>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this breaking analysis. I'm here with Erik Bradley, who's the managing director of ETR and runs their VENN program. Erik, good to see you. >> Very nice to see you too, Dave. Hope you're doing well. >> Yeah, I'm doing okay, hanging in there. You know, you guys in New York are fighting the battle, looks like we're making some progress here, so all the best to you and your family and the wider community. I'm really excited to have you on today because I had the pleasure of sitting in on a CIO/CISO panel last week and we're going to explain sort of what that's all about but one of the things that ETR does that I really like is they go deeper with anecdotal information, and it's almost like in depth interviews in these round tables. So they compliment their quarterly surveys and their other drilldown surveys with other anecdotal information from people in their communities, so it's a tried and true survey practice that adds some color to the data set. So guys, if you'd bring up the agenda, I want to share with the audience what we're going to talk about today. So, we'll talk a little bit about, you know, we just did intros. I wanted to ask Erik what ETR VENN is and then we will go through some of the guests, but if we go back to Erik, explain a little bit about VENN and the whole process, and how you guys do that? >> Yes, sure we should hire you for marketing, you just did a great job actually describing that, but about three years ago, what we decided was, ETR does an amazing job collecting the data. It can tell you what's happening, who it's happening to, and when it's happening, but it can't always tell you why it's happening. So leveraging a lot of my background in 20 plus years in journalism and the institution of Wall Street research, we decided to take the ETR community, the people that actually take the surveys and start doing interviews with them, and start doing events with them. And in enable to doing that, we're basically just trying to complement the survey findings and the data. So what we always say is that ETR will give you the quantitative answer and VENN will give you the qualitative answer. >> Now guys, let's bring up the agenda slide again, let's take a look at the folks that participated in the round table, now, for ETR's clients, they actually know the names and the titles and well the company that these guys work for. We've anonymized it for the public, but you had a CIO of a global auto supplier, a CISO of a diversified holdings firm who actually had some hospitality exposure, but also some government contract manufacturing exposure, a chief architect of a software ISV, and a VP and CISO of a global hospitality resort chain. So you had three out of the four, Erik were really in industries that are getting hit hard, obviously you know the software company, may be a little bit better but, maybe you could add some color to that? >> Well actually the software company unfortunately was getting hit hard as well because they're a software ISV that actually plays into the manufacturing space as well so this particular panel of CIOs and CISOs were actually in a very hard hit industries and are going to make sure we do two more follow ups with different industry verticals to make sure we're getting a little bit of a wider berth and collect all of that information in a better way. But coming back to this particular call the whole reason we did this and as you know you spoke to my colleague and friend Sagar Kadakia who is the director of research for ETR. And we were nimble enough to actually change our survey while it was in the field to start collecting data on what the real time impact was on the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to take that information, extrapolate it and then say, okay, let's start reaching out to these people and dig deeper, find out why it's happening and even more so is it permanent? And which vendors are going to win and which vendors might lose from it? So that was the whole reason we set up a series of calls, we've only conducted one so far, we have another one this coming Tuesday as well with four entirely new panelists that are going to be from different industry verticals 'cause as you astutely pointed out, these verticals were very hard hit and not all of them are as hard as others, so it's important to get a wider cross-section. >> So guys, let's take a look at some of the budget impacts, the anecdotal sort of evidence that we gathered here, so let me just scan through it and then Erik, I'll ask you to comment. So, I mean like Erik said, some hard hit industries. All major projects, anything sort of next-gen have been essentially shelved, that was the ISV and then another one we cut at least 70% of the big projects moving forward, he mentioned ServiceNow actually called him out, but ServiceNow is a SaaS company, probably you know weather the storm here, but he did say, we've put that on hold. The best comment you know As-a-Service has Saved our Saas, (laughs) that one's great. And then we're going to get into some of the networking commentary, some really interesting things about how to support the work from home, you know we're kind of shifting from a hardened top into users, remote workers and then a lot of commentary on security, so you know that's sort of a high level scan and there's just so much information here, Erik but maybe you could sort of summarize on some of those, that commentary? >> Yeah, we should definitely dig in to each of those sectors a little more, but to summarize what we're seeing here was the real winners and losers are clear. Not everyone was prepared to have a work from home strategy. Not everyone was prepared to send their workers out, their VPN didn't have enough bandwidth so there was a real quick uptake in spending, but longer term we're starting to see that these changes will become more permeant. So the real winners and losers right now, we're going to see on the losers side traditional