(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. It's the cube live at VMware Explorer, 2022. We're at Mascone center and lovely, beautiful San Francisco. Dave Volante is with me, Lisa Martin. Beautiful weather here today. >>It is beautiful. I couldn't have missed this one because you know, the orange and the pure and VA right. Are history together. I had a, I had a switch sets. You >>Did. You were gonna have FOMO without a guest. Who's back. One of our longtime alumni V Stewart, VP of global technology alliances partners at pure storage one. It's great to have you back on the program, seeing you in 3d >>It's. It's so great to be here and we get a guest interviewer. So this >>Is >>Fantastic. Fly by. Fantastic. >>So talk to us, what's going on at pure. It's been a while since we had a chance to talk, >>Right. Well, well, besides the fact that it's great to see in person and to be back at a conference and see all of our customers, partners and prospects, you know, pure storage has just been on a tear just for your audience. Many, those who don't follow pure, right? We finished our last year with our Q4 being 41% year over year growth. And in the year, just under 2.2 billion, and then we come outta the gates this year, close our Q1 at 50% year over year, quarter quarterly growth. Have you ever seen a storage company or an infrastructure partner at 2 billion grow at that rate? >>Well, the thing was, was striking was that the acceleration of growth, because, you know, I mean, COVID, there were supply chain issues and you know, you saw that. And then, and we've seen this before at cloud companies, we see actually AWS as accelerated growth. So this is my premise here is you guys are actually becoming a cloud-like company building on top of, of infrastructure going from on-prem to cloud. But we're gonna talk about that. >>This is very much that super cloud premise. Well, >>It is. And, and, but I think it's it's one of the characteristics is you can actually, it, you know, we used to see companies, they go, they'd come out of escape velocity, and then they'd they'd growth would slow. I used to be at IDC. We'd see it. We'd see it. Okay. Down then it'd be single digits. You guys are seeing the opposite. >>It's it's not just our bookings. And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't remind your audience that our second quarter earnings call is tomorrow. So we'll see how this philosophy and momentum keeps going. See, right. But besides the growth, right? All the external metrics around our business are increasing as well. So our net promoter score increased right at 85.2. We are the gold standard, not just in storage in infrastructure period. Like there's no one close to us, >>85. I mean, that's like, that's a, like apple, >>It's higher than apple than apple. It's apple higher than Tesla. It's higher than AWS shopping. And if you look in like our review of our products, flash rate is the leader in the gardener magic quadrant for, for storage array. It's been there for eight years. Port works is the leader in the GIGO OME radar for native Kubernetes storage three years in a row. Like just, it's great to be at a company that's hitting on all cylinders. You know, particularly at a time that's just got so much change going on in our >>Industry. Yeah. Tremendous amount of change. Talk about the, the VMware partnership from a momentum of velocity perspective what's going on there. And some of the things that you're accelerating. >>Absolutely. So VMware is, is the, the oldest or the longest tenured technology partner that we've had. I'm about to start my 10th year at pure storage. It feels like it was yesterday. When I joined, they were a, an Alliance partner before I joined. And so not to make that about me, but that's just like we built some of the key aspects around our first product, the flash array with VMware workloads in mind. And so we are a, a co-development partner. We've worked with them on a number of projects over years of, of late things that are top of mind is like the evolution of vials, the NV support for NVMe over fabric storage, more recently SRM support for automating Dr. With Viv a deployments, you know, and, and, and then our work around VMware ex extends to not just with VMware, they're really the catalyst for a lot of three way partnerships. So partnerships into our investments in data protection partners. Well, you gotta support V ADP for backing up the VMware space, our partnership within Nvidia, well, you gotta support NVA. I, so they can accelerate bringing those technologies into the enterprise. And so it's it, it's not just a, a, a, you know, unilateral partnership. It's a bidirectional piece because for a lot of customers, VMware's kind of like a touchpoint for managing the infrastructure. >>So how is that changing? Because you you've mentioned, you know, all the, the, the previous days, it was like, okay, let's get, make storage work. Let's do the integration. Let's do the hard work. It was kind of a race for the engineering teams to get there. All the storage companies would compete. And it was actually really good for the industry. Yeah, yeah. Right. Because it, it went from, you know, really complex, to much, much simpler. And now with the port works acquisition, it brings you closer to the whole DevOps scene. And you're seeing now VMware it's with its multi-cloud initiatives, really focusing on, you know, the applications and that, and that layer. So how does that dynamic evolve in terms of the partnership and, and where the focus is? >>So there's always in the last decade or so, right. There's always been some amount of overlap or competing with your partnerships, right. Something in their portfolios they're expanding maybe, or you expand you encroach on them. I think, I think two parts to how I would want to answer your question. The retrospective look V VMware is our number one ISV from a, a partner that we, we turn transactions with. The booking's growth that I shared with you, you could almost say is a direct reflection of how we're growing within that, that VMware marketplace. We are bringing a platform that I think customers feel services their workloads well today and gives them the flexibility of what might come in their cloud tomorrow. So you look at programs like our evergreen one subscription model, where you can deploy a consumption based subscription model. So very cloud-like only pay for what you use on-prem and turn that dial as you need to dial it into a, a cloud or, or multiple clouds. >>That's just one example. Looking forward, look, port works is probably the platform that VMware should have bought because when you look at today's story, right, when kit Culbert shared a, a cross cloud services, right, it was, it was the modern version of what VMware used to say, which was, here's a software defined data center. We're gonna standardize all your dissimilar hardware, another saying software defined management to standardize all your dissimilar clouds. We do that for Kubernetes. We talk about accelerating customers' adoption of Kubernetes by, by allowing developers, just to turn on an enable features, be its security, backup high availability, but we don't do it mono in a, you know, in a, in a homogeneous environment, we allow customers to do it heterogeneously so I can deploy VMware Tansu and connect it to Amazon EKS. I can switch one of those over to red head OpenShift, non disruptively, if I need to. >>Right? So as customers are going on this journey, particularly the enterprise customers, and they're not sure where they're going, we're giving them a platform that standardizes where they want to go. On-prem in the cloud and anywhere in between. And what's really interesting is our latest feature within the port works portfolio is called port works data services, and allows customers to deploy databases on demand. Like, install it, download the binaries. You have a cus there, you got a database, you got a database. You want Cassandra, you want Mongo, right? Yeah. You know, and, and for a lot of enterprise customers, who've kind of not, not know where to don't know where to start with port works. We found that to be a great place where they're like, I have this need side of my infrastructure. You can help me reduce cost time. Right. And deliver databases to teams. And that's how they kick off their Tansu journey. For example. >>It's interesting. So port works was the enabler you mentioned maybe VMware should above. Of course they had to get the value out of, out of pivotal. >>Understood. >>So, okay. Okay. So that, so how subsequent to the port works acquisition, how has it changed the way that you guys think about storage and how your customers are actually deploying and managing storage? >>Sure. So you touched base earlier on what was really great about the cloud and VMware was this evolution of simplifying storage technologies, usually operational functions, right? Making things simpler, more API driven, right. So they could be automated. I think what we're seeing customers do to today is first off, there's a tremendous rise in everyone wanting to do every customer, not every customer, a large portion of the customer bases, wanting to acquire technology on as OPEX. And it, I think it's really driven by like eliminate technical debt. I sign a short term agreement, our short, our shortest commitment's nine months. If we don't deliver around what we say, you walk away from us in nine months. Like you, you couldn't do that historically. Furthermore, I think customers are looking for the flexibility for our subscriptions, you know, more from between on-prem and cloud, as I shared earlier, is, is been a, a, a big driver in that space. >>And, and lastly, I would, would probably touch on our environmental and sustainability efforts. You saw this morning, Ragu in the keynote touch on what was it? Zero carbon consumption initiative, or ZCI my apologies to the veer folks. If I missed VO, you know, we've had, we've had sustainability into our products since day one. I don't know if you saw our inaugural ESG report that came out about 60 days ago, but the bottom line is, is, is our portfolio reduces the, the power directly consumed by storage race by up to 80%. And another aspect to look at is that 97% of all of the products that we sold in the last six years are still in the market today. They're not being put into, you know, into, to recycle bins and whatnot, pure storage's goal by the end of this decade is to further drive the efficiency of our platforms by another 66%. And so, you know, it's an ambitious goal, but we believe it's >>Important. Yeah. I was at HQ earlier this month, so I actually did see it. So, >>Yeah. And where is sustainability from a differentiation perspective, but also from a customer requirements perspective, I'm talking to a lot of customers that are putting that requirement when they're doing RFPs and whatnot on the vendors. >>I think we would like to all, and this is a free form VO comment here. So my apologies, but I think we'd all like to, to believe that we can reduce the energy consumption in the planet through these efforts. And in some ways maybe we can, what I fear in the technology space that I think we've all and, and many of your viewers have seen is there's always more tomorrow, right? There's more apps, more vendors, more offerings, more, more, more data to store. And so I think it's really just an imperative is you've gotta continue to be able to provide more services or store more data in this in yesterday's footprint tomorrow. A and part of the way they get to is through a sustainability effort, whether it's in chip design, you know, storage technologies, et cetera. And, and unfortunately it's, it's, it's something that organizations need to adopt today. And, and we've had a number of wins where customers have said, I thought I had to evacuate this data center. Your technology comes in and now it buys me more years of time in this in infrastructure. And so it can be very strategic to a lot of vendors who think their only option is like data center evacuation. >>So I don't want to, I, I don't wanna set you up, but I do want to have the super cloud conversation. And so let's go, and you, can you, you been around a long time, your, your technical, or you're more technical than I am, so we can at least sort of try to figure it out together when I first saw you guys. I think Lisa, so you and I were at, was it, when did you announce a block storage for AWS? The, was that 2019 >>Cloud block store? I believe block four years >>Ago. Okay. So 20 18, 20 18, 20 18. Okay. So we were there at, at accelerate at accelerate and I said, oh, that's interesting. So basically if I, if I go back there, it was, it was a hybrid model. You, you connecting your on-prem, you were, you were using, I think, priority E C two, you know, infrastructure to get high performance and connecting the two. And it was a singular experience yeah. Between on-prem and AWS in a pure customer saw pure. Right. Okay. So that was the first time I started to think about Supercloud. I mean, I think thought about it in different forms years ago, but that was the first actual instantiation. So my, my I'm interested in how that's evolved, how it's evolving, how it's going across clouds. Can you talk just conceptually about how that architecture is, is morphing? >>Sure. I just to set the expectations appropriately, right? We've got, we've got a lot of engineering work that that's going on right now. There's a bunch of stuff that I would love to share with you that I feel is right around the corner. And so hopefully we'll get across the line where we're at today, where we're at today. So the connective DNA of, of flash array, OnPrem cloud block store in the cloud, we can set up for, for, you know, what we call active. Dr. So, so again, customers are looking at these arrays is a, is a, is a pair that allows workloads to be put into the, put into the cloud or, or transferred between the cloud. That's kind of like your basic building, you know, blocking tackling 1 0 1. Like what do I do for Dr. Example, right? Or, or gimme an easy button to, to evacuate a data center where we've seen a, a lot of growth is around cloud block store and cloud block store really was released as like a software version of our hardware, Ray on-prem and it's been, and, and it hasn't been making the news, but it's been continually evolving. >>And so today the way you would look at cloud block store is, is really bringing enterprise data services to like EBS for, for AWS customers or to like, you know, is Azure premium disc for Azure users. And what do I mean by enterprise data services? It's, it's the, the, the way that large scale applications are managed, on-prem not just their performance and their avail availability considerations. How do I stage the, the development team, the sandbox team before they patch? You know, what's my cyber protection, not just data protection, how, how am I protected from a cyber hack? We bring all those capabilities to those storage platforms. And the, the best result is because of our data reduction technologies, which was critical in reducing the cost of flash 10 years ago, reduces the cost of the cloud by 50% or more and pays for the, for pays more than pays for our software of cloud block store to enable these enterprise data services, to give all these rapid capabilities like instant database, clones, instant, you know, recovery from cyber tech, things of that nature. >>Do customers. We heard today that cloud chaos are, are customers saying so, okay, you can run an Azure, you can run an AWS fine. Are customers saying, Hey, we want to connect those islands. Are you hearing that from customers or is it still sort of still too early? >>I think it's still too early. It doesn't mean we don't have customers who are very much in let's buy, let me buy some software that will monitor the price of my cloud. And I might move stuff around, but there's also a cost to moving, right? The, the egress charges can add up, particularly if you're at scale. So I don't know how much I seen. And even through the cloud days, how much I saw the, the notion of workloads moving, like kind of in the early days, like VMO, we thought there might be like a, is there gonna be a fall of the moon computing, you know, surge here, like, you know, have your workload run where power costs are lower. We didn't really see that coming to fruition. So I think there is a, is a desire for customers to have standardization because they gain the benefits of that from an operational perspective. Right. Whether they put that in motion to move workloads back and forth. I think >>So let's say, let's say to be determined, let let's say they let's say they don't move them because your point you knows too expensive, but, but, but, but you just, I think touched on it is they do want some kind of standard in terms of the workflow. Yep. You you're saying you're, you're starting to see demand >>Standard operating practices. Okay. >>Yeah. SOPs. And if they're, if they're big into pure, why wouldn't they want that? If assuming they have, you know, multiple clouds, which a lot of customers do. >>I, I, I I'll assure with you one thing that the going back to like basic primitives and I touched it touched on it a minute ago with data reduction. You have customers look at their, their storage bills in the cloud and say, we're gonna reduce that by half or more. You have a conversation >>Because they can bring your stack yeah. Into the cloud. And it's got more maturity than what you'd find from a cloud company, cloud >>Vendor. Yeah. Just data. Reduction's not part of block storage today in the cloud. So we've got an advantage there that we, we bring to bear. Yeah. >>So here we are at, at VMware Explorer, the first one of this name, and I love the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe. Doesn't that sound like a Marvel movie. I feel like there should be superheroes walking around here. At some point >>We got Mr. Fantastic. Right here. We do >>Gone for, I dunno it >>Is. But a lot of, a lot of news this morning in the keynote, you were in the keynote, what are some of the things that you're hearing from VMware and what excites you about this continued evolution of the partnership with pure >>Yeah. Great point. So I, I think I touched on the, the two things that really caught my attention. Obviously, you know, we've got a lot of investment in V realize it was now kind of rebranded as ay, that, you know, I think we're really eager to see if we can help drive that consumption a bit higher, cuz we believe that plays into our favor as a vendor. We've we've we have over a hundred templates for the area platform right now to, you know, automation templates, whether it's, you know, levels set your platform, you know, automatically move workloads, deploy on demand. Like just so, so again, I think the focus there is very exciting for us, obviously when they've got a new release, like vSphere eight, that's gonna