In this video, we're going to explain what is the role of the control unit. Let's just first say that this control unit is one part of the CPU and it's sitting next to the data path. Now, the main purpose of the control unit, as the name suggests, is to make sure that the rest of the chip or the rest of the CPU is performing the right applications or the right operations. So let's first consider what was the purpose of the data path. Now, this circuit over here was in charge of processing data and performing certain operations, but it also had certain control signals that needed to be provided, like for example the address of the register to be read, sometimes if the bank of registers allows, we will provide two of these addresses. Another one was the operation in the ALU that needs to be executed. Another control signal would be how to select operand one of the ALU or select operand two. And we can have many more signals that change the behavior of the rest of the CPU, namely the data path. So this is precisely the responsibility of the control unit. It needs to create all these units, all these signals that modify the behavior of this data path to perform the right set of operations. Now, how does the control unit know what kind of operation needs to be executed? It has one very important register, typically known as IR or IR typically stands for instruction register. Now, this instruction register, what it contains is the instruction that is being executed by the CPU. It is very important because this instruction will have certain encoding in binary, of course, ones and zeros. And now from the content of these ones and zeros over here, what this control unit needs to do is one of the most important steps, which is the coding, this instruction, this instruction needs to be decoded. And from this decoding, it deduces the steps to carry the operation. So this control unit can be seen as a little bit like the conductor of an orchestra. There are a lot of circuits over here that can carry multiple operations, but they need to be controlled or they need to be told what to do. The control unit is in charge of looking at this instruction over here and decoding the message that is contained in the zeros and ones. And as a consequence, providing the right signals over time, this is not a one single time instant, but across several time units to provide all the control signals so that this circuit over here executes the operation and coding in this register. Now another detail that needs to be explained is that where is this instruction actually coming from? This instruction is actually part of a program. And this program is stored in memory or in RAM, which means that this control unit, prior to starting decoding this instruction over here, what it needs to do is get the content from outside the CPU, go to memory, read certain position and store its content here. So even before providing all these control units for the data path to perform the right operation first, before that the control unit needs to provide control signals so that the memory content is obtained from the right location in place on the instruction register. Now the next question is how does this unit know what location needs to be loaded with the following instruction? And this brings us to the other very important circuit or register within the control unit, which is typically called as the PC. Now the PC stands for Per Encounter. It is very important, it has sets of 0s and 1s over here as well. And the value of this register is precisely the memory location into which the control unit needs to perform a read operation such that the following instruction to be executed gets loaded in the instruction register. So as we can see, for operations such as for example adding these two registers on the data path, the steps that the control unit would follow would be these ones. First, read the instruction from memory in location given by the power encounter, the PC. Once this instruction has been obtained from the position stated by the PC, it is stored in the IR. Next step is to decode this instruction. In other words, we need to know exactly what kind of 0s and 1s are here and their meaning in order to interpret the next operation to execute. Now let's assume for this example that these combination of 0s and 1s are encoding an operation such that two values in two registers in the data path need to be added. Now the following steps that then the control unit would do is provide all the control signals at the right time synchronized with the clock such that we read the operands from the register bank. Then we need to also select the right operation in the ALU, the result. Once the result has been stored at the output of the ALU, it needs to be written in another register. And finally, the control unit needs to prepare the execution of the following instruction. And the following instruction is in allocation which is next to the one that occupied instruction just executed. So in order to do that, it needs to increase or update the value of the program counter. So as we can see out of all these steps over here, these ones are specific for an instruction that is performing an addition. Now, once instruction has been finished, we increase the value of the program counter and these instructions are repeated or these steps are repeated by the control unit. So the control unit is constantly performing this loop with a difference that depending on the instruction that is the code here, instead of these steps over here, we could be executing some other set of steps for another instruction I2 or another set of steps which could be shorter for instruction I3. The important conclusion to understand exactly what is the role of the control unit is that it constantly executes these steps in a loop in an iterative matter and it needs always to rely on the program counter to go to memory, get the next instruction, put it in instruction, register, decode and find out what it means and then provide the right signal so that the data path performs the right operation. Let's give another example. Let's suppose this instruction I2 here is an instruction to store the value of register R1 in memory but in position 0x358A, for example. So in this case, the control unit would go to memory, will obtain the instruction, bring it to the instruction register. This instruction is being obtained from the location pointed to by the program counter. We decode the instruction as we did here and now instead of following these steps which were part of the addition instruction, then we're following this other step which needs to read the data from register 1, R1, as we say in the operation, then we also need to read the address from the instruction and by others we mean this value, 0x358A and finally write data in memory. Now these three steps over here would be exactly the analogous of these four steps we described previously for these operations but they would be executed by the control unit when the instruction to store R1 in memory is received. Since this instruction is executed, this loop continues, we increase and update the PC and the control unit goes again to read instruction from memory in the location pointed to by the PC and this loop repeats itself forever.


So like documentation, the release cycle management is what we call an horizontal project in OpenStack. That means it serves the needs of all the other OpenStack projects. And so our main challenge, like Anne mentioned, is to accompany the constant growth of the OpenStack project and reinvent ways of doing what we do at the scale of software development that we see inside OpenStack. So my own program is called release cycle management and it's really about all the coordination around releases, around organizing the development and making sure that whatever we produce is consumable downstream. We have three different subteams on the next slide. So we have integrated release management, that's what the current release cycle is about. So we make sure that all the different pieces of the integrated release are on track and communicate what they are working on so that we can predict what will be in the next release and hit the deadlines on time and release on time on the same date. We announced at the beginning of the cycle, we have stable branch maintenance that goes after the release. That's about back porting important bug fixes, back porting security issues, security bug fixes and then issue point releases for our downstream consumers to use. And finally we have a team working on vulnerability management, receiving vulnerability reports from various actors on the Internet and following up on them and making sure that we address the vulnerabilities that are reported in OpenStack software as fast as we can and with the best disclosure mechanism as we can organize. So we'll start with what we achieved during the June cycle. So during the June cycle we hit all our deadlines again. So we released on the date we announced we would release. We evolved the process for publishing all the development milestones. We have three development milestones in the middle of the cycle and we used to have more of a branch for a few days and let it cool off. And we replaced that by a more lightweight system where we just tag when the project technically is happy with the current state of the branch, we just apply the tag and move forward. So we simplified that development milestone publication process. On the stable branch side we extended ICE house support for 15 months so we will be supporting ICE house for a 15 month period. And on the vulnerability management team front we addressed 90 vulnerability reports and issued 24 security adversaries out of those 90 reports. Some of them were not really vulnerabilities. Some others were not considered significant or exploitable enough for justifying an adversary but we released 24 adversaries during the last cycle. And finally we created a taxonomy for incident reports which means now when we receive a report we classify it and there is a given process to apply for each type of incident reports in that taxonomy. So we have a much more transparent process in the way we handle those reports. For the keto