I'm sure they ask you all, I want to make sure my competitors aren't seeing my data, so talk about that conversation, the data governance conversation, and what you're seeing there. So with aerospace and defense, there's a lot of concern about security, securing the data. We are able to host these solutions in kind of a multi-tenant environment while still maintaining the security, and NetApp is a great partner for us in doing that. We can segregate data, make sure we have the demarcation between one customer's data and another, all while keeping it secure, keeping it encrypted, and being able to scale as we continue to grow. We were talking to Dan Timko, a previous guest, and we were talking about the whole prison thing, and the Snowden debacle, and so forth, and what he was saying is it's created an increased awareness within his customer base of that whole security. Now, you're serving a very security conscious crowd, so maybe there's been no change in your business, but presumably in the life sciences business you might see this, what are your expectations as a result of sort of the new discourse that's going on right now in the country? So there's a lot of concerns about healthcare, patient data, those types of things. So what we've tried to do is kind of take some of the tenets that we've used in aerospace and defense and use those in our life sciences vertical in those solutions. So things like identifying, if someone is really who they say they are, for companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, they have thousands of suppliers, thousands of anywhere from mom and pop shops up to huge suppliers that they deal with. And so we basically secure that network using digital credentials, using one-time password type tokens. So that's kind of our focus, adding that security overlay over all of our solutions. Describe your infrastructure a little bit. Actually, John, you got a question. I'm sorry. I mean, as usual, I'm dominating that this question here, so. You look like such a star right now. I didn't even notice you were there, John. I knew this. I was like, I can sneak out and get a chance to talk to Pat Gelsinger and Radu from VMware. Great presentation. Pat Gelsinger again with a NetApp shirt on. Really good form by VMware guys. I'll tell you, they're obviously very committed to NetApp. It shows, they're walking the talk. I've got to say, just put that update in. What I want to know is, is that we talked to a lot of the vendors selling stuff and in the day, people have built in solutions, but we would like to know, and the audience would like to know, what are the biggest inhibitors right now to a full adoption of cloud? Is it security, is it fear, all of the above? What's your take on it? Yeah, I think it's mostly fear and mostly kind of lack of industry standards for that secure overlay, that secure bubble in the cloud for admission critical. So we see the kind of the non-sensitive type services going to the cloud very easily, the non-core services, but in terms of those top tier, it's going to be a slow progression, because IT managers are not going to want to risk their business by putting their critical data in the cloud and then having an incident and putting themselves at risk. They're used to remember the old vaporware days, someone would announce a product and ship some beta code. You can't afford that kind of mistake, not that it's people are doing that, but that's a fear. Cloud is this potential risk. Just the potential scares people. That's what we're seeing. The reality is the economics are just insane. So what's your take on some of the economics, not like the number numbers, but like order of magnitudes of simplicity and ease of use. Right, so for us, we've heavily invested in the FlexSpot solution and what we were doing before is taking a mishmash of different products and technologies and thinking we were smarter than the vendors and what happened was our TCO was terrible. I had six or seven engineers had to be involved in every single deployment and it was borderline ridiculous. And so fast forward two years, now you have integrated solutions like FlexSpot with NetApp and Cisco and VMware in a tightly integrated solution. And that allows us to cut the time of deployment weeks and months to literally 15, 20 days for a full solution from design all the way to implementation. Yeah, it's interesting you were said, thinking we were smarter than the vendors. That had to be a cultural shift, a mindset shift, but you guys are in the business so you've realized early on, hey, you know what, we could probably do some things better. Right. So how did you shift those resources? Where did you shift them? Yeah, so Maria are NetApp contact. One of the things I tell her is that as kind of an IT technology manager, you know the three dirty words are I don't know. If an engineer comes to you, there's a big issue with your solution and you ask them what's going on and they say I don't know. That's pretty much a death knell for you. So for us, having these tightly integrated solutions gives you telemetry, it gives you kind of a dashboard, a single pane of glass. So that you don't have that issue anymore. The other thing too, the other comment you hear is we don't do it that way. That's a classic killer phrase, right? Oh no, no, we don't do it that way. That's not the one that's down. Right. And those