networking, the MPLS networking is in a lot of trouble according to all the data and the commentary that we're seeing, it's expensive, it's difficult to ramp up bandwidth as quickly as you need and it doesn't support remote. So we're seeing that lose out and the winners there are in the SD-WAN space, it's going to be impossible to ignore that going forward and some of our CIO and even CISO panelists said that change will be permanent. Also we're seeing at the same time, what they were calling a run SaaS and cloud, now we know these trends obviously were already happening but they're being exacerbated, they're happening even more quickly and more strong and I don't see that changing any time soon. That of course is at the expense of data centers, whether it be your own or hosted. Which has huge ramifications on on-prem hardware, even the firewall providers. So what we're seeing here is obviously we know things are going to be impacted by this situation, we didn't necessarily expect all of our community members and IT decision makers to talk about them being possibly permanent, so that on a high level was something that was extremely interesting. And the last one that I would bring up is that as we make this shift towards working from home, towards remote access, you also have to align yourself with the security that can support that. And one of the things that we're seeing in our data side on ETR, is a widening bifurcation between the next-gen security vendors and the more traditional security or the legacy security players, that bifurcation just keeps getting wider and wider and this situation could be the last straw. >> So I want to follow up on a couple of those things, you talked about sort of the network shift and toward SD-WAN, what people have described to me is that they've got a hardened top, it's a hierarchal network, it's very well understood, and it's safe right, and now all of a sudden you got all these remote workers and so you've got to completely sort of rethink your whole network architecture, the other thing I want to grill into is your cloud commentary. There's a comment that I saw Erik, that really stood out, one of the folks said, I would like to see the data centers be completely deleted, if you will or closed down, I mean I think we're going to see you know, a lot more of this, obviously. Not only from the standpoint of, and you heard this a lot the kind of pay by the drink, but just generally getting rid of all that sort of so called non-differentiated heavy lifting as we often hear about. >> That is a extreme comment, I don't think everyone feels that way, but yes, the comment was made and we've heard that comment from other people as you and I both know the larger the enterprise the harder that is to go completely SaaS, but yeah, when a situation like this happens and seeing the inflexibility of their on-prem infrastructure, yes it becomes something that really has to be addressed and it can become a permanent change, I was also shocked about that comment. That gentleman also stated that his executives outside of the IT area, the CEO, the CFO had never ever, ever wanted to discuss cloud, they did not want to discuss work from home, they did not want to discuss remote access. He said that conversation has changed immediately and to the credit of the actual IT companies out there, the technology companies, they're doing everything they can with this opportunity to make that happen. >> Yeah and so, right, I mean the whole work from home conversation that's to your point earlier, Erik, big chunks of COVID, you know the post COVID world are going to remain permanent, guys bring up the SaaS slide if you will, the SaaS commentary "As-a-Service-Saved our SaaS" as the wittiest quip award according to ETR, you know but you had, it was very interesting to hear folks, in fact I think somebody even called out, hey you know we expected Oracle to be auditing us but they're actually being very supportive as is IBM, SalesForce was an interesting comment Erik, one of the folks said they would share accounts you know on-prem but when they all do the work from home they had to actually buy some more. You also got Cisco with big props, Microsoft was called out, a lot of organizations actually allowing them to defer payments, so the SaaS vendors actually got very high marks, didn't they? >> They really did and even I wrote that summary and it was difficult to write that about Oracle because we all know that they're infamous for auditing their own customers in 2009, right after we we came out of the financial crisis. They have notoriously been a bad act, I don't know if they found religion and they decided to be nice to their customers, but every single person mentioned them as one of the vendors that was actually helping. That was very shocking. And then we all know that when bad situations happen people become opportunistic and right now it's really seeming that the SaaS vendors understand that they need a longterm relationship with these customers and they're being altruistic instead which is really nice to see. >> Yeah, I think the, I think anybody with a cloud realizes that hey, we have an opportunity here, the lifetime value of that customer whereas maybe in 2009 when Oracle didn't have a cloud they had to get people in a headlock to try to preserve their you know income statement. If we, let's go to the networking drilldown guys, that next slide, because Fortinet, some of the things that we've been reporting on is the sort of divergence in valuations between Fortinet and Palo Alto before this whole thing hit. Fortinet has done a really good job with it's cloud offerings, Palo Alto struggled a little bit with trying to figure out the sales compensation, is maybe a little bit behind, although both companies got strong props and I've talked to a number of customers and Palo Alto's going to be in the mix, but Fortinet from a cloud standpoint seems to be doing quite well, obviously networking, you know Cisco is the big gorilla