cycle first we'll start with stable branch because that's where most of the changes will be coming. So stable branches started to hit a scalability issue with the number of projects that we added to OpenStack so the reviews were really slow. There was a very small team driving the stable branches for all the projects. And we decided to decentralize this structure. So now we have a stable liaison named in every project that has a stable branch. So we have a designated person that lives in the upstream project that works in collaboration with the stable branch maintenance team. We have per project stable maintenance teams. So around the stable liaison we have a number of people that will directly approve the backports to the stable branch and that's a strong departure from the current system where it's a single team that was reviewing all the patches for all the projects and now we're decentralizing this organization so that we have project specific maintenance teams that are more in the domain expertise but we still have the stable branch maintenance team looking over them to make sure that they follow the stable branch rules, the rules that we created for the stable branch. We will have what we call stable champions. Those are people that are responsible for a branch in particular and making sure that that branch is still usable from a continuous integration perspective. Because from time to time the stable branch is not exercised as much as the master branch so it can go stale really, really fast. And when we need it like when we need to merge a security fix we kind of need it to be working on the right date. And the stable champion will watch the branch and make sure that we can land patches in that branch all the time. We'll have stable release managers. We already have them but we will more formalize how they're intervening in the structure. So stable release managers are people that are responsible for point releases so they bank the drum every month or every two months for issuing a specific point release in one of the stable branches and they make sure that all the important bug fixes are backported in time. And finally we'll have, in addition to the PR Project stable maintenance team, we'll have a stable core team that is responsible for answering the respect of the stable policy. So we have a stable policy that says only high impact bugs that are obviously backport compatible and will not result in behavior changes for users of the stable branch. So we have a very conservative stable branch policy and the stable core team is responsible for making sure that this continues to be respected with this more decentralized structure. So that's it for a stable branch. Oh no, we have more. We also try to introduce dependency capping in the stable branch. So currently we support new dependencies coming in the stable branch and this is the main reason why the stable branch breaks from time to time because there is a non-backport compatible dependency that gets pulled from the rest of our ecosystem. And so we are looking into ways to tap those dependencies to make sure that we don't get continuously broken by upgrading our dependencies. And finally we will work on opening the team because the team was operating on a separate mailing list and so it was really difficult for people outside the team to see the work that the stable branch team was doing and so we moved all our discussions to the development mailing list and we abandoned our specific mailing list to make sure that our work was visible so that we can recruit new people that would be interested in joining the stable branch team. Next slide please. So raise management. We will have feature freeze on the keto cycle on March 19. That means that will probably be the peak of feature landing and gate activity within OpenStack. So don't go in vacation around that date. For the final release, it's planned for April 30. So at the very end of the month of April and we'll have our next design summit in Vancouver in May. The challenge for the release management team is to handle one more project. We have Hyronic that was integrated at the end of the last cycle so we need to support it and it will be the first release of Hyronic in an OpenStack integrated release. We'll also do a number of changes in the release management processes. We'll switch to release liaison sync points. We used to have key health coming every Tuesday on the NRC channel to synchronize with release management and we'll more formally allow them to delegate to specific people within their team called the release liaison. We will then change, we already did change the release meeting that is every Tuesday at 21 UTC to become a true cross-project meeting. Any issue that is truly cross-project within OpenStack can be raised to that meeting to be discussed in an open forum, not just release management issues. So that's a nice improvement. We'll continue to evolve the design summit format to make sure that we can sustain more projects within the OpenStack community and to be discussed in the design summit. And finally, we'll also evolve tooling to support new practices. So lots of projects, for example, I've started to use SPEC for pre-approved design before implementation in OpenStack projects and we need to make sure that the SPEC process is as integrated as possible with the rest of our task tracking tools, Launchpad and the upcoming storyboard tool. On the vulnerability management front, we'll finish to publish the security advisories on a specific website. Currently, the security advisories are only published on an announce mailing list and we now have a repository for all the security advisories and we'll publish those directly on the security website on openstack.org. That will be more official than the copies that we would find on the Wiki currently. We plan to adopt a new vulnerability metric based on the Dread framework. So we'll be able to have a scale to rate the importance of every vulnerability. At least we'll try to provide a score that will be helpful for people to determine how fast they need to react to a given vulnerability. And I think that's it. Yes, thank you for listening and if you have any questions, please reach out to me on IRC, on Twitter or via email. Any questions on release cycle management?


In Madagascar, officials say the number of dead from tropical cyclone Batsirai has reached 92 as humanitarian groups increase aid efforts. U.S. troops crossed into Romania from Hungary late Wednesday. About 1,000 U.S. troops are being deployed there because of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. In Canada, truck drivers continue a protest against COVID-19 restrictions by blocking traffic in Ottawa and at the U.S. border. And at the Beijing Olympics, reports say a test shows the presence of a banned substance in the blood of a Russian figure skater.


Hi everyone, this is Sonali. Thank you all for carving out some time for attending today's webinar on the final episode of the Business X Learning Series, Invest, Scale, Value and Exit. To all the attendees out there, please type in any questions you might have in the Q&A section and we'll try to answer as many as possible at the end of the session. I would now like to welcome our speaker, Mr. Gaurav Maharyar, Chairman and Founder of the Franchise India Group. A very warm welcome to you, sir. Thank you, Sonali and thank you for hosting this all through for many months. This is a series which started actually when the COVID was going on and we felt that this was an interesting way to connect with our audience, which is very large. There were 3 million people who are the audience of Franchise India Group and Business X particularly and we thought that it would be interesting for sharing ideas on four different topics. One was investing, second was scaling your business, third was how to value your business and fourth was exit. And every Saturday we used to bring in one topic, get into detail, understand different aspects of that and we've done about 30 odd episodes on that. And today's episode is the final episode and this part of the series is launching a new series which would start starting next week, which would be more on mentoring and coaching side of the businesses and so on and so forth. So, stay tuned, it's not that we're stopping this series but it would be interesting to do that. So today I would like to make it extremely interactive because if you have any questions for yourself and any questions you would have for me to answer on any of these four topics. One is investing, second is scaling your business, third is how to value your business and fourth is about the exit part of it. I don't know which cycle of business at what stage you are in and I see in some time in life you have to do all four because you have to really do all these four elements of this and I feel that if you don't invest with exit in mind, it doesn't really go down. Any investment which you have done which has not scaled value is not built. So it's very interconnected these four dots.  First, let's understand the investing side of it. First, before we even go into this, let's understand the investor and I see this starting point and a lot of people come to me and there are two types of investors.  