>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by PureStorage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Man: Graduated ASU. >> Welcome back to PureStorage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with The Cube, sporting the clong of Prince, formerly known as, today because we are at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a really cool concert venue that's been here since 1950 and I'm joined by Dave The Who Vellante today. >> Play the toast and tea. (laughs) >> Pretty groovy T-shirt there. And we're joined by a couple of guys, next we've got Axel Streichart, the senior director of business application solutions from Pure and John Meng, senior director of IT operations at Simpson Strong-Tie. Hi guys! >> Hi. >> Lisa: Welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So John, first question to you. Tell us about Simpson Strong-Tie. Who are you guys, obviously you're a Pure customer, but give us a little bit of an orientation to the business. >> Sure, so Simpson Strong-Tie, we're a public company based out of Pleasanton, California. We've been in business since about 1956, if I've got my history right, so we've been around for quite a long time. We're a manufacturing organization. Basically, if you're building a home or a deck or if you're needing to put two by fours together, our niche is that little connector, that bracket that connects those two by fours and we do pretty well in that business. Overall our revenue is just shy of a billion dollars, so a pretty decent sized organization. >> Dave: So Pure passed you. >> Yes, last year, you know. >> You okay with that or? >> I'm okay with that. (all laugh) >> So tell us about, from a business perspective, the need for PureStorage specifically with respect to your SAP journey. >> So a couple of years ago when I came on board, the business had made a decision that they were going to get off of their old ERP system onto a new ERP system. When I say old ERP system, I'm being a little respectful there. It's a homegrown application running on SQL which is basically, they lovingly called it Blue Screen because you go to fileshare and you double click on the executable that you need, for example, if you're doing accounts payable or accounts receivables or purchase orders or what have you, you double click on the executable you want, opens up a nice little blue screen and it's a DOS based blue screen and you tab around and enter all your information. They had been running on that application for about 30 years. >> Lisa: Is that all? (laughs) >> Yeah, so quite a while. >> Dave: It works. >> It works, right. If it ain't broke don't fix it, but it was developed by a single person and it was time that the company put on some bootstraps and hitched them up, so they went to market to decide on what ERP application they were going to move to and SAP won out. They had actually been running for a year on a test system hosted by SAP when I came on board, so the decision had already been made, the application wise from an ERP perspective, but the next step in our journey for Simpson, and my challenge, was how do we host this environment? Do we host it in a cloud, do we host it on-prem? And so as I took a, looking at our environment, a very distributed environment, I said, alright, well first and foremost, SAP is a centralized solution. Is there a way for us to create a single environment that our entire company could run on, not only for SAP but everything else, a mixed use environment? And I started having conversations with Pure. They actually let me talk to a couple of their existing customers who were very happy about their mixed use workload including ServiceNow who talked today, so definitely a shout out to them on the conversations we had back a couple of years ago. Anyways, Pure ended up being our foundation for currently our core tenant, which is SAP, but also the future tenant for everything else that we're going to throw on there. And it's been an incredible journey over these last couple of years with them. >> And why the decision to stay on-prem, versus go to the cloud? Was it a function of SAP really not being there in the cloud or your data, you didn't just want to shove your business into the public cloud? >> So there was definitely a lot of analysis that went into that. Just from a financial perspective, I worked with the CFO and we put together a 12 year ROI on cloud versus on-prem and just to kind of really give ourselves some understanding over time what the impact would be of renting versus owning and it was very clear that on-prem financially made sense. Then we had to talk about the business, what was the best for the business. We looked at it from a, when I came there, there was some, the project team looking at SAP had really already made their mind up. They wanted it off of IT. They wanted it in an environment that they trusted, so when I came on board I said, look this is something I've done before. We have experience, we have the in-house expertise, you just trust me that this is the right thing and let me show you how and that's where, honestly, a lot of the information that I was able to pull off of FlashStack, off of SAP, it's a certified solution, talking to ServiceNow I was able to prove to the business that look, hosting