there, but so and we also got call outs from guys like Trend Micro, which was interesting from some of the folks so your thoughts on this Erik? >> Yeah, I'll start in the networking side because this is something that I really, I've dug into quite amount in not only this panel but a lot of interviews and it really seems as if as networking refresh starts to come up and it's coming up with a lot of large importers, when your network refresh comes up, people are going to do an RFP for SD-WAN. They are sick and tired of paying MPLS network vendors and they really want to look at something else. That was even prior to this situation. Now what we're hearing is this is a permanent change, I particularly had one person say, I wanted to find this quote real quickly if I can, but basically they were basically saying that from a permanency perspective, the freedom from MPLS will reduce our network spend by over half, while more than doubling or tripling our bandwidth. You can't ignore that, you're going to save me money and triple my bandwidth. And hey, by the way, my refresh is due, it's something that's coming and it's going to happen. And yes you mentioned a few, right, there's Viptela, there's VeloCloud, there's some big players like Cisco. But Palo Alto just acquired CloudGenix in the midst of all of this. They just went and got an SD-WAN player themselves and they just keep acquiring a portfolio to shift from their on-prem to next-gen. It's going to take some time, 'cause 70% plus of their revenue is still on-prem hardware, but I do believe that their portfolio that they're creating is the way the world is moving and that's just one comment on the traditional networking versus the next-gen SD-WAN. >> And the customers have indicated you know it's not easy just to get off of their MPLS networks. I mean it takes time, it's like slowly pulling off the bandaid, but like many things COVID-19 is sort of accelerating that, we haven't talked about digital transformation, that came up. As a maybe more strategic initiative, but one that you know very clearly has legs. >> You know David, it's very simple, you just said it, people, when things are going well and they're comfortable they don't change and that's the same for an enterprise or a company, hey everything's great, our revenue's fine, why would we do this? We'll worry about that next year. Then something like this happens and you realize wow, we've been dragging our feet. That digital transformation that we've been talking about and we've been a little bit slow to accept, we need to accept it, we need to move now. And yes, it was another one of the major themes and it sounds silly for researchers like you and I, because we know this is a theme, we know cloud adoption is there, we know digital transformation is there, but there are still a lot of people that haven't moved as quickly as they should and this is going to be that final catalyst to get them there without a doubt. Quickly on your point of Fortinet, I was actually very impressed with the commentary that came from that because Fortinet is sometimes one of those names that you think of that maybe plays in a smaller pool or isn't as big as some of the 800 pound gorillas out there, but in other interviews besides this I heard the phrase point of 40 everything, so through our R&D and through acquisitions, Fortinet has really expanded their portfolio. And right now is their time to shine because when you have smaller satellite you know offices and branches that you need to connect, they're really, really good at it. And you don't always want to call a Palo Alto and pay that price, when you have smaller branch offices and I actually I was glad you brought up Fortinet because it's not a name that we get to herald that often and it was deserving from this panel. >> Yeah and you know companies that can secure gateways, secure endpoints are obviously going to have momentum, Zscaler came up, you know I think that's and I tell you looking at I've done a couple of breaking analysis on security, and Fortinet has been strong in two dimensions, you know ETR as our audience is I think getting to know, we really look at two key metrics, one is a net score which is a measure of spending momentum and the other is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness, and companies like Fortinet in security, you know show up on both of those dimensions so it's notable. >> Yes, it certainly is, it is and I'm glad you brought up Zscaler too, very recently by strong request we did a very in depth research on Zscaler versus Palo Alto Prisma access. And they were very interested and this was before all this happened. You know does Palo Alto have a chance of catching up, taking share from Zscaler? And I've had the pleasure myself personally hosting Jay, the CEO of Zscaler at an event in New York City. And I have nothing but incredible respect for the company. But what we found out through this research is Zscaler at the moment their technology is still ahead according to their answers there is no doubt, however there doesn't seem to be any real secret sauce that will stop Palo Alto from catching up. So we do believe that parody of a feature set will shrink over time and then it'll come down to Palo Alto who obviously has a wider end-user interface. Now, what's happening today might change that because if I had to make a decision right now for my company on secure web gateway, I'm still probably going to got to Zscaler, it's the name. If I had to choose that in a year from now, Palo Alto might have had a better chance, so in this panel as you brought up, Zscaler was mentioned numerous times as just the wave of the future along with CASB Brokers, right, whether you're talking about a Netskope or Forcepoint, all those people that also play in the CASB space, to secure your access, zero trust is no longer a marketing hype term, it is real and it is becoming more real by the week. >> And so I want to kind of end on one of the other comments that really