The first message I gave everybody was there's nothing like a passive investor. There's nothing like that. Everybody has to be an active investor. The only difference it can create is that how active you have to be depending on the asset class you invested. If you invested into real estate, you might be not so much involved in it to your basis. But if you are invested into any kind of an active running business, you need to be involved in that. And even if you are invested into a company with a small shareholding in a structure or you've invested into a startup, I think you need to be involved. Not necessarily just to find out what is going on in the business, but also to really see through that your investment which you did is making some sense for you. It's very important to keep the eye on that. And I can tell you with my experience, I was a time in 2015, 16 and 17, I invested into a lot of businesses. Some I was very actively looking and monitoring and some businesses I was not really looking and monitoring. And I can tell you clearly where I was not looking and monitoring that much, those assets and my investment will be performed. Rather some had a really bad investment cases. So I have actually learned this very hard way that there is no nothing like a so to say a passive investor. Don't go out and anybody tells you that look invest into the business and it could make some money. It doesn't make unless and until you are looking after your investment very, very closely. And be very clear with even the founders you invest with that you need to participate. You need to participate to see what is going on. You need to be available that information has to be available to you for different pre-articles in a very systematic way so that you know where your investment is going. Second is understand the mindset. You need to really see what you want to invest into. A lot of people get into businesses they don't understand. And understand until you understand the business or the industry or the founders what vision they are coming from. Don't invest into any of businesses. Very, very important for you to really set the mindset is very, very important. And I will in my case and people can have different rules and there are multiple rules for investment. But in my rule, I look at three things always before investing. One, I would look at the founder. To me, if I'm early stage investing, the first probably 75% of my really qualifying that is not about the industry, not about the business is about the founder. I would like to understand in depth of the founder what is coming from why this is happening in his life right now. And what kind of objectivity he is putting into this business and so on and so forth. So it's very clear how objectivity is defined. And founders at different stages also behave very differently. So we need to really see at what stage they are in them and how this investment which you are doing would be important to him. And what this business is important to him in his life, in his journey at this stage. So that's very important to me looking at a founder. A lot of good founders who really build businesses, soul businesses, actually a meeting somebody in Monday. And he's now exploding to start a new startup. And I know how much, you know, baggage he's getting because everybody looks at him because he's done two very, very successful businesses which he exited and build those businesses and their great valuable businesses. So he has a lot of confidence of his marketing investors sitting behind him to invest behind him. But he is nervous because he wants don't want to really spoil his entire thing. Whenever he will start, he will see a queue of investors really coming through and supporting. So first look at the founder, second, what kind of problem this business is going to solve. And if it is not a problem which is very significant and you're solving and you feel that this is going to stay for many, many years to come. Then only the business to me looks very interesting. What is the startup problem solving, which is happening in any kind of business which is coming in the market has to solve some problem and how deep is that problem? You know, and that's very important to me the second part of it. The third part, which I will always look at is the go to market capability of this business. How fast this can go and commercialize itself and be successful. So that's another area which becomes very, very important. So as an investor, when you look at investing into businesses, a couple of things you need to keep in mind. One, don't put everything into one basket, diversify your risk. Don't really follow too much, you know, changes in your investment cycles just looking at the business going up.  So stay balanced, give yourself your investment sometime to really do something. And third, very clearly define where is your exit and why you need that exit and what time that exit is and put that benchmark. I like the investors who don't really go for the flow and they are very clear in mind at that stage, they need to call for exit. And there has to be very clear planning and understanding and who's giving you that exit is also important. We'll talk about in the exit structure. And while you're investing, that's also very important. You need to really see what is your investment cycle. Are you looking for a dividend-based investment that is very different? You need to go to companies which already become rich and you can get dividends from the businesses and start-up and mid-sized companies don't give you any dividends. So you really have to wait for very, very long cycles to get dividends. It's only about what you do with your equity. That's something which you need to be very, very clear. And then you have to really look at which stage you want to be invested in. If you are looking for a short-term investment cycles, then you have to look at businesses which would in sooner terms give you an exit. Because it means that there is another investor group which would come and acquire you. And there is a firmness in that. Most of the time, this is pre-IPO kind of investment cycles where there is a certainty that in 6 months or 8 months, the company is getting it to an IPO or a firm listing. So there is a certainty for you to do that. But at that level, there are very few opportunities that are available for independent investors to really come in. Most of the time, this is more even from venture fund or private equity kind of investor which would come in that state. Or otherwise, if you are very clearly looking at a period of go-to-market, which means that you see clearly 6 months is there where the commercialization of the business can happen and you can see that you can get a short-term invest. I'm not a big fan of the short-term kind of investment cycles. Even the founder, if overclaims that this can happen, I'm not a big fan of that. But I will go on the second which is mid-to-long-term viewpoint. Mid-term is a good term which is 2 to 3, I think 3 to 5 year kind of a term. Cycles for your exit and getting value. And a long-term would be anything above 5 to 3 years kind of investment cycles. I personally, I'm becoming more and more a fan of the long-term investment cycles because I feel that the businesses, if you invest early stage, would take a little longer period to do that. You need to then tag along with that investment and make sure that the investment is going to be there. It's a good time. It's a very, very good time to really evaluate some of the investments. Startup story is back again. There's a lot happening in both tech and non-tech businesses. There's a lot going to happen in next 3 to 5 years in some of the categories. And India can be a leader in that. I'm in a lot of categories. I'm very bullish on AgriTech, which is a new emergence. And I think it was long-waited state place. I feel that there would be a lot of opportunities in that apart from all the other techs which are anyway in the market. So there are a lot of opportunities which are coming on the way. Also, if you are on a startup stage, don't really wait too long. I mean, this is the time you need to start going out. And that's what we're seeing at BusinessX. We're seeing a lot of movement now started happening. We are getting both sides getting heated up. Both the investor world is also getting fueling a lot of capital coming in. And also, sometimes people ask me, at what stage I can be an investor? Even if you don't have too much money, you have investment anything upward of 3 to 5, 10 lakh rupees. And you can be an investor and look at investing very carefully. Clearly define yourself where you are. There are two types of investors I always see one are strategic. They have some experience and capability on the business they're investing. They bring in much more than the capital to that business. If you are somebody who's a strategic investor, say if I was a, even in non-tech space, there can be multiple people can be strategic, but in non-tech space, if I was to say even a chef and I wanted to invest into sub-promising food startup, because I'm a strategic, I understand I can value that product or I can do something on this. I think it can be a great opportunity. I would say there are a lot of great chefs who are very popular. They should really look at investing into these food tech startups or businesses like that because they can really take them to the next level. They can really take them. Imagine if Sanjeev Kapoor was an investor in a dark kitchen company or something of that nature with his audience and his capability where he can take that business too. Or he was in part of a not endorsement, so to say, investor into a food packaging business, what he would have done. So there is a strategic value which clearly comes in by some of the investors. And second is financial investor. Financial if you are an investor who either if you have to decide where you are, either you would be a lead investor, which means that you are taking the investment call and a lot of people join with you, which is normally done by people who have some experience in investing. Otherwise, if you're not, somebody who's so experienced and can handle that call, then obviously going to the right club is very important where you can have like-minded investors who have a little more visibility than you have on that investment base. So both with a lot of these fund groups are there in the market are angel groups and things of that nature you can work with. Many of them, business has association with all of them. We can introduce you to most of these people where you can make an opportunity to really do that. So this was about investment. I'll keep the session short so that we can go to the next piece and discuss about that. Let's talk about scale now. Scale I defined in one of the episodes, actually a very good episode we did on scale and we understood a few things and I'll just do a summary of that. Scale by definition. This is my own definition on scale is five things. The scale by spelling is like five alphabets. S stands for strategy. You need to have a very strong deeper strategy before you even think of scaling. For every business to build a very strong value case, it has to have scalability. So you need to have a very strong strategy. That's a starting point. C stands for the culture, the competitive advantage and the core competence you bring in. Again, I will repeat, if you're not providing the culture, the competitive advantage and the core competence of that business, clearly.  