drive a lot of channel behaviors. So we've gotta get our, you know, we're a hundred percent channel company. And so we've gotta go get our channel ready because with about half of the updates of vSphere is, is hardware refresh. And so, you know, we've gotta be, be prepared for that. So, you know, some of the excitements about just being how to find more points in the market to do more business together. >>All right. Exciting cover the grounds. Right. I mean, so, okay. You guys announce earnings tomorrow, so we can't obviously quiet period, but of course you're not gonna divulge that anyway. So we'll be looking for that. What other catalysts are out there that we should be paying attention to? You know, we got, we got reinvent coming up in yep. In November, you guys are obviously gonna be there in, in a big way. Accelerate was back this year. How was accelerate >>Accelerate in was in Los Angeles this year? Mm. We had great weather. It was a phenomenal venue, great event, great partner event to kick it off. We happened to, to share the facility with the president and a bunch of international delegates. So that did make for a little bit of some logistic securities. >>It was like the summit of the Americas. I, I believe I'm recalling that correctly, but it was fantastic. Right. You, you get, you get to bring the customers out. You get to put a bunch of the engineers on display for the products that we're building. You know, one of the high, you know, two of the highlights there were, we, we announced our new flash blade S so, you know, higher, more performant, more scalable version of our, our scale and object and file platform with that. We also announced the, the next generation of our a I R I, which is our AI ready, AI ready infrastructure within video. So think of it like converged infrastructure for AI workloads. We're seeing tremendous growth in that unstructured space. And so, you know, we obviously pure was funded around block storage, a lot around virtual machines. The data growth is in unstructured, right? >>We're just seeing, we're seeing, you know, just tons of machine learning, you know, opportunities, a lot of opportunities, whether we're looking at health, life sciences, genome sequencing, medical imaging, we're seeing a lot of, of velocity in the federal space. You know, things, I can't talk about a lot of velocity in the automotive space. And so just, you know, from a completeness of platform, you know, flat flash blade is, is really addressing a need really kind of changing the market from NAS as like tier two storage or object is tier three to like both as a tier one performance candidate. And now you see applications that are supporting running on top of object, right? All your analytics platforms are on an object today, Absolut. So it's a, it's a whole new world. >>Awesome. And Pierce also what I see on the website, a tech Fest going on, you guys are gonna be in Seoul, Mexico city in Singapore in the next week alone. So customers get the chance to be able to in person talk with those execs once again. >>Yeah. We've been doing the accelerate tech tech fests, sorry about that around the globe. And if one of those align with your schedule, or you can free your schedule to join us, I would encourage you. The whole list of events dates are on pure storage.com. >>I'm looking at it right now. Vaon thank you so much for joining Dave and me. I got to sit between two dapper dudes, great conversation about what's going on at pure pure with VMware better together and the, and the CATA, the cat catalysis that's going on on both sides. I think that's an actual word I should. Now I have a degree biology for Vaughn Stewart and Dave Valante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So keep it here.

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)

(electronic music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer just a set of remote services accessed through a public cloud. Rather, it's expanding to on-premises, to multiple premises, across clouds, and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one. The opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this CUBE program where we're featuring Pure Storage in its latest innovations in bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them, if you will. And today, we have a two-part program. First, we're going to hear from Rob Lee who's the CTO of Pure Storage and then my colleague John Walls is going to talk to Scott Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group. Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage. Welcome, Rob, good to see you. >> Good to see you again too, Dave. >> So take us through the announcements from today at a high level. What's most exciting about what you're delivering? >> Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, many announcement today, many things to discuss. But overall, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. We've always thought of the journey to modern data as being formed by three pillars, if you will, certainly, modernizing infrastructure, modernizing operations and applications. And today's announcements are really in that kind of middle category of, like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one, probably, people best know us for that and today's announcements are really about tackling that operations piece, bringing infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about Pure Fusion, for example, that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, products, and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly-integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the applications that they serve, whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations, or between the premise, on-premise environment and the cloud environment. Likewise, on the application front, when we think about today's announcements in Portworx Data Services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud-native developers are using and relying on, the database applications that are most poplar in open source, Cassandra, Mongo, so on and so forth, how dow we make the run and operate pieces of those applications a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed, monitored for those app developers? And so a ton of momentum. It's a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in Pure One, that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure running the apps and bring those closer together? So when we think about the visibility, we're now able to deliver for Portworx topologies allowing developers and DevOps teams to look at the entire tech stack, if you will, of a container environment from the application to the containers, to the Kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes, all the way down to the storage, and be able to see everything that's going on, the root cause of any sort of problems that come up, that again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. So that's really how I view it and like I said, that's really the next step in our journey of helping customers modernize between infrastructure, operations, and their applications. >> Okay, so you got the control plane piece which is all about the operating model, you've got Pure One, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the Portworx piece which brings sort of development and deployment together in both infrastructure as code and better understanding of that full stack of, like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers, all the way down to the storage. So I feel like it's not even the storage anymore. I mean, it's cloud. (chuckling) >> It is and you know, I chuckle a little bit because at the end of the day, we deliver storage but what customers are looking for is, and what they value and what they care about is their data. Now obviously, the storage is in service of the data and what we're doing with today's announcements is, again, just making it, extending our reach, helping customers work with their data a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage but now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly, get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. >> How does this news fit into Pure's evolution as a company? I mean, I don't see it as a pivot because a pivot's like, okay, we're going to go from here and now we're doin' this? >> Rob: Yeah, we were doing this, now we're doing that, right. >> And so it's more like a reinvention or a progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >> Absolutely. You know what, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's a next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. And again, I go back to, you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long-term path, long-term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data. We got our start in infrastructure and just, you know, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not going to do it on decades-old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first, that's how we got our start. Today's announcement are really the next couple of steps along that journey. How do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate, more automated in the hands of not just the DevOps teams, the IT teams, but the application developers? How do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why is that important? It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds, the traditional kind of measures, bandwidth, iOps, latency, that sort of thing, but they're looking for speed of agility. You look at the modern application space around how data's being processed, it's a very, very fast-moving application space. The databases that are being used today may be different than the ones being used three months from now or six months from now. And so developers, application teams are looking for a ton more flexibility, a ton more agility than they were three, five, 10, 15 years ago. The other aspect is simplicity and reliability. As you know, that's a core component of everything we do. Our core products, you know, our arrays, our storage appliances, we're very well-known for the simplicity and reliability we drive at the individual product level. Well, as we scale and look at larger environments, as we look at customers' expectations for what they expect from a cloud-like service, there's the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud, wants to be able to manage large fleets of infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver infrastructure services to their internal customers, they want to be able to do it in a self-service, policy-driven, easy to control, easy to manage way and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what Pure Fusion is about is allowing operators that control plane to specify those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Same thing with Portworx, if we think about simplicity and reliability, containers, cloud-native applications, micro services, a lot of benefits there. A very fast-moving space, you can mix and match components, put them together very easily, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity 'cause you have more moving parts, and a greater need for reliability because, well now, you're not just serving one application but 30 or 40 working in unison. And that's really what we're after with Portworx and Portworx Data Services and the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >> Right, thanks for that, Rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. So virtually every infrastructure player now has an as-a-service offering and there're lots of claims out there about who was first, who's the best, et cetera. What's Pure's position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack in delivering subscription and as-a-service offerings in the storage industry. You certainly were first with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as-a-service and Pure as-a-service? What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're lead in the industry in this regard? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think of, first and foremost, we think of everything we do at Pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate in an as-a-service model internally, or whether it's Pure taking on more of that run and operate as-a-service, ourselves, with Pure as a service. And so the second part of your question which is what is it that sets us apart, what are we doing differently, what gives us confidence that this is the right path, well, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a, you know, a hotter topic in the industry of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology-led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry who look at it as a little bit more of a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T(s) and C(s) and you call it a service. And what do I mean by that? So, you know, if you look internally at Pure, everything we do we think of as a service. We have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it and building out service offerings. When we think about why this is technology-led, I think of a service. For something to be thought of as a service, it's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need, whether that's changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day-one, rigid kind of static some lands of having the capacity planned or plan out what my user's going to look like 18 months from now. I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption, right? You know, it's not a service if you're going to make me do a data migration or take a down time. And so when I net all that out, what are the things that you need the attributes that you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product set that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolvable. You need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of needs, whether it's price performance, tiers, you know, high performance capacity, lower cost, price points. You need something that's got a rich set of capabilities whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replications, snapshots, ransomware protection. So you need that full suite of capabilities but in order to deliver it as a service and enable me, as a customer, to seamlessly grow and change, that's got to be delivered on a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products (chuckling) and expect me to change and move every single time that I have a service need change. And so when I net that out, that puts us in an absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on two core product families, Portworx adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price performance and service tiers, and we're able to do this on a very tight code base. And as you know, everything we do is completely non-disruptive so all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of a strategic focus for us. >> So these offerings, they're all part of the service-driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >> Absolutely, yep. >> Great. You talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern application, the modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure. What exactly does that mean and how are you driving that? >> Well, I think it means a couple of different things, but if I were to net it out, it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. And if we look at why that is, you know, when I talk to customers, as they think about an infrastructure, largely, they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today, and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support which is oftentimes the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve, so they're kind of balancing both worlds. And in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic, meaning the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time, the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up, down, growing, it has to be a lot more elastic, and has much more variance. And what I mean by that is you look at a modern, cloud-native, micro services architecture-type application, it's really, you know, 20, 30, 40 different applications all working in concert with one another under the hood. This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set. Back in the day, you have an Oracle application, you go design an environment for that. It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own lifecycle. These days with modern applications, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece, and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward, as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the change in demands and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle. And so that, at the end of the day, drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure being able to use it for many different purposes, much more agility being able to adapt very, very quickly, and much more variance or dynamic range, the ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure. And this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >> Great, thank you for that. I really like that answer because it's not just a bunch of slideware mumbo-jumbo. You actually put some substance on it. Rob, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> And look forward to havin' you back soon. Now, in a moment, Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group speaks with theCUBE's John Walls to give you the independent analyst's take. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in high tech coverage. (techno music) >> Agility is what all digital organizations strive for, and for almost the entirety of the enterprise storage industry, agility and storage aren't words you'd often hear together. Since the founding of Pure Storage, we've been laser focused on taking what's painful about traditional enterprise storage and making it better. We imagined a world where consumers self-service the provisioning of their storage resources to match the performance and data protection capabilities that their applications require. No endless back and forth between application owners and storage teams, just true on-demand self-service. At the same time, imagine all of the complex storage management operations required to make this possible being automated through software. From the placement of the initial workload to storage adjusting with the unpredictable needs of an application and seamlessly migrating and rebalancing the fleet as needed, all with zero down time and no manual intervention. And finally, imagine almost limitless scale that adjusts to meet your business' data management needs over time. This is what we believe the future of enterprise storage looks like. >> Today, we are announcing Pure Fusion, a leap forward in enterprise storage, marrying the best parts of the public cloud with the storage experience and capabilities you've come to expect from Pure. By bringing the simplicity and scalability of the cloud operating model with on-demand consumption and automated provisioning, organizations can deliver an enterprise-grade managed, self-service storage model that unifies fleets of arrays and optimizes storage pulls on the fly. End users will be able to rapidly consume volumes, file systems, and advanced data services like replication without waiting for backend manual work making storage hardware truly invisible. And organizations will be able to scale seamlessly across block, file, and object workloads, leveraging the power of the entire Pure Storage family, including FlashArray, Pure Cloud Block Store, FlashBlade, and Portworx. (electronic music) >> It is time to take a look at what Pure's up to from a slightly different perspective. To help us do that is Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. And Scott, thanks for joining us here, on theCUBE. Good to see ya today. >> Great to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this. First, we'll get to the announcement in just a little bit. First off, in terms of Pure's strategy, as you've been watching this company evolve over years now, how has it evolved? And then we'll go to the announcements and how that fits into the strategy. But first off, let's just take them from your point of view where have they been and how are they doin'? >> You know, many people know of Pure or maybe they don't know of their history as an all-Flash array. I think Pure has always been, ever since they entered the IT industry as a pioneer, they're one of the early ones that said look, we're going all in on the all-Flash array business and a focus on Flash technology. Then they were early pioneers in things like Evergreen and things like storage-as-a-service capabilities for on-premises storage. And the entire time, they've had a really almost streamline focus on ease of use which, you know, from the outside, I think everyone talks about ease of use and making things simple for IT, but Pure has really made that almost like core as part of not only their product and their design but also part of their culture. And one of the things, and we'll get into this a little bit as we talk about the announcements, but, you know, if you look at these announcements and where Pure's going, they're trying to expand that culture, that DNA around ease of use or simplicity, and expanding it beyond just storage or IT operations, and really trying to see okay, how do we make the entire digital initiative process or the larger IT operations journey simpler. And I think that's part of where Pure is going is not just storage but focusing more on apps, operations, and data, and making it easier for the entire experience. >> So how do the announcements we're talking about, well, there're three phases here, and again, we'll unpack those separately, but in general, how do the announcements then, you think, fit into that strategy and fit into their view and your view, really, of the market trends? >> I think one of the big trends is, you know, IT in terms for most businesses is, it's not just an enabler anymore. IT's actually in the driver's seat. We see in our research at ESGU, we just did this study and I'm going to glance over my notes as I'm kind of talking, but we see one of the things is more than half of businesses are identifying some portion of their revenue is coming from digital products or digital services. So data is part of the revenue chain for a majority of organizations according to what we're seeing in our research. And so what that does is it puts IT right in that core, you know, that core delivery model of where the faster IT can operate, the faster organizations can realize these revenues opportunities. So what is that doing to IT organizations? Well first off, it makes their life a lot harder, it makes demands continue to increase. But also, this old adage or this old narrative that IT's about availability, it's about resiliency, it's about keeping the lights on and ensuring that the business doesn't go down, well none of that goes away. But now, IT organizations are being measured on their ability to accelerate operations. And in this world where everything's becoming more, you know, more complex, there're more demands, organizations are becoming more distributed, application demands are becoming more diverse and they're growing in breadth. All of this means that more pressure is falling not only on the IT operations but also on the infrastructure providers like Pure Storage to step up and make things even simpler with things like automation and simplification which, you know, we're going to talk about, but to help accelerate those operations. >> Yeah, I mean, if you're DevOps these days, I mean, and you're talkin' about kind of these quandaries that people are in, but what are these specific challenges do you think, on the enterprise level here, that Pure is addressing? >> Well so for example, you talked about developers and driving into that in particular, I want to say let's see, glance at my notes here, about two-thirds of organizations say they're under pressure to accelerate IT initiatives due to pressures specifically from DevOps teams as well as line of business teams. So what does that mean? It means that as organizations build up and try to accelerate either their revenue creation via the creation of software or products, or things of that, that drive, that support a DevOps team, maybe it's improving customer experience for example, as well as other line of business teams such as analytics and trying to provide better insights and better decision making off of data, what that means is this traditional process of IT operations of where you submit a trouble ticket and then it takes, after a few days, something happens and they start doing analysis in terms of basically what ends up being multiple days or multiple weeks, to end up to basically provision storage, it just takes too long. And so in these announcements what we're seeing is Pure delivering solutions that are all about automating the backend services and delivering storage in a way that is designed to be easily and quickly consumed by the new consumers of IT, the developers, the line of business teams via APIs where you can write to a standard API and it goes across basically lots of different technologies and happens very quickly where a lot of the backend processes are automated, and essentially, making the storage invisible to these new consumers. And all of that just delivers value because what these groups are doing is now they can access and get the resources that they need and they don't have to know about what's happening behind the scenes which, candidly, they don't really know much about, right now, and they don't really care. >> Right. (chuckling) That's right. Yeah, what I don't see, what I don't know won't hurt me. And it can, as we know, it can. So let's look at the announcements. Pure Fusion, I think we were hearing about that just a little bit before, earlier in the interview that Dave was conducting, but let's talk about Pure Fusion and your thoughts on that. >> Pure Fusion is what I was talking about a little bit where they're abstracting a lot of the storage capabilities and presenting it as an API, a consistent API that allows developers to provision things very quickly and where a lot of the backend services are automated and, you know, essentially invisible to the developer. And that is, I mean, it addresses where, you know, I kind of talk about this with some of the data that we just, you know, some of our research stats that we just discussed, but it's where a lot of organizations are going. The bottom line is, we used to, in a world where IT services weren't growing as fast and where everything had to be resilient and available, you could put a lot of personnel power or personal hours focused on okay, making sure every box and everything was checked prior to doing a new implementation.and all that was designed to reduce risk and possibly optimize the environment and reduce cost. Now in this world of acceleration what we've seen is organizations need faster responsiveness from the IT organization. Well that's all well and good, but the problem is it's difficult to do all those backend processes and make sure that data's fully being protected or making sure that everything is happening behind the scenes the way it should be. And so this is, again, just mounting more and more pressure. So with things like Pure Fusion what they're doing is they're essentially automating a lot of that on the backend and really simplifying it and making it so storage, or IT administrators can provide access to their line of business, to development teams to leverage infrastructure a lot faster while still ensuring that all those backend services, all those operations still happen. Portworx Data Services also announced and we're hearing it from Dave, for that perspective may be a game-changer in terms of storage. So your take on that and Portworx? >> You know, I really like Portworx. I've been following them ever since prior to the acquisition. One of the things that they were very early on is understanding the impact of micro services on the industry and really, the importance of designing infrastructure around for that environment. I think what they're doing around data services is really intriguing. I think it's really intriguing, first off, for Pure as a company because it elevates their visibility to a new audience and a new persona that may not have been familiar with them. As organizations are looking at, you know, one of the things that they're doing with this data services is essentially delivering a database-as-a-service platform where you can go provision and stand up databases very quickly and again, similar to we talked about fusion, a lot of those backend processes are automated. Really fascinating, again, aligns directly with this acceleration need that we talked about. So, you know, a huge value, but it's really fascinating for Pure because it opens them up to, you know, hey, there's this whole new world of possible consumers that where they're, that they can get experience to really, the ease of use that Pure is known for a lot of the capabilities that Portworx is known for, but also just increase really the value that Pure is able to deliver to some of these modern enterprises. >> And just to add, briefly, on the enhancements that Pure One also being announced today. Your take on those? >> I like that as well. I think one of the things if I kind of go through the list is a lot of insights and intelligence in terms of new app, sizing applications for the environment if I remember correctly, and more, you know, better capabilities to help ensure that your environment is optimized which candidly is a top challenge around IT organizations. We talk about, again, I keep hitting on this need to move faster, faster, faster. One of the big disconnects that we've seen and we saw it very early when organizations were moving to, for example, public cloud services, is this disconnect towards for this individual app, how many resources do I really need and I think that's something that, you know, vendors like Pure need to start integrating more and more intelligence. And that's, my understanding is they're doing with Pure One which is really impressive. >> I hope it's all it takes. Scott, we appreciate the time. Thank you for your insights into what has been a big day for Pure Storage. But thank you again for the time. Scott Sinclair at the Enterprise Strategy Group, senior analyst, there. Let's go back to Dave Vellante now with more on theCUBE. (electronic music) >> Thanks for watching this CUBE program made possible by Pure Storage. I want to say in summary, you know, sometimes it's hard to squint through all the vendor noise on cloud and as-a-service, and all the buzz words, and acronyms in the marketplace. But as I said at the top, the cloud is changing, it's evolving, it's expanding to new locations. The operating model is increasingly defining the cloud. There's so much opportunity to build value on top of the massive infrastructure build-out from the hyperscalers to $100 billion in CapEx last year, alone. This is not just true for technology vendors, but organizations are building their own layer to take advantage of the cloud. Now, of course, technology's critical so when you're evaluating technology solutions, look for the following. First, the ability of the solution to simplify your life. Can it abstract the underlying complexity of a cloud, multiple clouds, connect to on-prem workloads in an experience that is substantially identical, irrespective of location? Does the solution leverage cloud-native technologies and innovations and primitives and APIs or is it just a hosted stack that's really not on the latest technology curve, whether that's processor technology or virtualization, or machine learning, streaming, open source tech, et cetera? Third, how programmable is the infrastructure? Does it make developers more productive? Does it accelerate time to value? Does it minimize rework and increase the quality of your output? And four, what's the business impact? Will customers stand up and talk about the solution and how it contributed to their digital transformation by flexibly supporting emerging data-intensive workloads and evolving as their business rapidly changed? These are some of the important markers that we would suggest you monitor. Pure is obviously driving hard to optimize these and other areas, so watch closely and make your own assessment as to how, what they and others are building will fit into your business. Now as always, this content is available on demand on theCUBE.net, so definitely check that out. This I Dave Vellante for John Walls and the entire CUBE team, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> The Cloud essentially turned the data center into an API and ushered in the era of programmable infrastructure, no longer do we think about deploying infrastructure in rigid silos with a hardened, outer shell, rather infrastructure has to facilitate digital business strategies. And what this means is putting data at the core of your organization, irrespective of its physical location. It also means infrastructure generally and storage specifically must be accessed as sets of services that can be discovered, deployed, managed, secured, and governed in a DevOps model or OpsDev, if you prefer. Now, this has specific implications as to how vendor product strategies will evolve and how they'll meet modern data requirements. Welcome to this Cube conversation, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. And with me to discuss these sea changes is Ajay Singh, the Chief Product Officer of Pure Storage, Ajay welcome. >> Thank you, David, gald to be on. >> Yeah, great to have you, so let's talk about your role at Pure. I think you're the first CPO, what's the vision there? >> That's right, I just joined up Pure about eight months ago from VMware as the chief product officer and you're right, I'm the first our chief product officer at Pure. And at VMware I ran the Cloud management business unit, which was a lot about automation and infrastructure as code. And it's just great to join Pure, which has a phenomenal all flash product set. I kind of call it the iPhone or flash story super easy to use. And how do we take that same ease of use, which is a heart of a Cloud operating principle, and how do we actually take it up to really deliver a modern data experience, which includes infrastructure and storage as code, but then even more beyond that and how do you do modern operations and then modern data services. So super excited to be at Pure. And the vision, if you may, at the end of the day, is to provide, leveraging this moderate experience, a connected and effortless experience data experience, which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business, and by really leveraging and managing and winning with their data, because ultimately data is the new oil, if you may, and if you can mine it, get insights from it and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation in your head, and that's what be intended to help our customers to. >> So you joined earlier this year kind of, I guess, middle of the pandemic really I'm interested in kind of your first 100 days, what that was like, what key milestones you set and now you're into your second a 100 plus days. How's that all going? What can you share with us in and that's interesting timing because the effects of the pandemic you came in in a kind of post that, so you had experience from VMware and then you had to apply that to the product organization. So tell us about that sort of first a 100 days and the sort of mission now. >> Absolutely, so as we talked about the vision, around the modern data experience, kind of have three components to it, modernizing the infrastructure and really it's kudos to the team out of the work we've been doing, a ton of work in modernizing the infrastructure, I'll briefly talk to that, then modernizing the data, much more than modernizing the operations. I'll talk to that as well. And then of course, down the pike, modernizing data services. So if you think about it from modernizing the infrastructure, if you think about Pure for a minute, Pure is the first company that took flash to mainstream, essentially bringing what we call consumer simplicity to enterprise storage. The manual for the products with the front and back of a business card, that's it, you plug it in, boom, it's up and running, and then you get proactive AI driven support, right? So that was kind of the heart of Pure. Now you think about Pure again, what's unique about Pure has been a lot of our competition, has dealt with flash at the SSD level, hey, because guess what? All this software was built for hard drive. And so if I can treat NAND as a solid state drive SSD, then my software would easily work on it. But with Pure, because we started with flash, we released went straight to the NAND level, and as opposed to kind of the SSD layer, and what that does is it gives you greater efficiency, greater reliability and create a performance compared to an SSD, because you can optimize at the chip level as opposed to at the SSD module level. That's one big advantage that Pure has going for itself. And if you look at the physics, in the industry for a minute, there's recent data put out by Wikibon early this year, effectively showing that by the year 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, just the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk is going to be cheaper than hard disk. So this big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that's going to disrupt the hardest industry, already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next and then even the long tail is coming up over there. And so to end to that extent our lead, if you may, the introduction of QLC NAND, QLC NAND powerful competition is barely introducing, we've been at it for a while. We just recently this year in my first a 100 days, we introduced the flasher AC, C40 and C60 drives, which really start to open up our ability to go after the hybrid story market in a big way. It opens up a big new market for us. So great work there by the team,. Also at the heart of it. If you think about it in the NAND side, we have our flash array, which is a scale-up latency centric architecture and FlashBlade which is a scale-out throughput architecture, all operating with NAND. And what that does is it allows us to cover both structured data, unstructured data, tier one apps and tier two apps. So pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all flash data center, slowly but surely we're heading over there to the all flash data center based on demand economics that we just talked about, and we've done a bunch of releases. And then the team has done a bunch of things around introducing and NVME or fabric, the kind of thing that you expect them to do. A lot of recognition in the industry for the team or from the likes of TrustRadius, Gartner, named FlashRay, the Carton Peer Insights, the customer choice award and primary storage in the MQ. We were the leader. So a lot of kudos and recognition coming to the team as a result, Flash Blade just hit a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, kind of a leader by far in kind of the unstructured data, fast file an object marketplace. And then of course, all the work we're doing around what we say, ESG, environmental, social and governance, around reducing carbon footprint, reducing waste, our whole notion of evergreen and non-disruptive upgrades. We also kind of did a lot of work in that where we actually announced that over 2,700 customers have actually done non-disruptive upgrades over the technology. >> Yeah a lot to unpack there. And a lot of this sometimes you people say, oh, it's the plumbing, but the plumbing is actually very important too. 