it internally made the most sense financially as well as for our business and what we were trying to achieve. >> Made you happy. >> Yeah and it's not just that, but this is a story we're hearing more often now. So customers actually trying this out in the cloud and realizing, number one, the cost, it's not that cost-efficient and effective as they were planning for and seeing, especially when you're making multiple copies of this SAP environments. The costs go through the roof and the other thing is also what a lot of customers then realize is how do you actually get your data and get your communication from your data center back to the cloud provider? You need a big pipe and this communication cost just to get the data out is huge, is sometimes huge. The other thing is SLAs. It sounds like a good thing, but in many cases, SLA's because they're not flexible, you're ending up quarter end you need help and they're saying, nope, talk to you in four days. It's not really acceptable. And the third one is, there's this whole concept around I don't really have to invest now into the knowledge, into the skill set, because I put it all in the cloud. It's not the reality. The reality, you still have to invest into the skills. Isn't that? >> Everything he has said is actually the conversations that we had in-house, absolutely. If you want to do a data migration from QA to Dev or Dev to Production or whatever your landscape is and how you want to move the data, oh, well, that's going to be a charge. Oh well, okay, well I need to spin up this extra project. Oh, well there's another charge. I mean, it's just constant nickel and diming and another key component that you hit on that I failed to mention was hosting it internally allowed us to control the end to end experience for our end users. When you're talking about hosting it in the cloud, your data is somewhere else and you can not control end to end. You can control it up to a certain extent, but then from there all you can rely on is the SLAs and, to his point, the SLAs are only what's on paper, they're not very flexible at all. >> So the business case didn't pan out for the cloud. >> Correct. >> But there's certainly attributes of the cloud that are attractive, so what are those attributes and how are you bringing those on-prem? >> So flexibility. Flexibility is huge for us, the ability to just quickly be able to spin things up and scale them back as needed. I kind of look of it as, look, there's a water line that you're going to use on a day in and day out basis for your organization. Maximize your investment there. On the peaks and valleys that you're going to have, that's where the cloud can really help and so, is cloud completely off the table for us? No, that's where we're going to be able to burst into that sort of scenario. If we need more compute, we need more spin cycles, whatever we need from the cloud, we can throw it up there and then bring it back down, so have much more controllable costs in our mind. >> So a major change in the application environment, migration, from an old platform. You had to freeze the app. Does that freeze the code? >> John: Yep. >> How long did you have to freeze the code for? >> So, when we're talking about, just making sure I understand your question. >> Your home-grown ERP, blue screen, C prompt to the SAP environment. >> Yeah, so the landscape as we have it today, we actually just went live on SAP early February and it's not company wide. It's only a certain branch. In its strength, the beauty of that previous application, it was very de-centralized and each branch where we have a high consolidation of users and workers, each branch had their own data center hosting their own ERP for their branch, so we could freeze their environment just during their time window. >> I see. >> Now the challenge for us today is as we start consolidating, those windows start to overlap, but that's honestly why we've invested in technologies like FlashStack and so forth that come with the redundancy built in so we can work on the environment without having to freeze it or bring it down. >> So you need the speed to compress those discontinuities. >> Yes, yes. >> Dave: In data. >> Absolutely. >> What about data protection? How do you, I know that's an area of expertise of yours. How do you approach data protection in this new environment? Are you doing anything differently? Where does Pure fit? >> It's actually a huge shift for us on how we do things. From a data protection standpoint, we're talking about disaster recovery, business continuity and so we have active passive data centers. We're utilizing what Pure has under the hood to be able to replicate in multiple ways. And that's the beauty of our setup that we've designed is the ability to replicate in multiple ways, because in a multi-tenant environment, yes, there are certain parts of the stack that one shoe will fit all sizes. I would say that PureStorage is that, but when you start getting to the details of each of the applications, they don't all play the same way when it comes to DR or it comes to replication or data protection and we will need to look at each one of those applications and design a data protection strategy around it as we import it in, so for SAP, we do have differencing of