Scalability will not come. So look at businesses. Businesses needs to have a strong one piece argument. They're not having too many. Sometimes companies try to do many things when they're trying to put their scale strategy. They would like to go all over and I see the investors would go all over trying to please every single thing they can do. But it's actually not the core competence. And I feel that any good scale story that has happened, it has worked on on their, at least in a scale time, they have worked on their core competence. Like Uber. Uber went to becoming the world's biggest mobility company. And then they started branching out into many other things. It can be food delivery, this, that's more of what I call optimization. But scalability would always come from your strong competence. Now, A stands for actionable plan and accountability. If you don't have a strong actionable plan, which means that you can action it out and you've thought through it. And then you set accountability with who's going to lead what process. That's going to be accountability. L stands for the kind of liquidity. Every stage of a scale cycle would need a strong liquidity back. Don't even jump into getting into scale unless and until you're back strongly. Sometimes a lot of founders start looking at scale story because they feel that on the way they would be able to pull up liquidity and they fail. It's very important that you need to really prepare yourself, fill your tank and then go out and do that. Sometimes it's tricky because what comes first, and a lot of people say this chicken the next story, what comes first, but it is important to have your liquidity in place and the East times for the final precision and acquisition, execution. The execution has to be very, very right because if you're not having effective and precise execution, you will not be able to do that. So the five elements are very important, which is strategy, culture, competitive advantage, core competence, actionable plan and accountability. L stands for liquidity and E stands for execution. If you've got this, then you need to really define the three P's on your scale. One is people, what people you require to which would be having the same scale story aligned to your scale story. If they're not aligned to your scale story or they don't come with the competence of doing it, it's again flat. Second, defining the strong processes because you cannot just run on this. If you are going on a very large growth plan, one of the companies I'm advising from moving from currently about 40 units, locations they have and they are looking at adding another 400. So now this 40 is easy where you can really manage unless but if you don't have a foundation of strong processes, you cannot do that. And that's something which needs to be done. And the third P stands on performance management. How do you manage every single performance and monitor that to the core? So if you're not able to do this, what would happen? The risk side of scale is you can lose control. It can be a difficult animal than to handle. And a lot of businesses which failed are not because the businesses of the founder was not right or the opportunity was not right. It went out of control. It went out of control and just to bring the control is very difficult in businesses. A mismatch of forecasting can happen because you can have think that this is a righty forecast. You imagine that you will be able to get your customers and imagine if COVID happened, right? And you're not able to get that or you got that to what your payment cycles broke. So you need to really see and give yourself room for deviation. If you're 20% deviate from a business plan, how you will be able to manage? If you're not able to get numbers as you thought, how would you be able to manage that? And how do you really move to us?  Do a small bite of scale and then check how you did that and then go to a little more of the next year, what I call the sustainable scaling methodology, which means that you already know. And then you can drive these smaller molecules. Each molecule has to be independently sustainable. And they can work in tandem. So which means that in the business, we create smaller profit centers and each profit center can then look after itself and can grow. So that way you hedge your business risk also. If there was a people problem or there was some process problem in any of the molecule, you can address that molecule rather than affecting the entire company because scale would need multiple hands to do that. So that would be among the scale side of the business. Now let's go quickly to do a little bit on the value. Now, value is many things in building a value. You need to really look at how your investor perceives you. That's very, very important and you need an expert and a lot of people think that they can do their own valuations and understanding that actually no. And a lot of times people are not even getting into their exit mind or any kind of future race. They come to me and say, should we value our business? I say, absolutely. You should really value your business at least every month, every six months and see what is going on in the business. And it gives you a lot of insight about your own business because you know your business well, you know where you are not doing well, what few things when you start looking at businesses and whenever we value businesses, it's a great insight for an entrepreneur to really look at his business into deep sense. A lot of times you're running costs into things which are not important. You're sitting on inventories which you don't need today. So a lot of things which are really burning your balance sheet, it's not giving you the right kind of a flavor, are doing it. And sometimes you're busy in a lot of other businesses interest which are around your businesses, but not the core part of it. It's not your core competence. That also doesn't add up to your value. So and if you're not building a value, then what are you doing in the business? That's very important. Then you're doing a job and you're just getting paid for what you're doing. If you're not building something which you can have a future monetization, which means that your paper value can cash out becoming a real cash value. And that's where people have become rich. If you really see people who have become rich or created wealth has been able to build some value in the business and able to monetize their businesses.  And also another thing which I would like to highlight, which is very important. A lot of times when I am talking to an entrepreneur and he's talking about value, he's always talking about his past, right? And this happened and that happened and this achieved, that achieved and still still. And really that's important. That's indicator of what you have done and what can be done in the future. That's just the indicator. The real value is seen from what is going to happen the next five years or 10 years. And the focus should be really to demonstrate that. Well, you will take your past as a fine indicator of what you've achieved, but nobody's interested in your past. Everybody's interested in where we go from here. So it's a best situation when your business is on a peak turn and it's on an upside. That is a time you really go and value because you can clearly demonstrate growth path for the business in social. A couple of other things which are very important for people to really look at it. How the business is structured. How is business ready for be transferred to somebody else or being undivided. So we all are very important to see our value being built in the business. Not necessarily you want to sell it, but essentially even if you want to invite an investor in the business, investors want to really see how process driven this organization is and how it can really be able to do that. So it's important for you where you work hard as a business owner if you have to go into depth and understand that is your business ready to be valued and what is the value of that business. It is also a mix of what I call always that it is a science and art which is made together. Scientific comes from the numbers which speak for itself and give you a lot of historic data. And art really comes from the investor's need to look at your business and look at why it is so attractive doing that. And a lot of these smaller sides of things which are actually dominant in the business valuation. After the valuation, you come down to exit and why exits has to be well-planned. There are two types of exits I've seen. One is very opportunist. Opportunists are where you are just being knocked by somebody and say, would you be interested in doing it? Most of the time when industries start getting into consolidation or there are bigger players in the market which need more market share to acquire or more value to be built in there. Balance sheet, they go out and keep buying businesses to really build more value to their... So anytime any new category of a business get listed like in food, you will see Domino's has already started showing the acquisition signs because they've got listed they've got greater value and then they were organically able to show growth in the stock market to share shareholders. But last two years they've been plateaued because there is no store to store to grow out. There is no endowment but rather there will be negative growth because of Domino and not performing and other businesses. And one thought came to their mind and say, let's go out and build new brands which would take a lot of justification cycle, a big justification cycle for building a brand. They started a Chinese format open few stores and it's going to by the time it starts going to give them significant improvement in their balance sheet it's not going