people fall behind, definitely. All right, let's take a pause for a second here and let's just reflect on where we are right now. Sure. Share with the audience where we are right now. Where are we? Where are we? So we're kind of, I think we're kind of in the second inning here. You know, the first inning was right outside the infield. We're a short infield outside of second base here at AT&T Park. Paint the picture of the folks out there. What's going on around here at the park? Right. So here, I mean, this is just more than I can imagine. It's like a party on steroids here. You know, this is my first time to VMworld and to a NetApp event like this. So it definitely, it's hard to talk to you guys because I'm distracted by everything that's going on. So we are live here in San Francisco at AT&T Park home of the San Francisco Giants. We're actually outside of the infield, right outside, short, outside second base, short outfield between short and third. I'm with Dave Vellotti. This is theCUBE. It's a special presentation with the tech athletes and it's a party going on all around us. We got guys doing the 40 yard dash, right? We got people seeing how high they can jump. We got the San Francisco 49 cheerleaders over here. Food, drink, people hitting golf balls, people hitting baseballs, throwing baseballs, seeing how fast they can throw. Olympic soccer, a star, signing autographs. We had pro athletes. This is an amazing event and NetApp is really laying it all out for their customers. So one, let's talk about NetApp since we have the NetApp on the mind. What about NetApp? It gets you excited about FlexPod and the solutions. NetApp is, you know, from our perspective, one of the leading storage vendors, leading the best of breed. And we had a lot of good customer references before we even went down that route, who had gone with NetApp and had great success in terms of managing the quagmire that storage sometimes becomes in cloud type companies. So for us, it was kind of a no-brainer because we were already looking at VMware. We were already looking at Cisco. And so that tight integration for us really was a no-brainer that we could basically use this as kind of a Lego, a building block to scale for the future. Dave, what's your take as an analyst? You see all the players. What is NetApp doing right now? What are they doing? And I want you to break it down into a baseball analogy. What are they knocking out of the park? What are singles? What are doubles? You know, how are they playing small ball? Are they going to hit slugging percentage? What's your take? Well, I think I have to think about the baseball analogy, but I guess they're, in a way, you know, a specialist in that they're focused really on the storage. NetApp's the last, you know, large independent storage company. I mean, a lot of independent storage companies, but NetApp's the last public independent storage company. I don't consider EMC one anymore. EMC's got the hands and so many different things. They're this, you know, federation, they own VMware, et cetera. So NetApp is exclusively focused on storage. So I guess in baseball terms, they're like the best shortstop in the league. You know what I mean? And they do that better than even their jeeter. Yeah, but they're more, you know, their customers are very technical. One thing about NetApp is, you know, they do have technical customers. They're pretty savvy. They have a good, savvy customer base. So, you know, make them more of a running team, small ball, maybe, a competitor like Monster. Well, the interesting thing about NetApp is they've changed over the years, right? They've transformed themselves. A lot of companies have, but especially NetApp. I mean, they really started out selling into the sort of workstation market, right? I mean, you saw this, and then they hit the enterprise, and then they bet the farm on virtualization and cloud, now they're, you know, betting the company on clustered on taps. So they've made these big bets that they talk about a lot, and they've been a survivor. Okay, we got to get the break here. Raj, final word. Hey, how are you? Welcome to theCUBE. This is the kind of thing we got at theCUBE. We got people cheering for us. We got the NetApp tech athletes. We're going to break in this segment. What is the big thing about just, we'll end on a note here. What's the big thing about NetApp? What should people know about what you've learned and enjoyed with NetApp? For us, it basically is, you know, knowing where your data is, having a dependable infrastructure, and, you know, just being in a place where you know and can predict how your environment, how your storage is going to scale in the future. All right, this is live. Come on in, girls. Hey, show what we got here. We got, this is what we're all about here. Center camera. That's what we're talking about. Guys, come in here. This is David Lante, this is theCUBE. This is the NetApp customer. What are you, big happy customer. This is theCUBE. How's it going? This is where we extract the signal from the noise. This is our special presentation live at AT&T Park, outside on the outfield. This is a special edition of theCUBE, live in San Francisco. How about a cheer for the NetApp customer? All right, this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with Thomas Stanley, S.B.P. of Global Sales and Alliance right after this short break.