how we're going to protect that versus when we bring in our web servers, versus when we bring in SharePoint and other core applications to the business. >> So Axel, you mentioned, well actually it was John, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to talk to ServiceNow and maybe another customer of Pure as well when you were in this decision making process. I imagine ServiceNow's business is probably quite different from Simpson Strong-Tie, so what, Axel, I guess both of you, help us understand, what were some of the similar changes that, say, a ServiceNow faced that you were facing and then Axel, to your point, tell us a little bit about the SAP alliance that you have with Pure and how customers as big as ServiceNow and Simpson Strong-Tie are helping to evolve that relationship? >> Me first? >> Go for it. >> Alright, so one of the biggest strategies, the focus that I had when I was making the decision around hosting SAP, I really wanted to make sure I understood, did I have to go a siloed approach? Was I buying architecture specifically for SAP or could I do a multi-use workload? Multi-purpose was huge for me. I was really, I couldn't understand how, in 2016 when I was looking at this, I'm like, look, it's 2016, I know there's a solution out there that can solve this problem and so that's what I was challenging Pure and they're like, who do you want to talk to? And I said, "Well I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP and I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP in a mixed-workload environment." And that's where ServiceNow came into play. And when I was having conversations with them, I said, alright, so you're running mixed workload. Yes, okay, when you have an SAP performance problem, do you have to, is there a lot of effort to show that there's, where the problem in the performance is? And there was a pause on the phone and the guy actually giggled over the phone. I don't know how else to say it. And he's like, "Performance problems? "We don't have any." And so, when you hear that, especially when you're talking about SAP, which is a known beast of an application inside any environment and it will use whatever resource you throw at it and it won't play nice with other apps, when I heard that, I was like, okay, where do I sign? So it was basically that conversation that really said, alright, let's give this a try. The other thing, honestly, for us is SAP is our first tenant and as we start applying other applications to it, we already have our baseline established and we can watch as the other applications are thrown in and it's not impacting anything, SAP, or on their own. >> So FlashStack is going to be able to give you a foundation to not only scale your SAP infrastructure-- >> Absolutely. >> But also to expand to multiple workloads. >> Yeah, for example, some of our public web facing applications, we've already moved them in-house. We used to use a public service provider, a public cloud offering for this web service that I'm talking about. It would take, so you'd go out there and you'd say, you know what, I want a product catalog of all Simpson products and you hit the button. 45 minutes later, it's downloaded, 45 minutes. I took that workload and I put it in our data center. Three minutes. 45 minutes to three minutes. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then another test was a web crawler, so we did a web crawler across that same web application to confirm when we moved it from one location to the other we didn't miss anything. In the old environment, running on a public cloud infrastructure, it took 20 minutes. 17 seconds on our own. And it was run from the same PC. There was no, it was pretty clear and honestly, when marketing felt that increase in performance and saw it and realized it, they bragged to the CFO and now the CFO's like, okay, when are we going to get this out of SAP? Well we have to get the whole company on SAP before we can really realize this investment, but they're very excited about the opportunities. >> And how long have you had the Pure infrastructure? >> We installed it probably about year and a half ago, because we had to get it prepared. We installed it about a year and a half ago. >> So you haven't had to do any upgrades yet. >> No, not major ones. We actually have our first major one this week. We're actually scheduling it, but one of the questions I was asked on an earlier panel was how due you handle outages with Pure and how has your experience been with support. Well, I'm sorry we haven't had to call support yet. I've heard great stories about it (Lisa laughs) and I know that our guys that are working with support right now to get our upgrades done, they've had nothing but praise, but honestly we haven't had a lot of interaction yet with their support, just because we haven't needed it yet. >> And you have an in-house development staff, application development team? >> Yes. >> Has their work flow changed at all in terms of being able to share data, share copies of data, are you there yet or? >> We're not there yet, but one of the goals of our environment, so we have two data centers and we have load balancers in front of the two data centers. When it comes to hosting our public web side of things, the goal is to have a green and a red environment where you develop on the red, green is your production and when it comes time, you just flip the switch and your development becomes your active. And so, basically, a lot of the nuances and strategies that you get out of public cloud, we're going to attain those using our private cloud infrastructure. >> Essentially use live data of the test environment-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then cutting over immediately. You couldn't have done that three, four, five years ago. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So Axel, we're just about out of time, but how common is John's story with Simpson Strong-Tie in terms of, we haven't had to call support yet. Are you hearing this resonate pretty pervasively in your SAP install base across industries? >> This is a very typical environment. I would call it almost green field, but most of the environments that we are dealing with are brown field, so customers are long-time SAP users and customers and they're going from, let's say, the Oracle environment into a HANA environment and the nice thing about this is that we are actually providing a platform that can help customers no matter where they are in their journey. If they are still in Oracle, they're already on HANA, they're moving onto AI, whatever it might be, they don't have to change anything on the infrastructure, per se, because there is no configuration or tuning necessary, whether it's Oracle, whether it's HANA, whether it's AI, so you're running it off the same platform. The other thing is that I want to mention is, because you asked me about our relationship with SAP. It's a very strong relationship, so we're actually working with SAP worldwide in their core innovation labs, so they have labs around the world where they develop new solutions together with hardware and software partners and they love to work with PureStorage because it is so simple and they're coming from a functional side. They don't care about the infrastructure at all. They're saying as long as it's simple and you can imagine they are pretty much the Switzerland of ERP. We actually recently published a white paper together with SAP around how to actually save license cost, SAP license cost, of up to 75%. Now you would ask yourself, why would SAP do that? Why would they promote something, push something, that actually cuts into their revenue? But for SAP it is more important to increase the adoption rate of HANA rather than the revenue that's behind it, so that's why we are publishing, and it's on the SAP website that you can download and you can see, together with PureStorage. It's an amazing story that we have. >> Let-- >> And honestly, that was part of why we chose Pure in the beginning, they're certified and now I didn't have to go to the business and try to convince them. It was all on paper for us. >> I can't help but notice that you brought a little kitty cat to the set, Axel. Tell us about this little stuffed animal. >> Maybe you heard it in the keynote this morning. We were talking about PureStorage is actually moving from their solution development towards engineered solutions. We want to actually put more application specific functionality and embed it directly into the array and one of the big challenges that a lot of customers have is how do I create copies, clones, and refreshes of my SAP environment? And we have customers it takes them sometimes nine days just for one copy, nine days. Why? Because it's a very complex and complicated end to end process, so we thought about why don't we take this entire process, automate this entire process, and embed it into our array, and we call this tool that we developed and that's available for everybody that, it's included in the maintenance. We call it Copy Automation Tool, CAT. >> The cat! >> That's the cat. (all laugh) >> And that's what we are, and so if people are asking, why is a cat, Copy Automation Tool. >> That's good. >> Very nice. >> I was like, where is this going? >> I like it. >> Brought it home, brought it home. >> Like you said. >> Do I get to keep this cat? Is this, oh. >> You can. >> Ah, very nice. >> This is pretty cool swag. Well Axel and John, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us the innovations that Pure and SAP are doing, how you are being successful, and now you are a reference customer for what you guys are achieving. >> Great story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks guys, appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Yep. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and cat. We are live from PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE covering Pure Accelerate 2017. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Pure Storage. (sparse percussion fading) >> Welcome back to San Francisco. We're at Pier 70, and this is Pure Accelerate. And this is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host David Floyer. First segment of the day. Welcome! >> Thank you. >> Dave: Todd Graham is here. He's the Vice President of IT Infrastructure at ScanSource, Inc. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Axel Streichardt, who's the Director of Business Applications Solutions at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Okay, so let's get right into it. Well, if we start with ScanSource, what does ScanSource do? Set up the interview with just a little background. >> Sure, so we are an international technology distribution company. We have been around since 1994, public since 1994. Today we're in the US, North, we're in Europe, Latin America, and we are quickly growing to 45 to 47 locations around the globe. We focus, very vertically focused, on technology such as telecommunications. Recently we bought a telecommunications services master agency, so we can deal with service and connectivity. Point of sale and barcode is our original business unit. And we do Voice over IP phone systems, videoconferencing, and those types of technologies today. >> You said you started in '94 and you been public since '94. So you started with an IPO? (panelists laughing) >> It was very early. That's correct. (panelists laughing) >> Wow, that's amazing. I'd love, I got to talk to you afterwards. (panelists laughing) >> That's right. That's right. >> That's like Bitcoin or something. Okay, and then maybe we could set up to the segment here. Axel, I saw you speaking here earlier to an audience. >> Axel: Right. >> Maybe describe the discussion that we're going to have here about cloud. >> We, of course, focusing a lot on the different flavors of cloud and the different deployment models that SAP customers are considering today, right? So it could be on premise. Do you want to do it in a hybrid cloud? Do you want it in a public cloud? And we see that, initially, a lot of customers were thinking and considering public cloud as the solution for SAP workloads. And it is interesting that, in recent months, we actually see that from this initial, let's say, movement we see a lot of customers actually reconsidering and coming back, right? And they're seeing that the economics, the flexibility, the agility that they were thinking about when moving certain SAP workloads to the cloud is actually not really the reality. And the reality caught up with them. And they see that the value that they get from Pure Storage actually to run SAP workloads on Pure Storage make way more sense from an economical and also from an agility perspective, right? And we also see that IDC and some other analysts, even SAP themselves, they are actually saying that probably 60%-70% of all SAP workloads will stay on premise. They will not go into a public cloud or cloud deployment. >> Okay, so, Todd. So tell us about, so you're a ERP customer, SAP customer. You decide to move into the cloud. Maybe tell us about that journey. You moved in, and the pendulum swung back. So add some color to. >> Yeah, we were migrating away from our legacy ERP environment and moving to SAP. It was a greenfield opportunity, so we felt like it was the right time to move into the cloud. We looked very heavily at our internal expertise from an applications standpoint as well as an infrastructure standpoint and felt that this would be the right opportunity to move to that infrastructure as a service, application as a service model. And then we could take time to take our center of excellence team around SAP and do knowledge transfer between the cloud organization, the managed organization, and use it as a ramp for us to educate ourselves more around SAP. Some of the other driving factors were simply. Why do we want to go to the cloud? The elasticity, the ease of deployment, the things that we firmly believed at the time were the right decision. And we felt like it could be done quicker by moving to the cloud to do that. >> Okay, so you moved to the cloud, and then it wasn't the experience that you thought it would be. It was >> Todd: Correct. >> Axel mentioned a bunch of factors. The agility wasn't there. The cost wasn't there. Maybe add some color to that as well. >> Yeah, absolutely, we felt like, with the growth of our company through acquisitions, that speed of deployment was going to be key in the future. And we quickly learned that that was not necessarily the case. Everything became request-driven, SLA-driven, versus actually worrying about what was happening within our application itself. And so we just became another customer that was submitting tickets, if you will, in that environment. Stability and performance, we saw some real impacts to the environment that were actually end-user-affecting, which really began to force us to look for some different solutions. >> Okay. So, David, you just participated in a study. We call it the True Private Cloud. >> David: Right. >> So what was happening was it was a lot of cloud washing going on. >> Right. >> And with Private Cloud, we said, "Well, you know, essentially what people want is "to be able to substantially mimic "the public cloud on private." So they can get back that control and address some of the problems. >> That's right. >> So maybe pick it up from there and talk a little bit about. >> Sure, so yes, this, this is reports that we've done on the amount of spend that'll go to hyper-converged types of products and bring it back in-house and offer the same sort of facilities to the end users as you get from a public cloud but in a private cloud itself. So is that how you've done it? Did you take a package, or how did you go, how did you take your work from the public cloud