to be enough. So what is an option now? Now they have to really look at investing and they recently place themselves in another public nation or they can go out and even invest into other businesses which are already reached to a certain size and structure and where they can really write on their growth cycle. So any market any businesses which have got that there is some form of consolidation which is happening you will see a lot of growth. You will see a lot of acquisition cycles in many other categories like a electric vehicle is just started I think it will play as fragmented as industry for the next two years between this year and the next year and 2013 onwards you will see a lot of consolidation a lot of M&A action going on whosoever would build a certain market share people would go and capture that market share and so on a lot of exits would come through lot of consolidations would come through it's a good timing I think in 2021 2022 is also a very strong times where people would have and I think but you need to be prepared so one is very opportunist approach second is more prepared approach we big believer of how to prepare yourself if you want to really look at exit you need to really go back and visit your financials your business define your business get yourself process driven and most importantly make yourself redundant which means you are the biggest baggage for your own business if you are able to take somehow yourself out and say that business can run of itself and can be profitable and continue to do that then you are a good back so that's how and it's very difficult sometimes you know business owners are too deeply involved in their businesses and where they don't want to leave it and I don't see the businesses so valuable because it's all dependent on the business owner who is not looking to do that so this was my few parts which I wanted to share on all the four aspects while it is very quick of all the series we have done we have done very detailed series if you have to visit all the series please go out and in our Facebook page of and all the links can be shared there are all videos available so you can really go out and see all these episodes very detailed episodes on different things how to value businesses different types of valuations and all these examples are available and we can also set any other advice you would like for for your business so I'm happy to take Sonali because we already 28 minutes but any questions you have for me I'm happy to take that sure sir so thank you once again for another wonderful session and the last session of this learning series so it was indeed special we do have quite a few questions lined up with us so I'll just quickly take up some of them the first question we have is is it sensible to start my investment journey by investing into startups directly since I have no prior experience and the startup market is on high risk yeah sure so every every investment is on a risk but research learning in that industry would reduce that risk not that it can eliminate the risk it could always be there so couple of things I would like to say we want to do that one one investment one time which means take out investment do adequate research see two different asset classes go deeper into that industry see who's the lead investor who's already invested or leading this investment his past portfolio of his investment what he's done research on these three things which is founder the problem he's trying to solve and his go to market capability bite the smallest if you want to do that monitor your investment very closely largely this could be or what I call learning cycle what happens to that investment should not be your your deciding factor for your future investments say for example the first investment I did was 5 lakh rupees in a startup and to me that was 5 lakh rupees was was not that I want to throw away the money I'm very serious about that investment but I looked at that investment and not to decide my future investment right that was my investment even if I came out and said it was not a big success for me should not decide that I'm not because the historic data says that there is more money to be made in investing in active businesses than any other asset class available ever so there is nothing which can compare close to investing into active businesses the kind of returns you can get any other asset class can ever compare so I feel that India has seen a very little participation in this space I feel that while government is talking about the startup India and all that and I think we have very little infrastructure available so to say to bring the investors and the businesses closer to each other while business X is one we have multiple platforms French India also is a platform where we bring these three very strong platform but not many platforms are available technology companies there are many platforms available but for non technology businesses becomes very difficult sometimes the next question we have is what is the right time to exit a business by an investor is a three year window good enough and similarly what is the right time to exit a business as a business owner myself what should I have in mind to get a good return on my business so what is a good time for investment I normally would say set your goal what do you want from that investment which you've done and that should be very honest decision you should take and not follow too much of greed and at a certain level if you feel that you're getting the value which you expected from the business and you want to exit sometimes if you think that the business is getting even more promising and you want to stay invested you can do a partial exit and keep some some stakes for the next round balance your exit cycles so if you invested with a some equity and you she sold 50% of equity at a certain stage and held the balance one for an upside which needs to be done so depending on where you are and which company you want to do and who is has a compelling reason to give you an exit that's something which I think is becoming a more questionable these days when you invest into startups and startups are not are able to get to the exit that's a challenging part and I think who you invest with is very important which club you are part of it is very important now it's becoming more and more important and that who is the team behind it and sometimes businesses are good promising but the things happen not in order and they need fresh equity it's also the lead investors in the business which are able to invest in different cycles to keep the business sustainable that's also we've seen especially in the COVID period we saw a lot of startups which survived so to say the lead investors really back them up and took that call to continue to do that it actually saves a lot of other investors which were which didn't do the call and that's something which is very important doing it and that's also good timing but the question you might have entered at this level and the valuation was not right because the business didn't take off that well you might consolidate more equity and balance your piece which is very rare but it happens sometimes absolutely sir the next question we have is how are the investors looking at valuation of startups after COVID since COVID has obviously hit the worth of companies how will this affect the negotiation process how are the investors looking at valuation of startups after COVID since COVID has obviously hit the worth of companies so how will this affect the negotiation process no startups has no worth in shift or COVID and even I mean honestly COVID was one pandemic which really shaped the business but not valuations even the most valuable moment this is only time frame it's not that people would stop going to hotels or multiplexes or things of that nature it's just they're not going now so it's an interim balance sheet problem so interim business problem it would be corrected very very fast as the business starts presuming back to normalcy and startups are yet to commercialize and get to the level it would be few months lost or a year lost in their startup is promising and still relevant as a problem they want to solve that to me is very important that problem is no more really relevant at that stage or somebody has already addressed that problem and there is something which has already been done then I think obviously you have you have missed the board but if the problem is equally relevant and you have you are ready to do that I would still say that the valuation would be right rather than valuations going crazy some emergence has happened in the consumer behavior and that really sets the valuation and I think consumer behavior like adrutec adrutec was very slow valuation cycle and then certainly covid has hit and you are seeing some ridiculous valuation while I think my own viewpoint is and you can order me for this it should also get some correction because the kind of valuation these adrutec companies are asking I don't see a reason for it and they are not even scaling is very regional and things of that nature so it's not really that I can take it to 100 countries and still would like to do that the scalability is a question again but they are getting valuation because of the period and time they are passing through I think there should be some correction in the adrutec side and but at this stage looks good and they probably would like to prolong the situation because if this some of them would get into IPOs and some very very high valuation and things of that nature so and obviously that's very bull stage at this stage so it's a push in the upside on that business absolutely sir and on very similar lines our next question is that which are the best sectors to invest in at this moment according to you any sector is good and India I have always been big fan of consumption anything which drives direct consumption anything which anything which you can be I think that's what we need to I was sitting with a very rich shake of Dubai actually Abu Dhabi an old man very seasoned big investor huge huge investor is one of the five big families of Middle East and and incidentally I met him