'Cause we're in a major inflection point, when we went from spinning disk to NAND. And it's all about volumes, you're seeing this all over the industry now, you see your old boss, Pat Gelsinger, is dealing with this at Intel. And it's all about consumer volumes in my view anyway, because thanks to Steve Jobs, NAND volumes are enormous and what two hard disk drive makers left in the planet. I don't know, maybe there's two and a half, but so those volumes drive costs down. And so you're on that curve and you can debate as to when it's going to happen, but it's not an if it's a when. Let me, shift gears a little bit. Because Cloud, as I was saying, it's ushered in this API economy, this as a service model, a lot of infrastructure companies have responded. How are you thinking at Pure about the as a service model for your customers? What's the strategy? How is it evolving and how does it differentiate from the competition? >> Absolutely, a great question. It's kind of segues into the second part of the moderate experience, which is how do you modernize the operations? And that's where automation as a service, because ultimately, the Cloud has validated and the address of this model, right? People are looking for outcomes. They care less about how you get there. They just want the outcome. And the as a service model actually delivers these outcomes. And this whole notion of infrastructure as code is kind of the start of it. Imagine if my infrastructure for a developer is just a line of code, in a Git repository in a program that goes through a CICD process and automatically kind of is configured and set up, fits in with the Terraform, the Ansibles, all that different automation frameworks. And so what we've done is we've gone down the path of really building out what I think is modern operations with this ability to have storage as code, disability, in addition modern operations is not just storage scored, but also we've got recently introduced some comprehensive ransomware protection, that's part of modern operations. There's all the threat you hear in the news or ransomware. We introduced what we call safe mode snapshots that allow you to recover in literally seconds. When you have a ransomware attack, we also have in the modern operations Pure one, which is maybe the leader in AI driven support to prevent downtime. We actually call you 80% of the time and fix the problems without you knowing about it. That's what modern operations is all about. And then also Martin operations says, okay, you've got flash on your on-prem side, but even maybe using flash in the public Cloud, how can I have seamless multi-Cloud experience in our Cloud block store we've introduced around Amazon, AWS and Azure allows one to do that. And then finally, for modern applications, if you think about it, this whole notion of infrastructure's code, as a service, software driven storage, the Kubernetes infrastructure enables one to really deliver a great automation framework that enables to reduce the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code. And we have, kudos to Charlie and the Pure storage team before my time with the acquisition of Portworx, Portworx today is truly delivers true storage as code orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes and in a multi-Cloud hybrid situation. So it can run on EKS, GKE, OpenShift rancher, Tansu, recently announced as the leader by giggle home for enterprise Kubernetes storage. We were really proud about that asset. And then finally, the last piece are Pure as a service. That's also all outcome oriented, SLS. What matters is you sign up for SLS, and then you get those SLS, very different from our competition, right? Our competition tends to be a lot more around financial engineering, hey, you can buy it OPEX versus CapEx. And, but you get the same thing with a lot of professional services, we've really got, I'd say a couple of years and lead on, actually delivering and managing with SRE engineers for the SLA. So a lot of great work there. We recently also introduced Cisco FlashStack, again, flash stack as a service, again, as a service, a validation of that. And then finally, we also recently did a announcement with Aquaponics, with their bare metal as a service where we are a key part of their bare metal as a service offering, again, pushing the kind of the added service strategy. So yes, big for us, that's where the buck is skating, half the enterprises, even on prem, wanting to consume things in the Cloud operating model. And so that's where we're putting it lot. >> I see, so your contention is, it's not just this CapEx to OPEX, that's kind of the, during the economic downturn of 2007, 2008, the economic crisis, that was the big thing for CFOs. So that's kind of yesterday's news. What you're saying is you're creating a Cloud, like operating model, as I was saying upfront, irrespective of physical location. And I see that as your challenge, the industry's challenge, be, if I'm going to effect the digital transformation, I don't want to deal with the Cloud primitives. I want you to hide the underlying complexity of that Cloud. I want to deal with higher level problems, but so that brings me to digital transformation, which is kind of the now initiative, or I even sometimes call it the mandate. There's not a one size fits all for digital transformation, but I'm interested in your thoughts on the must take steps, universal steps that everybody needs to think about in a digital transformation journey. >> Yeah, so ultimately the digital transformation is all about how companies are gain a competitive edge in this new digital world or that the company are, and the competition are changing the game on, right? So you want to make sure that you can rapidly try new things, fail fast, innovate and invest, but speed is of the essence, agility and the Cloud operating model enables that agility. And so what we're also doing is not only are we driving agility in a multicloud kind of data, infrastructure, data operation fashion, but we also taking it a step further. We were also on the journey to deliver modern data services. Imagine on a Pure on-prem infrastructure, along with your different public Clouds that you're working on with the Kubernetes infrastructures, you could, with a few clicks run Kakfa as a service, TensorFlow as a service, Mongo as a service. So me as a technology team can truly become a service provider and not just an on-prem service provider, but a multi-Cloud service provider. Such that these services can be used to analyze the data that you have, not only your data, your partner data, third party public data, and how you can marry those different data sets, analyze it to deliver new insights that ultimately give you a competitive edge in the digital transformation. So you can see data plays a big role there. The data is what generates those insights. Your ability to match that data with partner data, public data, your data, the analysis on it services ready to go, as you get the digital, as you can do the insights. You can really start to separate yourself from your competition and get on the leaderboard a decade from now when this digital transformation settles down. >> All right, so bring us home, Ajay, summarize what does a modern data strategy look like and how does it fit into a digital business or a digital organization? >> So look, at the end of the day, data and analysis, both of them play a big role in the digital transformation. And it really comes down to how do I leverage this data, my data, partner data, public data, to really get that edge. And that links back to a vision. How do we provide that connected and effortless, modern data experience that allows our customers to focus on their business? How do I get the edge in the digital transformation? But easily leveraging, managing and winning with their data. And that's the heart of where Pure is headed. >> Ajay Singh, thanks so much for coming inside theCube and sharing your vision. >> Thank you, Dave, it was a real pleasure. >> And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Advertiser: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to our ongoing CXO series, Charlie Giancarlo season, chief executive officer of Pure Storage. Charlie, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. >> Thanks, Dave. And like you said, always a pleasure, thank you. >> Well, I got to start asking you, the last time we talked, you were recovering from COVID. How are you doing? >> Yeah, I'm doing great actually. I seem to have fully recovered. I've been on 17 mile hikes at 10,000 feet. I've been doing a lot of biking, so it looks like other than my wife telling me that maybe I'm not all there, but she did that before COVID. So I'm used to it. >> Well, that's awesome to hear. Well, of course, just yesterday, you guys announced your quarter. I want to start there. You beat expectations, although revenue growth was a little less robust than we're used to from Pure, but you clearly had some activity regarding COVID in the US. International, very strong, but again, we'll talk about this US customers kind of reevaluating was your other key point. I got a lot of takeaways from the call that I want to ask you about. But the big thing was you had set a very confident tone on the Earnings Call. So I kind of want to start there. Well, give us your summary. >> Yeah, no, thank you for that. So first of all, we feel like we're operating really with all of our cylinders going. We have operational discipline. We've been adding to our R&D capabilities. We've hired people this year. and we showed a profit this quarter. So we're operating, I think very well. We've introduced a boatload of new products continuously over the last couple of quarters, including, FlashArray//C, the first and only all-flash product that competes at second Tier disc levels. We introduced our file services on FlashArray//C, which really allows us to go into the general purpose of file market. And we picked up a huge amount of share as you well know in Q1. We believe we're going to pick up significant share in Q2 as well, well above our competitors. So we feel like given everything we can control, we're doing very well. As you said, in Q2, what we saw was Europe, which came out of the crisis for the most part recover very, very nicely. The US, that's still in the crisis. Of course, we're seeing some slowness and especially among what we call the mid tier or the commercial market. They've been hurt very badly by the lockdown in the economy. And they have our sympathies, but we definitely saw some slow down there. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about the market share and maybe unpack some of that data. I mean, you guys gave a cautious outlook. It kind of gave no formal guidance, but you did informally guide flat, so you kind of gave some visibility there. So actually I appreciated it. I think some of the analysts were a little bit concerned there, but I think that's prudent. And they're really the expectations are a function of your expectations around the COVID recovery. I think you mentioned your account almost state by state and very clearly the international where you've seen comebacks have been very, very strong. >> Right, so I think our customers' data continues to grow if anything, growing faster under a lockdown environment and the move to more digital engagement with everyone, their customers, their employees, et cetera. So digital continues to grow, which generally creates more demand. However, of course, as you know, in storage customers generally always have a buffer. And what we saw on Q2 was customers starting to reconsider how they're going to spend their IT budget. And whenever you have a reconsideration, you have a slowdown. And that's what we experienced. And especially in the US where the effects of the pandemic, of the economy have been much more severe than in other parts of the world. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about some data. I often, as you know, like to share some data from our partner ETR every quarter we do the survey. So guys bring up that chart. And what it shows here, let's just set it up for the audience and Charlie for you as well. That this is essentially net score, which is a measure of spending velocity for the major primary guys. So we show Pure at the top in orange, that's just a coincidence guys. And then HPE, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. And you can see the net score, and then I've super imposed there in that table, in the upper left. And you can see Pure Storage is really the only one of these majors in the green. Everybody else is in the red, which is either the lower or high teens. And you can see a little bit of a COVID impact, last quarter, but holding strong at about a 40% net score where everybody else is, as I say, in the mid teens. And so that's a real positive. I point out, this is a forward looking survey. So we're asking people, what are you planning on spending in the second half relative to what you spent in the first half. And again, we see Pure with consistent momentum. I'll add, just if you looked at the past quarter, you guys announced plus 2% growth. IBM was plus 3% growth and we know why, they have the mainframe tailwind. HPE played a little hide, the growth ball. I don't know Charlie, how closely you looked at it, but they said 4% growth sequentially. Now, the last quarter they were down 16%. The same quarter last year, they were flat. So it looks to me like they were down this quarter. So we appreciate when you have clear guidance. >> Their storage, by the way, was down 10% year over year. >> Yeah, okay, great, thank you. I didn't pick up on that. And so, yeah, that seemed like that to me. And then NetApp happens tonight and we get Dell tomorrow. But so you were saying that you gained share, what gives you that confidence? >> Well, several, you mean for Q2? We know we gained Q1, right? We were 15 points above the industry average and maybe about 20 points ahead of our competitors. We saw a similar momentum from our partner. Remember, we're 100% partner fulfilled, right? And so in conversations with our partners, we have a general sense of how we're doing vis-a-vis competitive environments. We also know that our win rates have held very nicely and in quarters, almost every quarter, we're used to about a 20% per annum higher growth rate than our competitors. So when all of our metrics, that is our relative metrics. Things like win rates and so forth continue unabated, we generally expect to have the same outcome. >> Great, and then so let me go through some of the takeaways that I have from the quarter. I'll just run through them and we can go wherever you like. But the COVID snapback obviously is a key indicator. We saw that in international versus the US. >> Charlie: Right. >> New opportunities for growth. I want to talk about that, at some length the FlashArray//C object, the Cohesity pieces and other TAM expansion. The pipeline is very encouraging, but there's some uncertainty leading to your tepid guidance. Very strong, gross margins as usual. The subscription model is growing nicely. I want to hit on that. And the RPO, the remaining performance obligations grew to almost a billion dollars. That's a big number. New logo, solid at 20%. No real change in the competitive, but you called out, you'll see more PowerMax than PowerStore. That was really interesting. You're still hiring pretty aggressively, last quarter. And your technology investments continue. And I'll throw in the seven nines, which I think is another industry first, but where do you want to go there? >> Yeah, well, seven nines is a reliability figure for those of your audience that doesn't know. It relates to how much uptime or availability a product has or in our case, fleet of products. We have tens of thousands of arrays in the field. And last quarter we achieved what's called seven nines, which is the equivalent across the fleet of only three seconds of downtime per array per year. Which is, most other vendors had struggled to stay to five nines. And that's typically without even counting what they call scheduled downtime for upgrades. We don't even count that. We count all downtime of any type. So we're clearly, I think with no doubt, we're the most reliable product on the these days. >> So I want to come back to the TAM discussion because you, I inferred many opportunities for you guys to continue to grow. I mean, it's Flash, it's still about flash. flash is gaining share relative to spinning disk and relative to hybrid, you guys made that point a lot. FlashArray//C, you sound pretty happy with that, again, going after hybrid. And then this notion of bringing file services and object that unify play. kind of the man made great strides years ago with that capability. And then the data protection piece, the recovery with Cohesity, the faster recovery. That's another TAM expansion. So really, I identified four points of potential growth area for