struck me because we're constantly talking about okay, do you go with a portfolio of a suite of services or do you go with best of breed, what about startups? Are startups more risky in a crisis like this? And one of your panelists, I just loved his comment, he said, one of the things that I've always done, he said, you always hear about the guy, oh we're going to to the garden, we're going to check out the magic water, we'll pick out three guys in the upper right hand corner and test them out, he says, one of the things that I've always liked to do, is I'll pick two from the upper right, and I'll take one from the lower left, one of the emerging techs and I'll give them a shot, they won't win every time but then he called out FireEye as one of the organizations that he found early that gave them competitive advantage. >> Right. >> Love that comment. >> It's a great comment and honestly if you're in charge of procurement, you'd be stupid not to do that. Not only just to see what the technology is, but now I can play you off the big guys because I have negotiation leverage and I can say, oh well I can always just take their contract. So it's silly not to do it from a business perspective, but from a technology perspective what we kept hearing from these people with the smaller vendors and my partner Peter Steube, my colleague and I we did the host together, we asked this question, really believing that the financial insecurity of the moment in the times would make smaller vendors not viable. We heard the exact opposite, what our panelists said was no, I'd be happy to work with a smaller vendor right now because they're going to give me pricing flexibility, they're going to work with me right now, I don't need to pay them upfront because we're seeing a permanent shift from CAPEX to OPEX and the smaller vendors are willing to work with me and I can pay them later. So we were actually surprised to hear that and glad to hear it because to connect to your other point, the other person who was talking about security in a platform approach versus best of breed, he said listen, platform approaches you're already with the vendor you can bundle a little bit, but the problem is if you're just going to acquire a new technology every time there's a new threat, the bad guys are just going to switch the threat and you can't acquire indefinitely so therefore best of breed with security will always beat platform and that's kind of a message to Palo Alto and Cisco in my opinion because they seem to be the ones fighting that out, even Microsoft now trying to say that they're a platform approach in security. >> Wow and it says to me the security business is going to as we predicted is going to stay fragmented because you're still going to get that best of breed, you know just like cloud is going to be fragmented and it's you know multiple vendors, ever since I've been in this business people are trying to consolidate the number of vendors but technology moves so quickly, it gives competitive advantage, Erik, awesome thank you so much for joining us, I'm looking forward to next Tuesday with the next VENN and love to have you back and talk about it any time, you're a great guest, thanks so much. >> Certainly! I'll do my best to get a better AV connection the next time guys, I apologize for that, but it was great talking to you guys. >> Hey, we're all learning you know, so thank you everybody for watching, this Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, everybody. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and I've been running the last several weeks a CXO series, where I've talked to CEOs, CIOs, CISOs, to really try to understand the impact of COVID-19. As you know, we've really dug into the budget outlook, et cetera. Well, Cathy Southwick is here. She's a CUBE alum and the CIO of Pure Storage. Cathy, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the CUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to see you again, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So my first question to leaders is, when you started to get visibility that there was going to be this crisis, what was your first move? >> The first move for probably most organizations and especially for ours was to really assess current state of our organization. And how we support the business, so we went into a lot of pre planning and a lot of looking out and saying if things were to happen in a quarter and two quarters, three quarters what would we need to be prepared for? So we spend a lot of time going and looking at our BCP our DR plans and say what would we need to execute on? We actually started similar time that you met with Mike Fitzgerald last week. My supply chain actually started pulling triggers to get ourselves prepared and look across both our application side as how we evaluate availability, our partners that we use both, on prem and off-Prem. And we started to also look at just kind of the current state of how our employees currently work. And we do have a fair amount of our employees who are very productive and successful working remote. So we knew we need to make sure that we continue to provide that level of service across the board. There was really a lot of pre planning a lot of looking at what are we currently doing. And what do we need to make sure that we're prepared for in the unknown that we were all facing >> And I want to ask you about the kind of work from home piece of that. But before I do, help us understand, you're right, I did talk to Mike Fitzgerald. And it sounded like you guys maybe had an early warning system because you obviously have a supply chain, you're sourcing components from all over the world. Do you feel like you had kind of an early warning to this and maybe more than many organizations? >> I think we probably have an equivalent to others. I think the difference was that we are a small nimble organization our IT is very lean. And we immediately move towards kind of executing plan so there isn't a lot of approval