and he was the elderly guy and he told me that he says can you get me some very interesting because India is a very good country and he has visited India many times and different diplomat structures and he says I want to invest in India but I want something which can be addressed to every Indian and and I I was giving him all because I run franchise business and I was giving him this very rich man who pretty much controls the country and I'm giving him his ideas on different brands and different structure and he was not liking anything and then he told me that look can you understand can you get something which is like a matchstick he says I want that kind of business if you can get me something like that I know I can address 100 crore people in this so he was he was thinking was very clear he was very very clear that anything which I want to do commerce in a country like India has to reflect to every single Indian and if that was the business opportunity and it cannot go wrong so I got a learning sometimes we which can touch upon every Indian wallet share to me is the most valuable business which can be and that's how telecom companies that's how geo philosophy is geo is actually about taking wallet share out of every single Indian whatever they consume they consume oil they consume telecom which means data or they would consume electricity tomorrow so they would they would get into big time that every form or everything which is now powered by electricity and tomorrow the car the vehicles everything is electric so fundamentally anybody who thinks like that would build absolutely sir so I would just take up the last few questions now if your time permits one of the questions that we have is we are currently in talks with the VC in USA they ask me for a business plan financial plan initial call the VC seemed to be very interested and his words were your project can turn into a billion dollar company it's been 10 days and I've been following up with the manager that connects me to the CEO of VC so my question is usually how long does it take a VC to get back after reading the business plan you know so very good question actually I should tell you this question we get from a lot of early stage businesses and they come to me and say when I had a pretty gaming feedback and so let's not mix your business potential with your ability to raise from that particular VC right sometimes people are impressed with what you've created and but they are not in the investment cycle themselves you don't know their side you're thinking that they're investing all the time they're actually not if you go and see the VC portfolios you will find they've done and even the biggest of the world's biggest investors the giants of the entire thing if you go on their websites and find in their 50 years of cycle they've done over 300 investments only so which tells you a lot that they're not investing every day they're not investing every day if 50 years took them so many investments they are not investing more than 2 or 3 or 4 investment and each of these investments are also billion dollar so which means they're not investing every day but they don't invest into every single company every single day which means but there is a billion dollar idea which you can take you to many other people and that's the way and I I genuinely believe in this line of call spray and pray spray as much you want to do and then and leave it on this piece and something would come but if you just depend on one person and say you have an idea and you have full right to take it to anybody as many people to do that a lot of people they go if you're wrong and say or don't show it to many people then it's not really good because you just put yourself into thin and they don't like because they connected well let it be go out and tell other people also and while you're respectful for that you really approach them and you always would love to have them as your first venture capitalist sometimes they become just quiet because they're not ready for any investment themselves not that your business model is not good absolutely sir and just taking up the last question now it's a combination of two questions that we have one of the questions is how to know that my company is ready to scale up to the next level is there a specific milestone which can be set for all companies and on very similar lines another question we have is how to build a profitable what business model matrix we should look at before starting deciding whether to scale or not okay first important is that couple of things which should be defined in the right manner not necessarily you have to be profitable before you scale lot of companies scaled without having profitability rather they went into scaling because they eventually want to be building convo scale and then they would be able to be profitable right so that's one wrong argument yes what stage you need to scale and then you have to really see from two aspects one is internal readiness how ready you are for that scale and second is how realistic that scale opportunity is and these two are two different aspects and have to be looked at it first I would like to look at the second one which means how realistic is that scale opportunity which means that I like I wanted to aggregate all the independent small hotels how realistic was that opportunity and how much need really was there in the market place were these hotels not performing because they don't have a single brand name actually the truth was that most of the smaller hotels were running 100% occupancy and when they joined OYO their expectation was that I will be able to improve the overall average room rent and that didn't happen and then got into conflict because I was already doing well and the second side you got aggregated hotels which can never do well so what do you do right you it's a problem with OYO today that one side they have hotels which are fighting with them and say I was already doing 100% occupancy and you did nothing to me because you never improved anything which I can do and the other ones are struggling because I partner with you because I was not doing well and still not doing well because nobody stays in the hotel so now fundamentally now that's that's partially not rightly thought through opportunity while they have taken some part of it but there's not really being very very clear so you have to define the external and the internal readiness and internal readiness can be captured but externally very clearly how real is the scale opportunity is to be really known and if you are confident on these two sides well thought through and been consulted by somebody then you're ready to be scared absolutely sir and with this we'll just wrap up the Q&A session that we have we still had a few questions related to valuation of startups and related to scaling up and because of the shortage of time we cannot take all of the questions so I apologize to whosoever we weren't able to take the questions off but I assure you that we have covered all of those topics in our previous sessions as well so if you need to know anything more about it please feel free to reach out to me and I would be very happy to personally share the link of the sessions that we have covered and for that and Gaurav sir thank you so much for once again very patiently answering all of our questions and anything you would like to say in the end sir thank you very much it's been a very good series 30 episodes very engaging startups and investors who came in this piece we will continue to this piece it's our commitment to bring in our learnings and not learnings that are coming from just what we have achieved but also failures in life also gives you a lot of learnings which you should go and officially guide the young entrepreneurs who are coming up and the responsibility I personally feel that I should be really doing it because God has been kind has given us opportunity to work with a lot of entrepreneurs work on with very very successful businesses and a lot of failures also so we have got a lot of mix and if this can platform can also give us ability to share some of the insights it would be good stay tuned with Sonali and if you are looking to do anything with business X which means that you want to invest or you want to scale or you want to value or you want to look at exit all these four platforms are done by company Sonali runs called business X reach out to her she has a full team and multiple teams available and they would be able of any of these things thank you very much and and I have also available like gm gm at gauravumaria.com very simple you can always remember this gm at gauravumaria.com just send me a hello and any question you have I will be more than happy to answer that thank you very much thanks for your time absolutely thank you so much sir and thank you to all our attendees for being a part of this session and for being a part of the entire series it has been a wonderful time and as gauravumaria said we are still we will still be seeing you next week with a completely new series and our focus will still be on educating small businesses and entrepreneurs and investors and bringing the whole community together and until next time please take care and thank you so much once again if you have any questions or if you need any of the recordings of any of the sessions please feel free to reach out to me thank you so much from samir his travel sector investment answer is yes absolutely absolutely travel is still very very interesting sector to invest on great thank you very much thank you so much sir thank you everyone