back into the private cloud? >> So part of that was, we did the initial cost analysis of where we were at. And that was one of the main drivers behind, we really can do this in-house ourselves. That's when we began looking at partners that could help us. It was a perfect time that it had set up within our refresh strategy around our traditional storage and compute environment for us to really look at what the cost factors were. Could we improve the performance and the stability of that environment and improve that service to our end users? And so those are the decisions that we made, right? And then we said, "It's time for us to bring that back in." We can have control. And one of the biggest things, and it was really more than control, it was that we understood our environment. And that was the biggest thing that we saw a challenge with, was trying to convey the importance of what was happening within our deployment of SAP to the managed services provider. >> So what led you to the Pure decision? Like David said, you got some kind of converged infrastructure, whatever, the metaphor for mimicking public cloud. What led you to Pure? And we could talk about what the solution was. >> Yeah, one of the things was just the simplicity of Pure. At first, when we heard the story, we weren't sure we really believed it. We were like, "This is, this is entirely too simple." The evergreen model was very intriguing to us at the time, because we had been in that traditional storage and compute environment where, every three years, we had a massive project and do a forklift upgrade with choose any of the providers. And it was, is what we were doing. We were looking to set ourselves up for SAP HANA in the future. We wanted to build an infrastructure that would allow us to get there. And in all of the due diligence that we did, Pure came out on top with that, with a lot of the story around their compression and dedupe capabilities. Performance around IO was just extremely compelling at the time. >> So you got to love this story. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you hear this a lot from customers? Is this a unique situation maybe? >> Yeah, we see this a lot from customers. Actually by moving SAP workloads, mission-critical workloads, now to Pure Storage. And what really, it's not just about the evergreen and the simplicity, right? What also resonates very well with customers today is our story around the data platform, right? So that's not about storage anymore. It's really about providing a foundation for certain SAP workloads, and you can seamlessly go from, let's say, typical Oracle SAP deployment, and you can start with HANA deployments. Actually, by using our solution, you can actually reducing the cost by up to 75%, right? So these are all compelling reasons, and this all without any configuration changes or any setups that you need specifically for SAP workloads, right? It is so simple that you can run various SAP workloads on the same platform. And to move this, actually, to another angle is, What if in the future you want to do analytics, big data, internet of thing? Again, it's the same platform, it's the same foundation that you can run all these various SAP workloads on. And I think this is a very compelling story. >> And it's interesting for us. It's not just SAP workloads that are running in that environment. >> Oh, really? >> We're, it's, it's a mixed environment, so we're running everything else on top of that FlashStack today. >> Dave: Well, you've done a lot of work. >> Axel: Sure, yes. >> Well, I've got one other question I'd like to ask you about landscapes. See, you're a big international set of companies that you are servicing. So from a landscape point of view, did you want to centralize that onto one landscape or multiple landscapes? And I would have thought that's an area as well where using Flash was a great advantage that you could actually. >> It is centralized today. And then as we grow, we are giving consideration to, Will we have multiple instances across the globe. But today it is centralized and will be so probably for the next 24 months. >> But what you described earlier, Todd, was this horizontal infrastructure layer that could support mixed workloads. But there's got to be some kind of software, something in the middle that supports that as well. Did you have to write something to >> Orchestrate >> To support that >> Was it, yeah, some kind of orchestration or management, stack. >> No, today it was all, everything that we're doing today is within the Pure UI or within Wmware and UCS Manager today. >> Dave: Okay, well that'll get you pretty far. >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> So where do you, what do you take away from this in terms of where this market's going? You talked about analysts generally say that most SAP workload's going to stay on prem. I think we would generally agree with that. >> Yes. Yeah. >> It's going to be a long slog before they're ready for the cloud. At least the core, mission-critical stuff, right? Okay, so that says there's real pressure on IT organizations to mimic substantially that public cloud experience. Are we there today? With a lot more work to be done? I'd like both of your inputs on that. >> Right, and that's the beauty of