you over the next several years. I wonder if you could talk about that? >> Absolutely, we do feel very positive about all these areas. These areas open up a huge amount of the TAM that we didn't play in before. So FlashArray//C for example, as you say, flash was always a primary workload environment for flash 'cause it was very expensive compared to disc. Higher performance, better ecological footprint, denser, faster, cheaper, are more expensive though. So it only went after primary workload, but the vast majority of data storage is secondary workload. Things that don't require the high performance and therefore customers want it less expensive. And of course there were even more bits there. But FlashArray//C now competes very well with low cost disc, which is amazing. And of course it's 10 times lower footprint and 10 times more reliable. So this is the first and literally today only product that has all-flash in that secondary workload market. So just opens up a huge amount for us. And then, yes, I love talking about data protection for the following reason, customers actually don't want to do a backup, right? If you think about it, what they really want is recovery. Backup is what you have to do in order to get recovery. And these backup systems have been very good at backup, but usually can take 24 or 48 or even more hours to be able to recover from a failure. And now with ransomware, you don't want your website to be down for days before it comes back up. You don't want your traders not trading for days. It costs a lot of money. And with what we call rapid recovery and now flash recover, we can have companies come back within an hour or two at most, with a rapid recovery solution. And so the integrated solution that we've put together with Cohesity, allows customers to very quickly get up and running with an anti ransomware solution that allows them to get back up and operating in no time at all. >> Well, was interesting to see you choosing the partner route. I mean, you could have, if you remember EMC in the day. They bought in, data protection and it had actually worked out pretty well for them. You look at a company like NetApp, they've chosen not to vertically integrate with backup. You're choosing the same path. What's the thinking there? Stick to your knitting and partner up and add value where you can? >> Yeah, we have strong partnerships actually with all of the data backup players, Veritas Veeam, with Rubrik and others. In many cases, customers have already made their decision who their backup player is. Also, backup is actually a very relatively fragmented market. There's backup for different types of applications and different vendors have strengths and weaknesses in each one of those. And so our partnership across the backup board is very important to us. We did see however customers wanting an integrated solution, which we have, let's say initiated with Cohesity. But we believe it's the first of what will be multiple pure validated designs. Not all of which will be OEM, but all of which will be available as integrated systems in the market, through our channel partners. And so you can expect to see more of these as we go forward. >> So kind of the PVDs okay. I want to ask you about your subscription model. I mean, it's growing very nicely. Are there nuances there just in terms of understanding the income statement ie, product revenue was down, subscriptions growing. Are you going through that transition and having to sort of educate people on the impact on the income statement? You didn't make a big deal out of that on the Earnings Call and I thought, well, maybe I'm overstating that, but I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic? >> No, no, you're absolutely correct. And there is some of that going on on the earning statement. The bigger part, though, of let's say the lower growth this quarter was due, and the forecast was due to the pandemic. No doubt and especially in the US, especially hard hit in the US. But simultaneously we are going through the transition that many companies have had to go through in the past where a larger proportion over time of our sales are going to be what we call Pure as-a-Service and our unified subscription. So moving to subscription from CapEx. And whenever you do that, it takes a while, even though your sales, as in bookings, can stay in the growth path. The revenue takes a while to catch up as your subscription bookings grow. So there is some of that going on on our P and L as well. >> Yeah, well, it's the nirvana to the extent you can get that model. And of course your RPO is a good indication of you got a nice backlog that's yielding, that's certainty in revenue. >> That's correct. And the RPO is very nice and it reflects the fact that we have multi-year contracts going in with customers who are choosing Pure as-a-Service in Evergreen. And of course, the billing only reflects what we've actually built them for. >> I was struck by your comments regarding your main competitor, which is Dell, Dell EMC. Now, of course, in the early days of Pure, I've always said you guys drove a truck through the old VNX and symmetrics base. You said you're seeing PowerMax more than you're seeing PowerStore. That was interesting and somewhat surprising to me. >> Yeah, well, a standard play of Dell is to offer VMAX because it's less expensive versus our FlashArray. And then when the customer clearly says, well, it's just not performance enough or it just can't do the work that we need, then they'll offer PowerMax at a supposedly a deep discount to be able to compete with a FlashArray. So that's been a favorite tactic of theirs for quite some time. We maintain our win rates against that. PowerStore on the other hand, remember, it's a forklift upgrade with a new product on four different Dell existing products, right? And two things. One, is customers are just reluctant right now to try new things, right? They don't have the time to be able to test them properly. But I also think there's some reluctance even on Dell's part to put those properties up for grabs right now, when customers are more risk adverse. So, we continue, as I said, we are not seeing it as much as we had thought we might going into this. >> Yeah, we'll definitely find out more tomorrow. And I would expect that, to the extent that you're having more and more success in file, you're going to obviously run into NetApp more. >> Yeah, and that's what we're expecting. The file services on FlashArray//C really allow us to start to penetrate the general purpose file market. Clearly not on the very small, and we're not going after the very small market. We're going after the data center file share market on this and the Tier 2 workloads. >> Well, what's the early returns there? I mean, you saw the NetApp did the SolidFire acquisition to shore up NetApp kind of missed flash, and then bought SolidFire but that is obviously a good play. Do you feel like it's a tougher road than perhaps the old EMC install base or what are you seeing early on? >> Well, there's a lot of maturity obviously in files. And it will take us a while to be able to get up to full levels of maturity in files. But what customers love about us is our simplicity. And our file services on FlashArray is just as simple as our block services on FlashArray. And I think what customers are going to find is a very performant product that requires very little maintenance, very little tuning to meet their needs. And I think they're just going to appreciate the fact that it's a true fully capable block product with a fully capable set of file services. And that they'll be able to consolidate more and more of their use cases onto smaller and smaller footprint. So I think that's what they're going to appreciate about what we do. >> That's ironic, outsimplifying NetApp, which of course made its name, taken on guys like ASPEX for those of you remember that or even even the early day. So that's good. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about cloud. Thinking on cloud, I know it's early days and I know most of your subscriptions of course are still with on-prem, but you made an interesting announcement last year to accelerate with Cloud Block Store running on AWS. How's the uptake been there? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, we're seeing a good uptake there. I'd say more of it is in the DevOps environment than in the actual NDR, disaster recovery, more than it is in transition of primary workloads into the cloud. And we're just seeing a bit less of that than one would expect given all the press around it. I don't think it's us. I think customers are just taking a while. They're focusing their new activities in the cloud and much less about transitioning existing environments. But we are seeing work done there. What we are seeing is a huge uptake in what we call our unified subscription, which is a Pure as-a-Service on-prem where we deliver to our customers, basically cloud, the equivalent from their point of view of cloud storage on-prem, where we manage the entire environment plus the unified subscription is that plus Cloud Block Store. So regardless of where our customers want to place their data, either on-prem or in the cloud, it's the same price and the same contract, same interface, same management to them. So we've seen a huge, I mean, literally an incredible spike in uptake in that. >> Great, thank you for that. And then I got to end with, I asked you last time about networking. You have a, a very wide observation space and a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas. So I want to ask you about, we've seen the spate of IPOs this week. Snowflake came , Palantir, UniFi, JFrog, number of others. Very interesting to see that in the Valley, you're in the Valley. Of course you shot in the Valley like everybody else these days, but what do you make of that? Is it kind of everybody trying to get in before the election? Or is it just a really good time? What's your take on that? >> I think a lot of it is getting in before the election, but a lot of stock market movements as you well know, has to do with cash flows more than it has to do with the prospects of individual companies and just given the amount of stimulus that's taking place, not just in US but worldwide. There's a lot of money floating around, which is boiling stock market prices. And so it's a great, an old colleague of mine had a saying, "When Monday's on sale, take it." And that seems to be the case right now, at least as far as the stock market is concerned. And I've stood there for a good time for IPOs. >> Well, the Palantir IPO took a swipe at Silicon Valley broadly, really targeting, I think Facebook and Google. It really doesn't have anything to do with your business, but I mean, I think as an executive in Silicon Valley, you see the innovation and the software development that's going into so many good things. I was struck by that though. I thought it was a little bit of a cheap shot at Silicon Valley. It really was aimed at Google and Facebook because there's so many companies from you guys, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, it'll work on and on and on. They are just doing some great software work. And we're seeing that with COVID, where would we be without Big Tech? >> Well, thank you, Dave. I think the press tends to focus on the consumer companies. And we all have maybe our own individual opinions about the way they operate, but you're correct. I mean, I think the good foundational work that many companies in Silicon Valley are doing to make our lives easier every day, just continues to really impress. >> Well, Charles Giancarlo it's always a pleasure. Thanks so much. You're generous with your time. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Again, as you said, always a pleasure to speak with you and look forward to doing it next quarter. >> All right, us as well. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time, we're out. (bright upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (intense music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante in theCUBE, and as you know, I've been doing a CEO series, and welcome to the isolation economy. We're here at theCUBE's remote studio, and really pleased to have Charlie Giancarlo, who is the CEO of PureStorage. Charlie, I wish we were face-to-face at Pure Accelerate, but this'll have to do. Thanks for coming on. >> You know, Dave, it's always fun to be face-to-face with you. At Pure Accelerate when we do it in person is great fun, but we do what we have to do, and actually, this has been a great event for us, so appreciate you coming on air with me. >> Yeah, and we're going to chat about that, but I want to start off with this meme that's been going around the internet. I was going to use the wrecking ball. I don't know if you've seen that. It's got the people, the executives in the office building saying, "Eh, digital transformation; "not in my lifetime," complacency, and then this big wrecking ball, the COVID-19. You've probably seen it, but as you can see here, somebody created a survey, Who's leading the digital transformation at your company? The CEO, the CTO, or of course circled is COVID-19, and so we've seen that, right? You had no choice but to be a digital company. >> Well, there's that, and there's also the fact that the CEOs who've been wanting to push a digital transformation against a team that wants to stick with the status quo, it gives the CEO now, and even within our own company in Pure, to drive towards that digital transformation when people didn't really take up the mantle. So no, it's a great opportunity for digital transformation, and of course, the companies that have been doing it all along have been getting ahead during this crisis, and the ones that haven't are having some real trouble. And you and I have had some really interesting conversations. Again, that's, I think, the thing I miss most, not only having you in theCUBE, but the side conversations at the cocktail parties, et cetera. And we've talked about IP, and China, and the history of the US, and all kinds of interesting things there, but one of the things I want to put forth, and I know you guys, Kix especially, has done a lot of work on Tech For Good, but the narrative pre-COVID, PC I guess we'd call it, was really a lot of vitriol toward big tech especially, but you know what? That tech lash... Without tech, where would we be right now? >> Well, just think about it, right? Where would we be without videoconferencing, without the internet, right? We'd be sheltered in place with literally nothing to do, and all business would stop, and of course many businesses that require in-person have, but thank God you can still get goods at your home. You can still get food, you can still get all these things that today is enabled by technology. We've seen this ourselves, in terms of having to make emergency shipments during our first quarter to critical infrastructure to keep things going. It's been quite a quarter. I was saying to my team recently that we had just gotten everyone together in February for our sales kickoff for the year, and it felt like a full year since I had seen them all. >> Well, I had interviewed, I think, is it Mike Fitzgerald, your head of supply chain. >> Yes. >> In March, and he was saying, "No. "We have no disruptions. "We're delivering for clients," and we certainly saw that in your results in the quarter. >> Yeah, no, we're very fortunate, but we had been planning for doing our normal business continuity disaster planning, and actually, once we saw COVID in Asia in January we started exercising all those muscles, including pre-shipping product around to depos around the world in case transportation got clogged, which it in fact did. So we were well-prepared, but we're also, I think, very fortunate in terms of the fact that we had a very distributed supply chain. >> Yeah, I mean you guys obviously did a good job. You saw in Dell's earnings they held pretty firm. HPE, on the other hand, really saw some disruption, so congratulations to you and the team on that. So as we think about exiting this isolation economy, we've done work that shows about 44% of CIOs see a U-shaped recovery, but it's very fragmented. It varies by industry. It varies by how digital the organizations are. Are they able to provide physical distancing? How essential are these organizations? And so I'm sure you're seeing that in your customer base as well. How are you thinking about exiting this isolation economy? >> Well, I've certainly resisted trying to predict a U- or a V-shape, because I think there are many more unknowns than there are knowns, and in particular, we don't know if there's a second wave. If there is a second wave, is it going to be more or less lethal than the first wave? And as you know, maybe some of your audience knows, I contracted COVID in March. So I've done a lot of reading on not just COVID, but also on the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. It's going to take a while before this settles down, and we don't know what it's going to look like the rest of the year or next year. So a lot of the recovery is going to depend on that. What we can do, however, is make sure that we're prepared to work from home, work in the office, that we make sure that our team out in the field is well-placed to be able to support our customers in the environment, and the way that we're incenting our overall team now has less to do with the macro than it does with our specific segment, and what I mean by that is we're incenting our team to continue to build market share, and to continue to outperform our competition as we go forward, and also on our customer satisfaction figure, which you know is our Net Promoter Score, which is the highest in the industry. So that's how we're incenting our team. >> Yeah, and we're going to talk about that, and by the way, yes, I did know, and it's great to see you healthy, and I'd be remiss if I didn't also express my condolences, Matt, the loss of Matt Danziger, your head of IR, terrible tragedy. Of course Matt had some roots in Boston, went to school in Maine. >> Yeah. >> Loved Cape Cod, and so really sad loss, I'm sure, for all of the Puritans. >> It's affected us all very personally, because Matt was just an incredible team member, a great friend, and so young and vital. When someone that young dies for almost unexplainable reasons. It turned out to be a congenital heart condition that nobody knew about, but it just breaks... It just breaks everyone's heart, so thank you for your condolences. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Okay, so let's get into the earnings a little bit. I want to just pull up one of the charts that shows roughly, I have approximately Q1 because some companies like NetApp, Dell, HPE, are sort of staggered, but the latest results you saw IBM growing at 19%. Now we know that was mainframe-driven in a very easy compare. Pure plus 12, and then everybody else in the negative. Dell, minus five, so actually doing pretty well relative to NetApp and HPE, who, as I said, had some challenges with deliveries. But let's talk about your quarter. You continue to be the one sort of shining star in the storage business. Let's get into it. What are your big takeaways that you want us to know about? >> Well, of course I'd rather see everybody in the black, right, everybody in the positive, but we continue to take market share and continue to grow 20 to 30% faster than the rest of the industry combined, and it's quarter after quarter. It's not just a peak in one quarter and then behind in another quarter. Every quarter we're ahead of the rest of the industry, and I think the reasoning is really quite straightforward. We're the one company that invests in storage as if it's high technology. You do hear quite often, and even among some customers, that storage is commoditized, and all of our competitors invest in it, or don't invest in it, as if it's a commoditized market. Our view is quite straightforward. The science and the engineering of computing and data centers continues to evolve, continues to advance, has to advance if we continue down this path of becoming more of a digital economy. As we all know, processors advance in speed and capability. Networking advances in terms of speed and capability. Well, data storage is a third of data center spend, and if it doesn't continue to advance at the same pace or faster than everything else, it becomes a major bottleneck. We've been the innovator. If you look at a number of different studies, year after year, now over six or seven years, we are the leader in innovation in the data storage market, and we're being rewarded for that by penetrating more and more of the customer base. >> All right, let's talk about that. And you mentioned in your keynote at Accelerate that you guys spend more on R&D as a percentage of revenue than anybody, and so I want to throw out some stats. I'm sorry, folks, I don't have a slide on this. HPE spends about 1.8 billion a year on R&D, about 6% of revenues. IBM, I've reported on IBM and how it's spending the last 10 years, spent a huge amount on dividends and stock buybacks, and they spent six billion perpetually on R&D, which is now 8% of revenue. Dell at five billion. Of course Dell used to spend well under a billion before the EMC acquisition. That's about 6% of revenue. And NetApp, 800 million, much higher. They're a pure play, about 13%. Pure spends 430 million last year on R&D, which is over 30% of revenue on R&D, to your point. >> Yeah, yeah, well, as I said, we treat it like it's high technology, which it is, right? If you're not spending at an appropriate level you're going to fall behind, and so we continue to advance. I will say that you mentioned big numbers by the other players, but I was part of a big organization as well with a huge R&D budget, but what matters is what percent of the revenue of a specific area are you spending, right? You mentioned Dell and VMware. A very large fraction of their spend is on VMware. Great product and great company, but very little is being spent in the area of storage. >> Well, and the same thing's true for IBM, and I've made this point. In fact, I made this point about Snowflake last week in my breaking analysis. How is Snowflake able to compete with all these big whales? And the same thing for you guys. Every dime you spend on R&D goes to making your storage products better for your customers. Your go-to-market, same thing. Your partner ecosystem, same thing, and so you're the much more focused play. >> Right, well I think it boils down to one very simple thing, right? Most of our competitors are, you might call them one-stop shops, so the shopping mall of IT gear, right? The Best Buy, if you will, of information technology. We're really the sole best of breed player in data storage, right, and if you're a company that wants two vendors, you might choose one that's a one-stop shop. If you have the one-stop shop, the next one you want is a best of breed player, right? And we fill that role for our customers. >> Look it, this business is a technology business, and technology and innovation is driven by research and development, period, the end. But I want to ask you, so the storage business generally, look, you're kind of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind here. I mean the storage business has been somewhat on the back burner. In part it's your fault because you put so much flash into the data center, gave so much headroom that organizations didn't have to buy spindles anymore to get to performance, the cloud has also been a factor. But look, last decade was a better decade for storage than the previous decade when you look at the exits that you guys had and escape velocity, Nutanix, if you can kind of put them in there, too. Much larger than say the Compellents or 3PARs. They didn't make it to a billion. So my question is storage businesses, is it going to come back as a growth business? Like you said, you wish everybody were in the black here. >> Right, well a lot of what's being measured, of course, is enterprise on-prem storage, right? If we add on-prem and cloud, it actually continues to be a big growth business, because data is not shrinking. In fact, data is still growing faster than the price reduction of the media underneath, right, so it's still growing. And as you know, more recently we've introduced what we call Pure as-a-Service and Cloud Block Store. So now we have our same software, which we call Purity, that runs on our on-prem arrays, also running on AWS, and currently in beta on Azure. So from our point of view this is a... First of all, it's a big market, about $30 to $40 billion total. If you add in cloud, it's another $10 to $15 billion, which is a new opportunity for us. Last year we were about 1.65 billion. We're still less than, as you know, less than 10% of the overall market. So the opportunity for us to grow is just tremendous out there, and whether or not total storage grows, for us it's less important right now than the market share that we pick up. >> Right, okay, so I want to stay on that for a minute and talk about... I love talking about the competition. So what I'm showing here with this kind of wheel slide is data from our data partner ETR, and they go out every quarter. They have a very simple methodology. It's like Net Promoter Score, and it's very consistent. They say relative to last year, are you adopting the platform, that's the lime green, and so this is Pure's data. Are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the 32%, the forest green. Is spending going to be flat? Is it going to decrease by more than 6%? That's the 9%. And then are you replacing the platform, 2%. Now this was taken at the height of the US lockdown. This last survey. >> Wow. >> So you can see the vast majority of customers are either keeping spending the same, or they're spending more. >> Yeah. >> So that's very, very strong. And I want to just bring up another data point, which is we like to plot that Net Score here on the vertical axis, and then what we call market share. It's not like IDC market share, but it's pervasiveness in the survey. And you can see here, to your point, Pure is really the only, and I've cited the other vendors on the right hand, that box there, you're the only company in the green with a 40% Net Score, and you can see everybody else is well below the line in the red, but to your point, you got a long way to go in terms of gaining market share. >> Exactly, right, and the reason... I think the reason why you're seeing that is really our fundamental and basic value is that our product and our company is easy to do business with and easy to operate, and it's such a pleasure to use versus the competition that customers really appreciate the product and the company. We do have a Net Promoter Score of over 80, which I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another company in any industry with Net Promoter Scores that high. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on the R&D thing for a minute, because you guys bet the company from day one on simplicity, and that's really where you put a lot of effort. So the cloud is vital here, and I want to get your perspective on it. You mentioned your Cloud Block Store, which I like that, it's native to AWS. I think you're adding other platforms. I think you're adding Azure as well, and I'm sure you'll do Google. >> Azure, Azure's in beta, yes. >> Yeah, Google's just a matter of time. Alibaba, you'll get them all, but the key here is that you're taking advantage of the native services, and let's take AWS as an example. You're using EC2, and high priority instances of EC2, as an example, to essentially improve block storage on Amazon. Amazon loves it because it sells Compute. Maybe the storage guys in Amazon don't love it so much, but it's all about the customer, and so the native cloud services are critical. I'm sure you're going to do the same thing for Azure and other clouds, and that takes a lot of investment, but I heard George Kurian today addressing some analysts, talking about they're the only company doing kind of that cloud native approach. Where are you placing your bets? How much of it is cloud versus kind of on-prem, if you will? >> Yeah, well... So first of all, an increasing fraction is cloud, as you might imagine, right? We started off with a few dozen developers, and now we're at many more than that. Of course the majority of our revenue still comes from on-prem, but the value is the following in our case, which is that we literally have the same software operating, from a customer and from a application standpoint. It is the same software operating on-prem as in the cloud, which means that the customer doesn't have to refactor their application to move it into the cloud, and we're the one vendor that's focused on block. What NetApp is doing is great, but it's a file-based system. It's really designed for smaller workloads and low performance workloads. Our system's designed for high performance enterprise workloads, Tier 1 workloads in the cloud. To say that they're both cloud sort of washes over the fact that they're almost going after two completely separate markets. >> Well, I think it's interesting that you're both really emphasizing cloud native, which I think is very important. I think that some of the others have some catching up to do in that regard, and again, that takes a big investment in not just wrapping your stack, and shoving it in the cloud, and hosting it in the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the local services. >> Well, I mean one thing I'll mention was Amazon gave us an award, which they give to very few vendors. It's called the Well-Architected AWS Award, because we've designed it not to operate, let's say, in a virtualized environment on AWS. We really make use of the native AWS EC2 services. It is designed like a web service on EC2. >> And the reason why this is so important is just, again, to share with our audience is because when you start talking about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, you want the same exact experience on-prem as you do in the cloud, whether it's hybrid or across clouds, and the key is if you're using cloud native services, you have the most efficient, the highest performance, lowest latency, and lowest cost solution. That is going to be... That's going to be a determinate of the winner. >> Yes, I believe so. Customers don't want to be doing... Be working with software that is going to change, fundamentally change and cause them to have to refactor their applications. If it's not designed natively to the cloud, then when Amazon upgrades it may cause a real problem with the software or with the environment, and so customers don't want that. They want to know they're cloud native. >> Well, your task over the next 10 years is something. Look it, it's very challenging to grow a company the size of Pure, period, but let's face it, you guys caught EMC off-guard. You were driving a truck through the Symmetrics base and the VNX base. Not that that was easy. (chuckling) And they certainly didn't make it easy for ya. But now we've got this sort of next chapter, and I want to talk a little bit about this. You guys call it the Modern Data Experience. You laid it out last Accelerate, kind of your vision. You talked about it more at this year's Accelerate. I wonder if you could tell us the key takeaways from your conference this year. >> Right, the key takeaway... So let me talk about both. I'll start with Modern Data Experience and then key takeaways from this Accelerate. So Modern Data Experience, for those that are not yet familiar with it, is the idea that an on-prem experience would look very similar, if not identical, to a cloud experience. That is to say that applications and orchestrators just use APIs to be able to call upon and have delivered the storage environment that they want to see instantaneously over a high speed network. The amazing thing about storage, even today, is that it's highly mechanical, it's highly hardware-oriented to where if you have a new application and you want storage, you actually have to buy an array and connect it. It's physical. Where we want to be is just like in the cloud. If you have a new application and you want storage or you want data services, you just write a few APIs in your application and it's delivered immediately and automatically, and that's what we're delivering on-prem with the Modern Data Experience. What we're also doing, though, is extending that to the cloud, and with Cloud Block Store as part of this, with that set of interfaces and management system exactly the same as on-prem, you now have that cloud experience across all the clouds without having to refactor applications in one or the other. So that's our Modern Data Experience. That's the vision that drives us. We've delivered more and more against it starting at the last Accelerate, but even more now. Part of this is being able to deliver storage that is flexible and able to be delivered by API. On this Accelerate we delivered our Purity 6.0 for Flash Array, which adds not only greater resiliency characteristics, but now file for the first time in a Flash Array environment, and so now the same Flash Array can deliver both file and block. Which is a unified experience, but all delivered by API and simple to operate. We've also delivered, more recently, Flash Array 3.0... I'm sorry, Purity 3.0 on FlashBlade that delivers the ability for FlashBlade now to have very high resiliency characteristics, and to be able to even better deliver the ability to restore applications when there's been a failure of their data systems very, very rapidly, something that we call Rapid Restore. So these are huge benefits. And the last one I'll mention, Pure as-a-Service allows a customer today to be able to contract for storage as a service on-prem and in the cloud with one unified subscription. So they only pay for what they use. They only pay for what they use when they use it, and they only pay for it, regardless of where it's used, on-prem or in the cloud, and it's a true subscription model. It's owned and operated by Pure, but the customer gets the benefit of only paying for what they use, regardless of where they use it. >> Awesome, thanks for that run through. And a couple other notes that I had, I mean you obviously talked about the support for the work from home and remote capabilities. Automation came up a lot. >> Yep. >> You and I, I said, we have these great conversations, and one of the ones I would have with you if we were having a drink somewhere would be if you look at productivity stats in US and Europe, they're declining-- >> Yes. >> Pretty dramatically. And if you think about the grand challenges we have, the global challenges, whether it's pandemics, or healthcare, or feeding people, et cetera, we're not going to be able to meet those challenges without automation. I mean people, for years, have been afraid of automation. "Oh, we're going to lose jobs." We don't have enough people to solve all these problems, and so I think that's behind us, right-- >> Yeah, I agree. >> The fear of automation. So that came up. Yeah, go ahead, please. >> I once met with Alan Greenspan. You may remember him. >> Of course. >> This is after he was the chairman, and he said, "Look, I've studied the economies now "for the last 100 years, "and the fact of the matter is "that wealth follows productivity." The more productive you are as a society, that means the greater the wealth that exists for every individual, right? The standard of living follows productivity, and without productivity there's no wealth creation for society. So to your point, yeah, if we don't become more productive, more efficient, people don't live better, right? >> Yeah, I knew you'd have some good thoughts on that, and of course, speaking of Greenspan, we're seeing a little bit of rational exuberance maybe in the market. (chuckling) Pretty amazing. But you also talked about containers, and persisting containers, and Kubernetes, the importance of Kubernetes. That seems to be a big trend that you guys are hopping on as well. >> You bet. It is the wave of the future. Now, like all waves of the future, it's going to take time. Containers work entirely differently from VMs and from machines in terms of how they utilize resources inside a data center environment, and they are extraordinarily dynamic. They require the ability to build up, tear down connections to storage, and create storage, and spin it down at very, very rapid rates, and again, it's all API-driven. It's all responsive, not to human operators, but it's got to be responsive to the application itself and to the orchestration environment. And again, I'll go back to what we talked about with our Modern Data Experience. It's exactly the kind of experience that our customers want to be able to be that responsive to this new environment. >> My last question is from John Furrier. He asked me, "Hey, Charlie knows a lot about networking." We were talking about multi-cloud. Obviously cross-cloud networks are going to become increasingly important. People are trying to get rid of their MPLS networks, really moving to an SD-WAN environment. Your thoughts on the evolution of networking over the next decade. >> Well, I'll tell you. I'm a big believer that even SD-WANs, over time, are going to become obsolete. Another way to phrase it is the new private network is the internet. I mean look at it now. What does SD-WAN mean when nobody's in the local office, right? No one's in the remote office; they're all at home. And so now we need to think about the fact... Sometimes it's called Zero Trust. I don't like that term. Nobody wants to talk about zero anything. What it really is about is that there is no internal network anymore. The fact of the matter is even for... Let's say I'm inside my own company's network. Well, do they trust my machine? Maybe not. They may trust me but not my machine, and so what we need to have is going to a cloud model where all communication to all servers goes through a giant, call it a firewall or a proxy service, where everything is cleaned before it's delivered. People, individuals only get, and applications, only get access to the applications that they're authorized to use, not to a network, because once they're in the network they can get anywhere. So they should only get access to the applications they're able to use. So my personal opinion is the internet is the future private network, and that requires a very different methodology for authentication for security and so forth, and if we think that we protect ourselves now by firewalls, we have to rethink that. >> Great perspectives. And by the way, you're seeing more than glimpses of that. You look at Zscaler's results recently, and that's kind of the security cloud, and I'm glad you mentioned that you don't like that sort of Zero Trust. You guys, even today, talked about near zero RPO. That's an honest statement-- >> Right. >> Because there's no such thing as zero RPO. (chuckling) >> Right, yeah. >> Charlie, great to have you on. Thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Dave, always a pleasure. Thank you so much, and hopefully next time in person. >> I hope so. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020, here in Barcelona. Our third year of the show, over 17,000 in attendance between the Cisco people, their large partner ecosystem, and the customers, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier's scouring the show for all of the news at the event, and joining us, we have two first time guests on the program, first, sitting to my left is Patrick Smith, who is the field CTO for EMEA with Pure Storage. Sitting to his left is Eric Greffier, who is the managing director of EMEAR specialists with Cisco, so you have a slightly larger region than Patrick does, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Patrick: Great to be here. >> All right, so, we know this show, we were talking that broad ecosystem, and of course Cisco in the data center group has very strong storage partnerships, highlighted by their converged infrastructure stacks. I wrote my research many many years ago, Cisco's brilliant job was when they entered the server market, they made sure that that fragmented storage ecosystem, they made partnerships across the board. And of course, when Pure's ascendancy with the flash era made the stack, so helping to paint those data centers orange with your Cisco partnership, so Patrick, give us the update here, 2020, what's interesting and important to know about Pure Storage and Cisco customer base? >> You know, we continue to see significant adoption of FlashStack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco. Driving just great interest and great growth, both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform, and the value that the customers see in FlashStack, bringing together storage, networking and compute together with overall automation of the stack, and that really gives customers fantastic time to value. And that's what they're looking for in this day and age. >> All right, and Eric, what differentiates the partnership with Pure, versus, as you said, you do work with many of the storage companies out there. >> Well, we had a baby together, it was called FlashStack, and it was couple of years ago now, and as you said, I think the key element for us is really to have those CVDs, those Cisco Validated Designs together, and FlashStack was a great addition to our existing partnership at that time, talking about a couple of years ago. And of course, with the flash technology of Pure, we've seen the demand that we'd say going and going, and it has been amazing, amazing trajectory together. >> But talk a little bit more about the CVDs, the different use cases that you're seeing. You don't have to go through all 20, but maybe pick a couple of your favorite children. >> Well, just to make sure that people understand what CVD means, it's Cisco Validated Design, and this is kind of an outcome in the form of a document, which is available for customers and partners, which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D, which is just telling customers and partners what they need to order and have in it to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome. And the reason why we have multiple CVDs, is we have one CVD per use case. So the more use cases we have together, the more the CVD's precise, and you just have to follow the CVD design principles. Of course, the later swarms, and maybe Patrick can say a word, but we've been of course doing things regarding analytics and AI, because this is a big demand right now, so maybe Patrick, you want to say a word on this. >> Yeah, you guys were first with the AI and bringing AI and storage together with your partnership with Nvidia, so maybe double down on that. >> The FlashBlade was our move into building a storage platform for AI and model analytics, and we've seen tremendous success with that in lots of different verticals. And so with Cisco we launched FlashStack for AI, which brings together FlashBlade networking, and Cisco's fantastic compute platform with capability for considerable scale of Nvidia GPUs. So an in-a-box capability to really deliver fast time to market solutions for the growing world of analytics and modern AI, people want quick insight into the vast amounts of data we have, and so FlashStack for AI is really important for us being able to deliver as part of the Cisco ecosystem, and provide customers with a platform for success. >> What's happening with modernization, generally, but specifically in Europe, obviously Cisco, long history in Europe, Pure, you've got a presence here, good presence, but obviously much newer. Larger proportion, far larger proportion is in North America, so it's a real opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing in terms of modernization of infrastructure, and apps in the European community? >> Modernization I think is particularly important, and it's more and more seen under the guise of digital transformation, because investing in infrastructure just doesn't get the credit that sometimes it deserves. But the big push there is really all around simpler infrastructure, easier management, and the push for automation. Organizations don't want to have large infrastructure support teams who are either installing or managing in a heavy touch way, their environments, and so the push towards automation, not just at the infrastructure layer, but all the way up the stack, is really key. And you know, we were talking earlier, behind us we have the DevNet sessions here, all about how customers of Cisco and by correlation Pure, can really optimize the management to their environment, use technology like Intersight, like Ansible and others, to really minimize the overhead of managing technology, deliver services faster to customers and be more agile, in this always-on world that we live in, there's no time to really add a human to the cycle of managing infrastructure. >> I think we've been very proud over the years because this notion of converged infrastructure, which was, the promise was to simplify and modernize the data centers, before it was like, "Everything needs to get connected to anything," and coming was this notion of a pod, everything converged, "We've done the job for you, mister customer, "just think about adding some pod." This has been the promise for the last 10 years, and we've been very proud, almost to have created this market, but it wouldn't have been possible without the partnership with the storage players, and with Pure, we've been one step further in terms of simplifying things for customers. >> I love the extension you're talking about, because absolutely converged infrastructure was supposed to deliver on that simplicity, and it was, let's think of the entire rack as a unit of how we manage it, but with today's applications, with the speed of change happening in the environment, we've gone beyond human speed, and so therefore if we don't have the automation that you were talking about, we can't keep up with what the business needs to be able to do there. >> Yeah, that's what it's all about, it's the rapid rate of change. Whether it's business services, whether it's supporting developers in the developer environment, more and more our customers are becoming software development organizations, their developers are a key resource, and making them as efficient as possible is really important, so being able to quickly spin up development environments, new environments for developers, using snapshot technology, giving them the latest sets of data to test their applications on, is really central to enabling and empowering the developer. >> You know, you talk about Cisco's play and kind of creation of the converged infrastructure, Mark, and I think that's fair, by the way. Others may claim it, but I think the mantle goes to you. But there were two friction points, or headwinds, that we pointed out early in the day, the first was organizational, the servers team, the storage team, the network team didn't speak together, then the practitioner told us one day, "Look, you want to solve that problem, "put it in and watch what happens." 'Cause if you try to figure out the organization you'll never get there, and that sort of took care of itself. The other was the channel. The channel likes things separate, they can add value, they have this sort of box selling mentality, so I wonder if you could update us on what the mindset is in the channel, and how that's evolved. >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think the channel actually really likes the simplicity of a converged infrastructure to sell, it's a very simple message, and it really empowers the channel to take, to your point about organization, they have the full stack, all in one sellable item, and so they don't have to fight for the different components, it's one consistent unit that they sell as a whole, and so I think it simplifies the channel, and actually, we find that customers are actively seeking out, it's shown by our growth with FlashStack that customers are actually seeking out the channel partners who are selling FlashStack. >> Yeah, and do you think the channel realizes, "Wow, we really do have to go up the stack, "add more value, do things like partner with"? >> Well for most of the partners, they were heavily specialized on storage or compute or network, so for most of them, supporting the converged infrastructure was to be able to put a foot into another market, which was an expansion for them, which was part number one. Part number two, maybe the things that we've been missing, because since the beginning we had APIs around all those platforms. I don't believe in the early days, I'm talking about five years from now, that they got, that they could really really build something upon the converged infrastructure. Now, if you go through the DevNet area here at Cisco Live, you will see that I think this is the time now for them to understand, and really build new services on top of it, so I believe the value for the channel is pretty obvious now, more than ever. >> Well yeah, it's a great point, you don't usually hear converged infrastructure and infrastructure as code in the same conversation, but the maturation of the platforms underneath are bringing things together. >> They really are, in the same way that IT organizations are freeing up more time to focus up the stack on automation and added value, the same is true of the partners. It's interesting the corollary between the two. >> So I have a question on your act two, so what got us here the last 10 years, both firms were disruptors. Cisco came in and disrupted the compute space, it was misunderstood, "Cisco getting into servers, "that'll never work!" "Well, really not getting into servers, "we're changing the game." "Ah, okay," 10 years later. Pure, all-flash, really created some havoc in the industry, injected a ton of flash into the data center, practically drove a truck through the legacy business. Okay, so very successful. What's act two for you guys, what do you envision, disruptors, are you more incrementalists, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. >> I start, Patrick. Probably for us, phase two is what you heard yesterday morning, I think Liz Anthony did a great speech regarding Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, sorry for the name, this is a bit long, but what it means is now we truly connect the infrastructure to the application performance, and the fact that we can place and discuss about converged infrastructure but in the context of what truly matters for customers, which is application, this is the first time ever you're going to see such amount of R&D put into bringing the two worlds together. So this is just the beginning, but I think this was probably for me yesterday one of the most important announcement ever. And by the way, Pure is coming with this announcement, so if you as a customer buy Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, you'll get everything you need to know about Pure and if you have to move things around the storage area, you know the tool will be doing it for you. So we are really the two of us in this announcement, so Patrick, if you want to? >> No, I mean as Eric mentioned, Intersight's important for Cisco, it's important for us, we're very proud to be early integrators as a third party into Intersight to allow that simple management, but you know, as you talk about the future, we were viewed as disruptors when we first came to market with flash array, and we consider still ourselves to be disruptors and innovators, and the amount of our revenue that we invest in innovation, in what is a really focused product portfolio, I think is showing benefits, and you've seen the announcements over the last six months or so with FlashArray//C, bringing all the benefits of flash to tier two applications, and just the interest that that has generated is huge. In the world of networking with NVMe, we have a fabric in RoCEv2, just increasing the performance for business applications that will have fantastic implications for things like SAP, time and performance-critical databases, and then what we announced with direct memory with adding SCM as a read cache onto flash array as well. Really giving customers investment protection for what they bought from us already, because they can, as you well know, Evergreen gives customers an asset that continues to appreciate in value, which is completely the opposite. >> And you're both sort of embracing that service consumption model, I mean Cisco's becoming a very large proportion of your business, you guys have announced some actual straight cloud plays, you've built an aray inside of AWS, which is pretty innovative, so. >> Yes, and as well as the cloud play with Cloud Block Store in AWS, there's Pure as a service, which takes that cloud-like consumption model and allows a customer to run it in their own data center without owning the assets, and that's really interesting, because customers have got used to the cloud-like consumption model, and paying as an OpEx rather than CapEx, and so bringing that into their own facility, and only paying for the data you have written, really does change the game in terms of how they consume and think about their storage environments. >> Patrick, we'd just love to get your viewpoint, you've been talking to a lot of customers this week, you said you've been checking out the DevNet zone, for people that didn't make it to the show here, what have they been missing, what would their peers be telling them in the hallway conversations? >> There's a huge amount as we've been talking about, there's a huge amount on automation, and actually we see it as we go into customers, the number of people we're now talking to who are developers but not developers developing business applications but developers developing code for managing infrastructure is key, and you see it all around the DevNet zone. And then, the focus on containers, I've been talking about it for a long time, and containers is so important for enterprises going forward. We have a great play in that space, and I think as we roll forward, the next three to five years, containers is just going to be the important technology that will be prevalent across enterprises large and small. >> Dave: Yeah, we agree. >> Eric and Patrick, thank you so much for giving us the update, congratulations on all the progress and definitely look forward to keeping an eye on your progress. >> Thanks very much. >> All right, Dave Vellante and I will be back with much more here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at AWS re:Invent, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Justin Warren. This is day one of AWS re:Invent. Rob Lee is here, he's the Vice President and Chief Architect at Pure Storage. And he's joined by Rob Walters, who is the Vice President, General Manager of Storage as a Service at Pure. Robs, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us back. >> Yep, thank you. >> Dave: You're welcome. Rob, we'll start with, Rob Lee we'll start with you. So re:Invent, this is the eighth re:Invent, I think the seventh for theCUBE, what's happened at the show, any key takeaways? >> Yeah, absolutely it's great to be back. We were here last year obviously big launch of cloud data services, so it's great to be back a year in. And just kind of reflect back on how the year's gone for uptick at cloud data services, our native US. And it's been a banner year. So we saw over the last year CloudSnap go GA Cloud Block Store go GA and you know just really good customer uptake, adoption and kind of interest out of the gate. So it's kind of great to be back. Great to kind of share what we've down over the last year as well as just get some feedback and more interest from future customers and prospects as well. >> So Rob W, with your background in the cloud what's you take on this notion of storage as a service? How do you guys think about that and how do you look at that? >> Sure, well this is an ever more increasingly important way to consume storage. I mean we're seeing customers who've been you know got used to the model, the economic model, the as a service model in the cloud, now looking to get those benefits on-prem and in the hybrid cloud too. Which if you know, you look at our portfolio we have both there, as part of the Pure as a service. >> Right okay, and then so Pure Accelerate you guys announced Cloud Block Store. >> Yeah, that's when we took it GA. Right so we've been working with customers in a protracted beta process over the last year to really refine the fit and use cases for tier one block workloads and so we took that GA in Accelerate. >> So this is an interesting, you're a partner obviously with Amazon I would think many parts of Amazon love Cloud Block Store 'cause you're using EC2, you're front-ending S3 like you're helping Amazon sell services and you're delivering a higher level of availability and performance in certain workloads, relative to EVS. So there's probably certain guys at Amazon that aren't so friendly with you. So that's an interesting dynamic, but talk about the positioning of Cloud Block Store. Any sort of updates on uptake? What are customers excited about? What can you share? >> Yeah, no absolutely You know I'd say primarily we're most pleased with the variety of workloads and use cases that customers are bringing us into. I think when we started out on this journey we saw tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the AWS Echo system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud. What we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS, it's allowed customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flash arrays into. So that's their tier one mission critical environments, their VMware workloads, their Oracle workloads, their SAP workloads. They're also looking at us from everything from to do lift and shift, test and dev in the cloud, as well as DR right, and that again I think speaks to a couple things. It speaks to the durability, the higher level of service that we're able to deliver in AWS, but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and have it operate in exactly the same way on-prem and in the cloud. 