This is stock number 9565. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and use Jeep Wrangler headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2000 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara. This vehicle has a 3.8 liter V6 motor. From this HD video you will be able to tell that this Jeep is in exceptional condition all the way around. Sahara tan is the color on this vehicle. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device, turn them on right now because it's like you're right here looking at the Wrangler with me. Factory alloy rims that are in excellent condition. I didn't see any scuffs or scrapes and if you look at this rim it actually has that number etched into it. That's a security system on this vehicle. They got it etched on all the windows and the rims so that if anybody steals it they'd have to get that off to prove that it's not yours. Brand new tires on this vehicle, Mastercraft Corsairs. They are brand new, no miles on them.  You'll be able to tell that from this video. I didn't see any dents or dings on that hood. Passengers side rim is absolutely perfect as well and that tire is brand new too. As we go down this side of the vehicle you can see just how clean that body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is so this is the Sahara color on a Sahara which is kind of a neat deal. It has the color matching hard top and the color matching fenders. Of course the step bars, the doors are in excellent condition and those stars on there if you did not like them you could definitely take those off.  Back rim is an excellent condition as well and that back tire is brand new too. You can see the frame and underbody on this vehicle is in exceptionally nice shape. Very little corrosion just a little bit of service thrust on that frame there but all the rockers look really good. The lower lips are in excellent shape. The door hinges look really nice. I didn't see any corrosion on them. The rear bumper is in really nice shape as well. Has a full towing package which includes that receiver hitch and wiring. You can even get the Sahara wheel cover on here. See that window edge number on the back window here. This back door opens up nice and smoothly and the back door is in really nice condition. This one does have the Infinity sound system subwoofer. It's the Alpine sound but they got the Infinity sub which is factory. Back format is an exceptionally clean condition and this folds up. Under here is where your door hinge bolts and your roof bolts go and then they have a storage space under here. Those seats do fold down. Take this hard top off. There's three bolts on that side, three bolts on that side and then two on the top and then that lifts right off. There's two quick disconnects right there and they go off pretty easy but very very clean around this vehicle. Has the mud flaps which is a nice feature. It's at hard tops in exceptionally nice condition and on this side very very clean as well. Like I said those door hinges are in nice condition. A lot of times you have to look and make sure that they're not all corroded. Sometimes people take them off, the paint gets chipped and that can cause corrosion on those hinges but these are in really nice shape. The step bars are in really nice shape.  There are no rips. There are no tears in these seats. This vehicle has never been smoked in. It is an exceptionally nice condition inside. Factory all-weather formats and as we jump inside the vehicle here you can see that this one has 65,210 miles. It has the leather wrap steering wheel. We've got Bluetooth audio controls, cruise controls on that side, information center controls on that side. There's no rips or tears on the steering wheel. Very nice condition. Has the AM, FM and series satellite radio capabilities, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, stability control, downhill assist control. You have your 4x4 shifter on the floor and then your automatic transmission. Passenger seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that and we got a factory all-weather format on that side. The rooftop pieces are in nice condition too. No major gouges or anything like that. And finally there is a 115 volt, 150 watt plug-in. Take a quick look at the back seats. No rips, no tears back here. Very nice and clean. These seats do fold down like I said for extra storage and they go down pretty flat. And they fold up like so. All-weather format back here. And we'll take a quick look under the hood. Heated mirrors. Like I said those graphics on the hood and the doors, those all can come off. They're just stickers if you didn't like them. Very easy to get off too. And under the hood we have the 3.8 V6 motor. Engine bay is very clean, runs very smooth. This vehicle has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this Jeep is 100% ready to go. Thank you so much for checking out the video. And if you want to check out more, you can more pictures of this vehicle or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, Jeeps. You name it we got it go to our website www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summitauto.com. If you want to check out just our used inventory you can go to truckson41.com. That's truckson41.com. And check us out there.  Ask for one of our sales associates to make this Jeep yours today. Once again that number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thanks again for checking out the video. If you want to check out more you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto. 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We're back. Dave Vellante here at Wikibon.org. I'm here with Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG. Welcome to the Cube, Mark. Hello. Sorry to be interrupting Ronnie over the back. Yeah, we're interrupting Ronnie. He's talking about waking up every day and going, Woo! I wonder what the woo thing was. I caught the end of it.  Let's see if we can have a woo moment. Let's have a woo moment. Right. So, well, this announcement is pretty woo. What do you think? This Satachi announcement? What's your take on it? Actually, I don't know what everyone else has been saying, but my main thing, the main thing that really interests me about this is how they've done the announcement and what this represents for Hitachi. So, I'm not really going to talk about the product. Product's lovely, product's wonderful, lots of great features, but we all know there are elements there that it's kind of a leapfrog in the market. You know, someone else will come out with something bigger, faster, cheaper, eventually. What I think is significant about this, and you tell me too, because you've been around the market a long time, many, many people think that Hitachi has great equipment, great technology, and yet it remains a leader in the market, but not the leader in the market. And I think it's always played this safe, conservative game. And I'm sure people who are listening to us saw some of today's events, drums, things falling over, smoke, and you, once you can make fun of them, it also, and I'll give a more serious aspect to this in just a second, it also signals the fact that they're serious, that they want to play. And to me, it's the marketing element of this that's huge. Just a quick example for me of something. Yeah, please. I was talking to a journalist last week, you know, the way the process goes, we all hear about things. I mean, Hitachi didn't used to tell us anything before it actually happened. And they go, oh, yeah, we're sorry, we forgot to tell you. Read the press release. Big announcements. Yes, exactly. Whereas here, they've done all the work you should do behind the scenes. I was talking to a journalist about this last week preparing their article. And they were saying, you know, I don't like 3D scaling. That's wonderful for Hitachi, because they were talking about it. Now, whether things like that catch on, whether I heard the phrase today, a storage computer, you know, which reminded me of VMware, you know, and the software mainframe, that sort of thing, whether those things catch on or not, it makes them part of the conversation. And I don't know why, but over the years, certainly while I've been following them, Hitachi has almost seemed to be happy to sit behind the curtain and let everyone else fight it out. And if they're going to make, as you know, Hitachi has been doing very well recently, but if they're going to make the moves in the market, then I'm sure they want to grow their business, they've got to grow their base. And you're only going to grow your base by becoming part of the conversation. That's a dangerous combination, you know, great product, you know, if they can combine that with great marketing, and maybe a few more feet in the street, would you expect that they would continue to gain share and maybe could they become a leader or the leader? Absolutely. I mean, again, the this market, the longer you look at it and the longer the terms that you look over, the more it changes.  And when you see someone else's kids every six months or six years, why haven't they grown? And that's exactly what could happen here. But they weren't going to do that without an attempt to get a message, get some marketing, get out there and, but you know, rattle the trees a bit. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You see as we all do this industry consolidation, it's probably not likely that Hitachi is going to get taken out anytime soon. Right.  Cisco is going to buy EMC. Hitachi is that that one constant, but they've changed a lot over the years, haven't they? So now were you in Japan? I was, yes. Tell us about that trip, because a big cultural aspect of the announcement today. So what was that like? I would say it's fair to say that the Japanese end of the company is where the conservatism comes from. There's a very and that's also why the products tend to be very good. And you know, the Japanese don't tend to rush things out that don't work. And so you see that methodical approach. It's also why if you look at the what Hitachi has done for years, there is a new big announcement. It's pretty regular every five years, roughly speaking. They're not rushing things out 18 months down track, changing everything. They're happy to let one product live its life. So there's a consistency, a methodological method. What's the word I'm looking for? Methodological? That's the one. Definitely.  Anyway, there's a very clear, careful cadence to what they do. But I'm glad to see for, you know, for our Western palates, I'm glad to see something with a bit more verb come out today makes a real encouraging change. So let's talk a little bit about the industry.  