In recent years, the co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s live roving news desk, interviewed many of the most insightful and knowledgeable tech industry luminaries on-sight at various conferences and events—executives from Aman Singh of Jive Software, Inc. to Ronald Zapar of Re-Quest, Inc. to Brian Bulkowski of Aerospike.

Some of the most memorable interviews happened at events such as VMworld and Oracle OpenWorld.

For this series of 2014 Reflections, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier, Dave Vellante, David Floyer, Jeff Kelly and Stu Miniman take a look back to remember their favorite theCUBE segments from the past year or so.

Floyer‘s favorite interviews included ones with Aman Singh, Ronald Zapar, Brian Bulkowski, Gary Orenstein and Ken Grohe. Check out the interviews in their entirety below (listed in no particular order).

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1. Aman Singh, Senior Enterprise Storage and Backup Architect at Jive Software, at VMworld 2013

Aman Singh, Senior Enterprise Storage and Backup Architect at Jive Software, spoke to Floyer and Vellante at VMworld 2013. Here, Singh discusses Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and its future as the industry moves toward broader virtualization. Singh discusses the future (or non-future as the case may be) of e-mail and the world’s inevitable transition from e-mail collaboration to cloud collaboration. Ultimately, he says this transition will enhance the general protection of data for a customer organization. Singh then discussed the evolution of Jive Software‘s architecture model including its deduplication technology.

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2. Ronald Zapar, founder and CEO of Re-Quest, at Oracle OpenWorld 2014

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Ronald Zapar, founder and CEO of Re-Quest, spoke to Floyer and Vellante at Oracle OpenWorld 2014. Here, Zapar discusses how converged appliances offer to do away with the colossal hassle of cobbling together different infrastructure components into a cohesive and functioning whole, thereby freeing up a proportionally large chunk of the technology budget for CIOs. Zapar says the flip side of the equation is that the systems integrators typically contracted to carry out the work are seeing less and less demand for their core services but that trend doesn’t seem to concern Zapar all that much. He says that the new way of deploying enterprise infrastructure is conducive rather than disruptive to his firm’s long-term goals. And he adds that it has been positioning itself accordingly from the very outset of the phenomenon.

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3. Brian Bulkowski, founder and CTO of Aerospike, Inc., at Oracle OpenWorld 2013

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Brian Bulkowski, founder and CTO of Aerospike, spoke to Floyer and Furrier at Oracle OpenWorld 2013. Here, Bulkowski discusses his take on in-memory computing, key value store usage and analytics; Oracle‘s entry into the in-memory market and the effect it has on his company’s position in the marketplace, the security benefits of real-time, flash-oriented NoSQL databases; and the enormous influx of change in capability and innovation that’s happening in the industry at the moment.

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4. Gary Orenstein, SVP of Products at Fusion-io, Inc., at Oracle OpenWorld 2013

Gary Orenstein, (who at the time was) SVP of Products at Fusion-io, spoke to Floyer and Vellante at Oracle OpenWorld 2013. Here, Orenstein discusses flash and storage market trends, his company’s focus on flash at Oracle OpenWorld, the big focus on in-memory at Oracle OpenWorld, how flash provides a better cost/performance balance when it comes to ingesting, processing, presenting and archiving data all at once; how flash is fitting in between DRAM and disk drives, how real-time analytics can benefit from flash technology, how Fusion-io customers are transforming applications, and his take on innovation in open source.

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5. Ken Grohe, VP of Worldwide Customer Operations at Virident Systems, Inc., at Oracle OpenWorld 2013

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Ken Grohe, VP of Worldwide Customer Operations at Virident Systems, spoke to Floyer and Vellante at Oracle OpenWorld 2013. Here, Grohe discusses the latest developments from his company and the use cases that are driving flash adoption in the enterprise. Grohe also comments on Virident’s product strategy, saying that management is doubling down on software to diversify beyond hardware and meet long-term business goals. The vendor’s ability to combine the two is what sets it apart, according to Grohe. After discussing Virident’s new partner program and its complementary certification track, Grohe says that the speed and low-latency of flash storage is disrupting application development. Apps can now be architected to ingest and serve data in near real time.

Photo of Brian Bulkowski courtesy of theCUBE

All videos are courtesy of SiliconANGLE