cycles or red tape to go through. We're really empowered at the organization level to make the decisions that we think are necessary to help our business be successful. So that was really the the forefront was, see what needs to happen and then actually start doing. so don't just think about it, plan, do the analysis over and over, but actually start executing. And I think you would have seen that across all of Pure. that we immediately started mobilizing teams, our supply chain, both from an internal What do we consume, whether it's laptops, devices for employees, et cetera. Or it was the products that we need to provide our customers and what they need to do. So I think it has to do with more of how our company culture is and how we operate very much you make it happen for our customers. And that means that all of us need to be constantly prepared for what needs to happen in within our respective teams to support our customers. So I want to break this talk down to people, process, and tech. We always talk about the big three. Let's start with the people. I mean, obviously your first concern was the health and well being and safety of your people. But as Sanjay Gupta told me, once we figured that out, it's like, get to work, you know, we got to be productive. So maybe talking about the people situation, California was kind of hit early. But I imagine you've got a remote workforce as well. Paint a picture of the people resource if you would. >> That's a great point that Sanjay made. You're absolutely right. The people was it's going to be look at this is its people the safety and health, and then, what do we have to do to provide the necessary tools for our customers. And so we immediately from the employee lens, we immediately start doing things like interactions with our employees. I'll say on a very regular basis. So we do a daily set up and IT at the leadership level, that each of the organizations, they're also holding those. And a big part of that is not you know, how's your work going? It's, you know, how are you doing? How's your family doing? How are the things that you need to have in your own personal space to be able to be productive. Because if you don't have those things, then people actually can't do the work. So try to be very flexible, and we've got people who are working different shifts, meaning that they normally will be in the office Monday through Friday, but they're trying to balance those home things with homeschooling children now, and all those different aspects. So it's really been about, take care of the people first we've done some fun things like, doing little exercises where we have a challenge every day. Some type of challenge that we're asking our employees to do just to kind of keep the health and mind part of it healthy and then go right into the work. And you're right. You going to get to that, okay. I think our employees have settled down to this, whatever this new norm is. And people are not becoming very focused on how do I make sure I hit my deliverables. They're so focused on helping our business that they are, it's literally about, we actually had to tell some people to kind of back off, take some time off, because 24/7 became 24/7 for everyone instead of having some rotations because people just didn't want others to have to wait for responses. >> Right Cathy, well let's turn to the next P, which is the process. So what kind of changes did you have to make in order to support this whole work from home notion? >> You know, we're we're very fortunate, as I had mentioned earlier, we already have a fair amount of our employees that were very successful working remote. So we had already the tools in place, the capabilities in place, everything from, what we really did was a lot of validation of what we had was it going to really be sufficient. So things like checking, do we have the right VPN, do we have enough network bandwidth connections, et cetera. So for the most part, all of that has worked pretty well knock on wood, but it's gone pretty well. And we've had some challenges with some of the new hires coming in, because we still are onboarding new employees. And there are some locations around the world where there are some logistical challenges of going to certain countries. But other than that, we've actually, the plans, a lot of the planning the team had done has really paid off for them as we move forward. So we've been very successful from that perspective. >> And I definitely want to ask you about the technology but before I do, I want to talk about the macros. So we've been reporting that when we came into this year, the consensus for IT spending was a plus 4%. Through COVID and other research and surveys that we've done with our data partner ETR, we've kind of settled in at a negative 4% for the year. which would be a lot worse were it not for the work from home offset. And about 20% of the organizations that we talked to said they're increasing spending about 35% said Hey, no change. And then of course, there are a lot of industries, airlines, others affected by supply chains, et cetera, which are way way down the hospitality, et cetera. Now, that's the macro. Pure is not a bellwether for the macro because you guys are a high growth company. But, what's your budget situation kind of coming into the year and has there been any change? >> I feel very fortunate. We've been very supported from our business. We actually made some changes to I'll say double down on some investments in IT this year. So our budget coming into this year was already increased. And that was to deal with just opportunities that we saw are better aligned with the business, Better strategic partnerships in different areas of our business, how we support them from the customer side. And then also how do we want to think about areas of like our employee experience. So we actually have made this an investment year for IT. Right now, we're still on track for that. I would say that we've done a little bit of some