What's what's hot these days that you follow? Storage is hot. Storage is sexy. It's storage. I saw that. So I'm very clear what I say. Yeah, totally. Are we ready for the dance? Well, actually, storage is sexy. And the reason it's sexy is because it's high on everyone's list. And therefore, you know, defining sexy as important and of one of interest, because I'm English, we don't do sex. But so you hear all the terms, I'm going to come to that I think are really important because it's all the stuff about virtualization and cloud and so on and so forth and scale out. Yes, that's all very interesting. It's all very important. It's how we do things. But I think there are two things out there that are really significant. One is a general point and one is the technology. The general point is economics. You cannot have a discussion about storage these days without economics and economic value, both from a cost perspective, and from a value perspective, both of those have to come into equations these days. And I just think that's because for decades, we concentrated in storage in it on getting the job done effectively. That didn't necessarily mean efficiently. And I think there's a subtle distinction between those two words effectively mean getting the job done well efficiently adds getting the job done well using the you know, as few resources as you possibly can. So that's one side of the equation. The other technology that's just huge in my view is solid state. I don't mean solid state disk. I mean solid state is a much bigger array of technologies. And it's been for all of us who watch it I actually sold solid state back in the 80s, believe it or not. This is with SDK. Yeah, yeah, right big giant mainframe size boxes that plugged into a mainframe about a megabyte and about a zillion dollars. Great. But it was the same principle then very expensive, very good if you had the right data sets it worked. But the challenge and linking to today that the challenge has been and I think, you know, why SSD is being on the cusp and us Chatterati have all been talking about it for a year or two. It hasn't done that hockey stick yet. It's still seem to be yeah, it's really good at doing certain things. But it's really quite expensive and it's hard to use and it's that hard to use thing that lots of vendors Hitachi included with what they're talking about today are beginning to address by make it something that you don't need to worry about that's part of an automated tiering process. And that leads back to the other thing about the economics that I was talking about and you're seeing it permeate everywhere right not just plugged into the disk drive what you're seeing like Fusion IO doing PCI E and popularizing that and people picking up on that. And do you think that's an either or it's a both? Oh gosh, no, it's a both. And I think the one of things that depresses me as you see people talk about solid state as if it's one thing. Solid state is that's why I was careful not say SSD. Solid state is an array of things. Now, at the end of the day, it's really just expanding all the way down from memory and mainframe memory and sorry, down from the main memory shouldn't say mainframe shows my age, doesn't it? It's okay. Down through the servers. Yeah, a lot of mainframeers in the cube. I'm one myself into the storage itself. And as you say, it comes out whether it's in the server, whether it's as an appliance, whether it is as an SSD. What's intriguing to me is people talk about it all as if it's one thing. And yet they're quite happy to have a hierarchy of other storage. And then what sort of SSD are you going to get? Well, no, it's going to be a whole range. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about Oracle.   But you guys have written an ESG about Oracle and the impact that they might have in the business. Are they insane? Brilliant? Both? What's your take on that? Clearly, insanely brilliant would be the answer. Haven't been around the press before. Brilliantly insane. No, I think the question that many people are asking when they bought some, which of course bought storage tech and full disclosure, I used to work for storage tech for many years. So I'm kind of a bit biased when it comes to take. Oracle is selling tech. Wow, who'd a thunk? You know, that really is. I don't need to talk about consolidation. I can't think of a really good analogy for that. But anyway, I think the question when Oracle bought Sun was, you know, were they buying it for software? Were they buying it for hardware? Were they buying it for both? I was actually at Oracle World last week. I think they're serious. They want to be a systems player and you can't be a systems player without hardware. Were you at VMworld as well? Yeah, so different five. No, I wasn't. I was at AMC. Well, they get so confused these days. Oh, yeah, there you go. So we were there. A little different, a lot different vibe from Oracle, open world. I mean, VMworld, I said, was like wood stock and everybody was happy, a lot of love, very open. Oracle was, you know, very close, dominating sort of world revolves around Oracle. You know, here's our box, put it in. Two different philosophies, right? I mean, and of course, now you're seeing EMC go one direction with the open ecosystem Hitachi seems very open, you know, play with everybody in Oracle. Close, dominating. What's your take? Is it kind of Oracle and IBM, you know, going after that vertically integrated stack and everybody else has to compete with the sort of open systems approach or how do you see that shaking out? This is an odd thing to mention first, but something just in terms of the vibe of places. It was interesting. Jack, when he was doing his, you know, he was on here, wasn't he? Red T-shirt? Who to thank? I go to Oracle, there's all my ex-son storage tech colleagues with ties on. Of course, right. I mean, so Oracle, if it wants to be anything, yeah, it probably wants to be IBM. I mean, I don't know. I mean, that's the, that's probably the target that they have. What was the question again? Because I totally forgot. We're just rapping about Oracle, you know, and the open versus closed sort of philosophy and, and, you know, where Hitachi fits in and all that. It's going to be interesting with Oracle because clearly they would like to be closed, but they're going to talk open. And I think many organizations are like that, but they managed to say both things at the same time. We were saying it should be called the Oracle closed world. Yeah, though, and again, another comparison, was that unfair? Well, I put it, it's hard to get out of there, well, because it's so big when you're there. I'd never been before.  It's huge. You're in the bubble. It was impressive. No doubt Oracle or whatever. Yeah, exactly. But here's the thing that's interesting. And I heard a couple of instances that I actually liked. It is hard as a, even though we're in the business, it's hard. Let's say you were just a regular person walking down. You never heard of Oracle. You walk down the street there and it says, you know, five of the top five banks use Oracle and 89 of the top 90, whatever. Yeah, everybody uses Oracle. But it's impressive. It was very impressive. It was nice to hear some of that said in here today. Because again, coming back to that sort of almost corporate shyness that I think Hitachi has represented. They might not realize it because they all work for Hitachi. But those of us who watch the business, they've always been the quieter player. And to hear them, Jack was up saying, you know, and whatever it was, you know, 80% of the Fortune 500 using Hitachi, that sort of thing. That's good to hear. That's the sort of thing that users actually want to know. That's an interesting observation you're making because it used to be really hard for Hitachi to get its customers to stand up on a stage in an announcement like this and tell them we saw Lloyd's banking group up there today talking about how they're, you know, deploying the technology. I think it's because they've used it. It worked as promised and they're happy. You know, I mean, that's a good sign. And so I'm definitely seeing a change in terms of Hitachi and the loyalty and it's around that virtualization platform. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that. So ESG did a study in August and it was published and it was one of the pieces of the study was VMware penetration, storage penetration in VMware and EMC came out as the far and away the leader, which doesn't surprise me, right? There was a US based study. I have to clarify that North America and statistically valid. You guys do I think a really good job there. So EMC came out number one in VMware virtualization. Hitachi, on the other hand, is all about storage virtualization, which really isn't EMC's game, right? So is Hitachi sort of the leader in storage virtualization? Can you talk about that a little bit?  We had IDC on, they didn't know either. And they should know. They count all this stuff, right? That's their jobs. No, but I think I don't know what they said, but I think the interesting thing and the real way you have to look at it, I'm going to give you a sliding answer and then a real answer. The sliding answer is who knows? And how do you really count that if you're IDC or whoever does the number? He has a licenses, is it revenue? Is it terabytes? But also is it exactly? Is it terabytes? Wow, he's noisy. It's okay. These mics are amazing. So is it the, is it the number of terabytes you're managing? Is it the value that produces for certain companies? Is it the number of sites? Is it the size of sites? Everyone will always find some way they can be the best, you know, biggest, fastest, tallest or whatever in this business. The glib but important thing and, you know, obviously a lot of users are watching this, more than just vendors, hopefully, is to look at what you're actually trying to do. I hate to be really, really twee, but what are you trying to achieve? Which set of applications looks to be best to suit that and what architecture infrastructure you're going to run those on? It's as simple as that. Excellent. Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG, great advice for users. Mark, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you, David. Appreciate your insights.