it. We're actually providing it, at Pure, the various flavors of cloud. So if customers want to actually go from physical to virtual, we are supporting this, because you can actually run your virtual SAP workloads seamlessly on our storage array. At the same time, if you're already then moving to the next level and you want to have a private cloud environment, right? So we have all the components and capabilities actually built into our product that you can do things like self-service, right? You can have chargeback. You can have all the deployment, right? So all of these features that actually make up a private cloud environment, so we have them in our mix already, right? So we more or less have everything ready for customers today. And if they want to actually go to a hybrid cloud, that's why I'm saying. 30%, maybe, to 40% of SAP workloads might go into a cloud, into a public cloud or a hybrid cloud environment. And we're actually also providing this hybrid cloud capability that you can move workloads seamlessly to an Azure, to an AWS, or to Google Cloud. So we just heard this morning we have this capability to move certain workloads seamlessly from on premise, from on premise Pure, onto AWS, for instance. So we have all the ingredients, so throughout this entire journey that the customer wants to go through, that they can actually move along with this one data platform, and that makes it. >> So, Todd, how do you decide now, knowing what you know, what goes where, what to put in the public cloud, what to put on prem, what's eventually going to be hybrid? >> Well, and we have adopted a strategy of Cloud First, which means, Will the workload or will the application fit in that as-a-service model? Does it necessarily mean that we're going to put everything there? We still believe that most mission-critical, anything around the RP, will most likely remain in-house. And one of the main differences that we saw was the availability in uptime that the Pure system gives us around what we could see that the manu-services providers could provide. And downtime is really not tolerated, and it's one of those things that we need. And when it's down, we've got to have things back up, and we need the availability to our end users. And as we expand across the globe, we're becoming more of a 7 by, maybe today we're a 6 by 20. We're not fully 7-by-24 shop yet. But we're getting to that, and so we're looking at the infrastructure that will help us achieve that goal. >> So you're looking at cloud as an operating model more so than a destination. Is that right? >> Todd: That's correct. That's correct. >> And of course, there's the destination aspect of it, which is a function of, what, performance and cost, and. What do you look at? What are the determinants there? >> Yeah, so performance is obviously key for us. Cost is always an important factor, but it's probably number 3 or 4 on the list, right? Availability, uptime, and performance are our key. And if we can get those, we can get the support and the availability that we need, then maybe it makes sense, right? If it's a web application, if it's something that's very straightforward, again, one of the biggest reasons that we go back to bringing it in-house is we truly understood the environment and how things fit together. Whereas in that manu-services environment, it was very difficult to do that. >> And what about security? We haven't talked much about security today. But where does that fit in in your cloud decision? >> David: Especially internationally, the different rules in different countries, for example. >> Yeah, internationally, it's a challenge with all of the data privacy laws and the things that are country-specific, and we're learning a lot of that in Latin America as well (David chuckling) as we begin to move into those markets. But security is absolutely top of mine. We will work with those cloud services providers, but we've talked to a lot of folks along the AWS and the Azure route. And we're comfortable with where the security around the cloud is going. We're talking to a lot of new cloud security brokers to understand what they can bring to the table as well. And it's not just an IT discussion. It's a legal discussion, right >> Right. >> We're having those legal teams come back to us and say, "Well, what does this mean?" Right? Where is the data going to live? And is it going to fit within our retention models and all of the things that we have in place today? >> Alright, good. Okay, we got to leave it there. But Axel, I'll give you the last word. >> The last word? Pure Accelerate. Give me the bumper sticker. >> So we are really excited to have, actually, a confirmation from a customer side to see that the strategy and the direction that we're going here at Pure is exactly on par with what customers are actually demanding and what they want when it comes to SAP or mission-critical workloads. So I'm really glad that we're hearing this now from a customer and get the confirmation from a customer. So I'm just really super duper excited to have Todd here with us to hear from, directly from a customer. >> Excellent. Alright, Cloud First. The CUBE, we hope you're first, we're first on your playlist. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (upbeat percussion music)