re-prioritization of some initiatives that we wanted to do versus things that we're now wanting to make sure we care for. So think about like collaboration tools, do we want to expand any of that portfolio that we currently have? So it's more of, I feel very fortunate that we came in pretty strong, and we're still at that point. But we are doing some, I'll call, reassessing some of our priorities, say, are these the right things we should still continue to do? Or should we alter some of that. So at this point, that's what we're looking at. >> Yeah, I've talked to a number of technology leaders that have said, Look, this is a sort of, shift in priorities as you were mentioning. For instance, one said yesterday that we had this kind of hard network And now we've got this distributed workforce. So we're really kind of rethinking our network priorities. We've got to secure those remote workers. It's not just video conferencing tools. It's our VPN. It's security. It's our network bandwidth, it's maybe things like VDI, et cetera. Have you had to shuffle some of your priorities? >> So I would say the ours have been more of augmenting capabilities. So we've had a pretty successful strategy around what we're doing on the remote workers and how we secure them et cetera. We are absolutely like everybody else. I participate in several CIO forums, we talked about this. Do we need to go back and revalidate some of the decisions that you might have made in the past? And so we're doing that from ensuring that we have the right security around our enterprise. But the other is that it's also looking at are there things that we could do that would help us from productivity capabilities. And those are things like we have some tools that allow us to do Like you said video conferencing. But they're also, do you want to have capabilities to actually do white boarding or sessions that allow you to feel like you're in the room with someone. So looking at some of those new opportunities. >> So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that some of your suppliers are doing. Obviously, Pure is a big supplier of yours. I presume they're treating you like gold. But I've had some CIOs that I've talked to say that they really were overwhelmed and pleased with the way in which their vendor partners have treated them. Maybe deferring payments for them and some of these hard hit industries and the like. What is the relationship in with your providers? >> I would characterize it very similar. We've had great partnerships with many of our major suppliers of technology. And for both SaaS providers as well as some of the other areas that we work with. And I would say that everyone has made the extra effort to either reach out, whether it's at the CEO level, it's at, different layers within their supply chain. A lot of communication we do, We've had a lot of communication from the, I'll say, the supplier community, which has been really great and very responsive. So when we are seeing issues or have questions, it's not I will get back to you at some time, or you're not important. It's about what we'll do to help you. So I think we're seeing similar to what you've heard from others. We're experiencing that great kind of ecosystem that says, hey, we got to make sure everyone is successful not just an individual company. So that's been the experience we've had as well. It's been really nice to see it. >> Tn that CIO and CISO Roundtable that I mentioned from ETR. We had thought that, especially in some of the harder hit industries that they'd be less likely or more reticent to work with startups, but it was just the opposite. In fact, one individual said, you know, you hear, the other guy says, hey, I picked three from the upper right in the Magic Quadrant, I vet them. He said, I always pick two from the upper right, and then one from the lower left. Because I'm trying to find that next diamond in the rough. And he mentioned a couple of success stories. They don't all pan out. But, they want to try new things, and get some competitive advantage. What's your take? I mean, you guys were in this position. That the challenge or the disrupter. But what's your take on working with startups in these times of crisis? >> I think it's important to, because they're seeing and they're nimble. And so I think that was one of the benefits that Pure had. We're very nimble, very quick to make decisions. You're hyper focused on the customer. And I know that a lot of companies will comment that they're very focused on their customer first, but coming into Pure you see it firsthand. And so you often see that from startups, they're very curious on what problem are you trying to solve? So they're not necessarily trying to sell you a widget of some sort. They're really trying to solve a business issue that you're facing. So I would tell you that we've had success as well over the years. Pure has worked with startups over the years. We participate with different communities whether they're the VC community who's doing round tables and discussions around new startups and the opportunities that they're bringing. Will they solve problems? And I would tend to agree. I think you need to have something that, you know, understand your business enough that can help you to scale. Because as a company like Pure, we're continuing to grow. You got to able to scale your business. And so some startups might not have some of those capabilities. But there's actually quite a few that, they can solve the problems a different way. And so, scale looks different than maybe what a traditional way to approach it. So, I think it's really important to keep them in the mix. And to actually just keep anyone who's trying to solve problems. Because the if you aren't looking at it from the lens of like, what are we trying to do to support our business. And a lot of the CIOs were in the same boat. You're trying to figure out how do I help the business be faster, better, et cetera. You're stuck with the status quo, and