We’re taking this opportunity to recap some of the wise words spoken by Ken Grohe, the vice president of worldwide customer operations for Virident Systems, who stopped by theCube at VMworld 2013 to share his take on the rapid adoption of PCIe flash beyond the realm of web-scale giants. Of recent interest on Virident is the company’s recent acquisition by Western Digital for $685 million.

Grohe opens the interview by noting that his company recorded a 300 percent sales increase this year, a massive growth rate that is due in no small part to increased demand from clients in the retail industry and other technologically conservative segments. Virident is “building and creating and leading a flash platform transformation” in the traditional enterprise, Grohe highlights, by delivering “the familiarity of getting a platform that looks like a SAN, feels like a SAN, and has the data services of other SANs, albeit with the performance that only PCIe flash can provide.”

Software-led data services are central to Viridian’s plans. The executive says that his firm delivers high availability, caching and other enterprise capabilities at the kernel level to help IT organizations extract the most value from their flash deployments without having to hire new talent.

TheCube host John Furrier asks Grohe to shed light on the market dynamics that fuel Virident’s rapid growth. The executive once again mentions increased demand from direct end users, which he reveals account for over 50 percent of his company’s sales.

Virident sets itself apart from the back by coupling raw performance with unique functionality such as the ability to choose between write-back, write-through and write-around caching modes. This capability accelerate both modern workloads and traditional apps from SAP and Oracle, Groh says. He adds that Virident is working to complement its existing lineup with denser cards and more sophisticated management capabilities.