Jeff Steiner

They're packaging up services and selling the service where you have more choices than just Oracle to go get yourself an application server and a database server in the cloud.

You can go to a lot of different service providers, and they can offer you more of a high-touch, hands-on approach.

Those are the customers that I think that we should be going after more strongly because we can provide those services.

Let's say that you want to be a

a database as a service provider.

You're going to have to find a way to do backups and restores and replication, and a lot of your customers are going to want to do things like refreshing development clouds.

We can enable all those things to wrap it up as a service that the service providers can then resell to their own customers.

And there's also a lot of large enterprises that can do the same thing.

where they can make that transition not to just buy something from a cloud provider, but to actually thinking and acting like an actual cloud-enabled enterprise.

And I think something that illustrates this in an interesting way is the solid-fire acquisition because that is not a product for the customer who is all about cost and nothing but cost.

And until that acquisition closed, I never really thought about how silly some of these conversations we get into will be, where you're talking to a customer, and they might move, I don't know, $100 billion a year worth of widgets from point A to point B, and we're actually arguing over $15,000 worth of professional services.

Why?

The storage system that powers these databases that runs the enterprise is usually barely a rounding error on the overall budget.

Why is everybody so obsessed with reducing the costs rather than trying to figure out, hmm, maybe there's something useful we can do here?

If nothing else, maybe it's just an insurance policy where if somebody nukes the database, wouldn't it be nice to have your business back online in five minutes?

I've said this to customers a lot.

Snap Restore and FlexClone and a lot of these technologies that we do are something that I hope you never have to actually use because the only time you need them is something bad happened.

But wouldn't it be nice to know that it's there if you actually rely on it?

And then along comes SolidFire.

And I have to admit, I've struggled to figure out how do I know when a customer would be interested in SolidFire?