none of us want to be in that position. And none of our businesses can actually afford that either. >> But it sounds like your business continuance, business resilience, well, beyond disaster recovery, it sounds like you are in pretty good shape. But I'll ask you, what do you feel as though your biggest challenge has been since COVID-19 hit? >> It's funny, I thought, I've been thinking a lot about this. Because we're always trying to figure like, how do we do this better next time? What's that look like? So certainly, I think it's the education part with our employee community. We've spent an enormous amount of time with our HR partners on doing or best practice sessions? How do you use this? What's the best way to do this way? So I think that our key learning is that most users only touch the surface of capabilities in any of the tools that you provide. Whether it's a laptop, to their home networks, to what they're doing on software tools, collaboration tools. and everyone kind of just does enough to get themself started. But when you move into an environment where we're all remote, you have to rely on all those tools so much more. So I found it to be that we spend more time on what I'll call the education side, and the awareness side we are still running like some of our normal campaigns from like security awareness. So those things can't stop. But I found that we've spent more in that lane, than we have on, I'll say, dealing with, or challenge with some of the just technical capabilities to keep our teams productive. So it's been more of the people side, when you asked the question earlier. More of the people side that we've been focused on. >> So technology infrastructure, pretty solid, It's really sort of educating people. I always said bad user behavior prompts good security every time. But I'll follow up with somebody who was joking the other day that work from home infrastructure is the new hand sanitizer and you can't get a lot of it. But no, no challenges with securing laptops, or other sort of components that you might need. >> No. I think in some of our initiatives we're still very focused on, I would say some of the areas that we're trying to get a little bit further on is what I'll call complete touchless remote capabilities. So similar to like what our customers expect of Pure, where you want, remote installs, you want to be able to do it touchless, you don't want people coming in. It's the same thing in the IT space. So we're trying to look at can we adopt some of what we're doing in the what I'd call the market side? Can we do more of that with our employee base? And I think that's where we're going to spend more of our time. Do we need to expand the collaboration capabilities? And then do we need to expand more of our capabilities on the remote side when people are not physically in the office or can't come into an office very quickly. What can we do to be more remote assist for those users? And we've spent a fair amount on that. But I would call it more of the basic capabilities. I think we need to look at, do we expand and really kind of to strengthen some of what we've done today. >> I mean, I got to say, I'm not super surprised about Your posture here. I mean Pure, you don't have a lot of legacy baggage. You've always been a very fast moving company kind of forward thinking. But I wonder if we could just ask you generally. kind of my last question here is when you think about Pure, but specifically, but also your peers? What portions of kind of post COVID-19? Do you think you're going to be permanent You know, a lot of people we're kind of on the wrong side of history in terms of work from home, forcing people to the create the beehive. Understandably, but that obviously, is going to change the whole use of collaborations. What's your sense of the top things that might remain permanent in a post COVID world? >> That's a great question. Actually one of the top questions that we're trying to grapple with right now is, What does reintegration look like? And what do you do both from a technical perspective, the people perspective and what are we going to do? So? I would say that there's still a lot of questions that are unanswered right now. I think that like all companies we're open for business right now. We're trying to understand what's happening from government controls, et cetera. And what will those need at the state, country level, et cetera,, for what we would have to differ with our employees. And I would tell you that our position as a company has been very much that we're going to have to continue to expand how we thought about, the beehive concept versus do we have more work from home. I think you will see that as a general you'll see more work from home across the board. And I also think that we'll look for some creative things that we've never done as companies before, whether that is staggering times when people are in the office. While we kind of do that today, just based on employee needs. We've got people who come in at six in the morning. we have people who come in at 10 or 11 in the morning. so, I think that we might have to be a little bit more prescribed about so many people in the office at certain times. So, I think it's going to be a combination of, I think the technical will all continue to work that. I think the people side of reintegration is going to be the how do we want to balance the working from home or the remote working? And then do we have more staggered schedules? All those things are going to be I think the bigger challenges for us to address. As just kind of as the economy in general. >> Okay, it's been great having you on, as you know, the cube we love face to face, but this is safe to safe. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing your perspectives. Great stuff. >> Great. It's great to see you Dave. >> All right, and stay safe. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the cube, and the cube conversation. We'll see you next time. (music playing)