"Hey Dave, so you're back from Vegas." "Yeah, Alex, it was unreal." "Really?" "I have a lot to tell you." "You know, Violin Memory, right?" "Yeah." "Well, the founder, Don Basile, he came onto theCube this week at EMC World and basically said the dream of the 90s is alive in the flash market." "No way." "I'm serious. I mean, he talked about when IBM's SNA technology dominated the networking market. They controlled like 70 to 80% of the data running through any corporate network." "Yeah, I remember that. There were like all these promises of e-business." Defining interfaces -- devops explosion "Exactly. Cisco eventually bought SNA in a $2 billion deal." All the hot jobs were in networking -- yeah "After that, Cisco just got bigger and bigger. They already had 75% of the market. And with the deal, they did not have to build a service business. They just relied on IBM. Mainframe heaven "Totally. They just killed it." You could build the Internet in your basement, yeah! "Alex -- that's what's happening now. The flash market is like those networking days. I mean, Violin could raise several hundred million in an IPO." "So, Don Basile says it is like Chambers II -- the sequel?" "Exactly, Alex." "I'm not sure I want to think about that." "I know." "So the flash market is like this alternative universe where hard drives don't exist." "Yes." Turn that server upside down. No more latency frowns. "It's a land where the data center can be in your closet, again." "Right." "Where legions of nano robots march across infinite data fabrics, take your picture and stitch it with a trillion other photos to tell your future." "I think that's taking it a bit far, Alex." "Okay. So, what did he say about really understanding this parallel space? "Just follow the application vendors, they are all doing it." "You mean like in-memory apps and things like that?" "Flash just makes it faster, Alex." The dream is al-i--ive