'Cause look, if you're going to DR the last time, the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat, hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a DR failover. And so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness, you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases that customers are bringing us into. >> So you guys obviously a big partner of VMware, you're done very well in that community. So VMware cloud on AWS, is that a tailwind for you guys or can you take advantage of that at this point? >> Yeah no, so I think the way I look at it is both VMware, Pure, AWS, I think we're all responding to the same market demands and customer needs. Which at the end of the day is, look if I'm an enterprise customer the reality is, I'm going to have some of my workloads running on-premise, I'm going to have some of my workloads running in the cloud, I expect you the vendors to help me manage this diverse, hybrid environment. And what I'd say is, there are puts and takes how the different vendors are going about it but at the end of the day that's the customer need. And so you know we're going about this through a very targeted storage-centric approach because that's where we provide service today. You know and you see VMware going after it from the kind of application, hypervisor kind of virtualization end of things. Over time we've had a great partnership with VMware on-premise, and as both Cloud Block Store and VMware Cloud mature, we'd look to replicate the same motion with them in that offering. >> Yeah, I mean to to extent I mean you think about VMware moving workloads with their customers into the cloud, more mission critical stuff comes into the cloud, it's been hard to get a lot of those workloads in to date and that's maybe the next wave of cloud. Rob W., I have a question for you. You know Amazon's been kind of sleepy in storage over the, S3, EBS, okay great. They dropped a bunch of announcements this year and so it seems like there's more action now in the cloud. What's your sort of point of view as to how you make that an opportunity for Pure? >> The way I've always looked at it is, there's been a way of getting your storage done and delivered on AWS and there's been the way that enterprises have done things on-premise. And I think that was a sort of a longer term bet from AWS that that was the way things will tend to fall towards into the public cloud. And now we see, all of the hyperscalers quite honestly with on-prem, hybrid opportunities. With the like Outpost today, et cetera. The hybrid is a real things, it's not just something people said that couldn't get to the cloud, you know it's a real thing. So I think that actually opens up opportunity from both sides. True enterprise class features that our enterprise class customers are looking for in the cloud through something like CBS are now available. But I think you know at Amazon and other hyperscale are reaching back down into the on-prem environments to help with the onboarding of enterprises up into the cloud >> So the as a service side of things makes life a little bit interesting from my perspective, because that's kind of new for Pure to provide that storage as a service, but also for enterprises as you say, they're used to running things in a particular way so as they move to cloud they're kind of having to adapt and change and yet they don't fully want to. Hybrid is a real thing, there are real workloads that need to perform in a hybrid fashion. So what does that mean for you providing storage as a service, and still to Rob Lee's point, still providing that consistency of experience across the entire product portfolio. 'Cause that's quite an achievement and many other as storage providers haven't actually been able to pull that off. So how do you keep all of those components working coherently together and still provide what customers are actually looking for? >> I think you have to go back to what the basics of what customers are actually looking for. You know they're looking to make smart use of their finances capex potentially moving towards opex, that kind of consumption model is growing in popularity. And I think a lot of enterprises are seeing less and less value in the sort of nuts and bolts storage management of old. And we can provide a lot of that through the as a service offering. So had to look past the management and monitoring. We've always done the Evergreen service subscription, so with software and hardware upgrades. So we're letting their sort of shrinking capex budget and perhaps their limited resources work on the more strategically important elements of their IT strategies, including hybrid-cloud. >> Rob Lee, one of the things we've talked about in the past is AI. I'm interested in sort of the update on the AI workloads . We heard a lot obviously today on the main stage about machine learning, machine intelligence, AI, transformations, how is that going, the whole AI push? You guys were first, really the first storage company to sort of partner up and deliver solutions in that area. Give us the update there. Wow's it going, what are you learning? >> Yeah, so it's going really well. So it continues to be a very strong driver of our flash play business, and again it's really driven by it's a workload that succeeds with very large sums of data, it succeeds when you can push those large sums of data at high speed into modern compute, and rinse and repeat very frequently. And the fourth piece which I think is really helping to propel some of the business there, is you know, as enterprises, as customers get further on into the AI deployment journeys what they're finding is the application space evolves very quickly there. And the ability for infrastructure in general, but storage in particular, because that's where so much data gravity exists to be flexible to adapt to different applications and changing application requirements really helps speed them up. So said another way, if the application set that your data scientists are using today are going to change in six months, you can't really be building your storage infrastructure around a thesis of what that application looks like and then go an replace it in six months. And so that message as customers have been through now the first, first and a half iterations of that and really sort of internalize, hey AI is a space that's rapidly evolving we need infrastructure that can evolve and grow with us, that's helping drive a lot of second looks and a lot of business back to us. And I would actually tie this back to your previous question which is the direction that Amazon have taken with some of their new storage offerings and how that ties into storage as a service. If I step back as a whole, what I'd say is both Amazon and Pure, what we see is there's now a demand really for multiple classes of service for storage, right. Fast is important, it's going to continue to get more and more important, whether it's AI, whether it's low latency transactional databases, or some other workload. So fast always matters, cost always matters. And so you're going to have this stratification, whether it's in the cloud, whether its on flash with SCM, TLC, QLC, you want the benefits of all of those. What you don't want is to have to manage the complexity of tying and stitching all those pieces together yourself, and what you certainly don't want is a procurement model that locks you out or in to one of these tiers, or in one of these locations. And so if you think about it in the long term, and not to put words in the other Rob's mouth, where I think you see us going with Pure as a service is moving to a model that really shifts the conversation with customers to say, look the way you should be transacting with storage vendors, and we're going to lead the charge is class of service, maybe protocol, and that's about it. It's like where do you want this data to exist? How fast do you want it? Where on the price performance curve do you want to be? How do you want it to be protected? And give us room to take care of it from there. >> That's right, that's right. This isn't about the storage array anymore. You know you look at the modern data experience message this is about what do you need from your storage, from a storage attribute perspective rather than a physical hardware perspective and let us worry about the rest. >> Yeah you have to abstract that complexity. You guys have, I mean simple is the reason why you were able to achieve escape velocity along with obviously great product and pretty good management as well. But you'll never sub optimize simplicity to try to turn some knobs. I mean I've learned that following you guys over the years. I mean that's your philosophy. >> No absolutely, and what I'd say is as technology evolves, as the components evolve into this world of multis, multi-protocol, multi-tier, multi-class of service, you know the focus on that simplicity and taking even more if it on becomes ever more important. And that's a place where, getting to your question about AI we help customers implement AI, we also do a lot of AI within our own products in our fleet. That's a place where our AI driven ops really have a place to shine in delivering that kind of best optimization of price, performance, tiers of service, so on, so forth, within the product lines. >> What are you guys seeing at the macro? I mean that to say, you've achieved escape velocity, check. Now you're sort of entering the next chapter of Pure. You're the big share gainer, but obviously growing slower than you had in previous years. Part of that we think is this, part of your fault. You put so much flash into the marketplace. It's given people a lot of headroom. Obviously NaN pricing has been an issue, you guys have addressed that on your calls, but still gaining share much, much more quickly than most. Most folks are shrinking. So what are you seeing at the macro, what are customers telling you in terms of their long term strategy with regard to storage? >> Well, so I'll start, I'll let Rob add in. What I'd say is we see in the macro a shift, a clear shift to flash. We've called the shots since day one, but what I'd say is that's accelerating. And that's accelerating with pricing dynamics, with and you know we talked about a lot of the NaN pricing and all that kind of stuff, but in the macro I think there's a clear realization now that customers want to be on flash. It's just a matter of what's the sensible rate? What's the price kind of curve to get there? And we see a couple meaningful steps. We saw it originally with our flash array line taking out 15K spinning drives, 10K's really falling. With QLC coming online and what we're doing in FlashArray//C the 7200 RPM drive kind of in the enterprise, you know those days are numbered, right. And I think for many customers at this point it's really a matter of, okay how quickly can we get there and when does it make sense to move, as opposed to, does it make sense. In many ways it's really exciting. Because if you think about it, the focus for so long has been in those tier one environments, but in many ways the tier two environments are the ones that could most benefit from a move to flash because a couple things happen there. Because they're considered lower tier, lower cost they tend to spread like bunnies, they tend to be kind of more neglected parts of the environment and so having customers now be able to take a second look at modernizing, consolidating those environments is both helpful from a operational point of view, it's also helpful from the point of view of getting them to be able to make that data useful again. >> I would also say that those exact use cases are perfect candidates for an as a service consumption model because we can actually raise the utilization, actually helping customers manage to a much more utilized set of arrays than the over consumption, under consumption game they're trying to play right now with their annual capex cycles. >> And so how aggressive do you see customers wanting to take advantage of that as a service consumption model? Is it mixed or is it like, we want this? >> There's a lot of customers who are just like we want this and we want it now. We've seen a very good traction and adoption so yeah, it's a surprisingly large, complex enterprise customer adoption as well. >> A lot of enterprise, they've gotten used to the idea of cloud from AWS. They like that model of dealing with things and they want to bring that model of operating on site, because they want cloud everywhere. They don't actually want to transform the cloud into enterprise. >> No, exactly, I mean if I go back 20 plus years to when I was doing hands on IT, the idea that we as a team would let go of any of the widgetry that we are responsible for, never would have happened. But then you've had this parallel path of public cloud experience, and people are like well I don't even need to be doing that anymore. And we get better results. Oh and it's secure as well? And that list just goes on. And so now as you say, the enterprise wants to bring it back on-prem for all of those benefits. >> One of the other things that we've been tracking, and maybe it falls in the category of cloud 2.0 is the sort of new workload forming. And I'll preface it this way, you know the early days, the past decade of cloud infrastructures of service have been about, yeah I'm going to spin up some EC2, I'm going to need some S3, whatever, I need some storage, but today it seems like, there's all this data now and then you're seeing new workloads driven by platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, you know clearly throw in some ML tools like Databricks and it's driving a lot of compute now but it's also driving insights. People are really pulling insights out of that data. I just gave you cloud examples, are you seeing on-prem examples as well, or hybrid examples, and how do you guys fit into that? >> Yeah, no absolutely. I think this is a secular trend that was kicked off by open source and the public cloud. But it certainly affects, I would say, the entire tech landscape. You know a lot of it is just about how applications are built. If you about, think back to the late '80s, early '90s you had large monoliths, you had Oracle, and it did everything, soup to nuts. Your transactional system, your data warehouse, ERP, cool, we got it all. That's not how applications are built anymore. They're built with multiple applications working together. You've got, whether it's Kafka connecting into some scale out analytics database, connected into Cassandra, connected right. It's just the modern way of how applications are built. And so whether that's connecting data between SaaS services in the cloud, whether it's connecting data between multiple different application sets that are running on-prem, we definitely see that trend. And so when you peel back the covers of that, what we see, what we hear from customers as they make that shift, as they try to stand up infrastructure to meet those need, is again the need for flexibility. As multiple applications are sharing data, are handing off data as part of a pipeline or as part of a workflow, it becomes ever more important for the underlying infrastructure, the storage array if you will, to be able to deliver high performance to multiple applications. And so the era of saying, hey look I'm going to design a storage array to be super optimized for Oracle and nothing else like you're only going to solve part of the problem now. And so this is why you see us taking, within Pure the approach that we do with how we optimize performance, whether it's across FlashArray, FlashBlade, or Cloud Block Store. >> Excellent, well guys we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts with us. And have a good rest of re:Invent. >> Thanks for having us back >> Dave: All right, pleasure >> Thank you >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one. Dave Vellante for Justin Warren. You're watching theCUBE from AWS re:Invent 2019. Right back (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the CUBE studio in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation. Where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every business wants Cloud, every business wants digital transformation, but the challenge is, what do you do with the data? How do you ensure that your data is set up so that you can take greater advantage of it, create more classes of business options in a digital world, while at the same time having the flexibility, the agility that you need from a storage and infrastructure standpoint to not constrain the business as it tries to move forward. It's a big topic that a lot of customers are facing. To have that conversation, we are joined by Matt Kixmoeller, who is the Vice President of Strategy at Pure Storage. Matt, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thanks, Peter. >> So lets dispense with the necessaries. Update from Pure. >> It's a fun time at Pure, we just hit our tenth birthday, and we're fresh off the heels of our Accelerate Conference down in Austin, where we had a lot of good product news and talked a lot about what the next decade's going to be all about. >> So, one of the things you mentioned down in Austin was the notion of the modern data experience. I want to really highlight that notion of experience because that's kind of the intersection with the Cloud experience. So, talk a little bit about how the experience word in modern data and cloud is coming together. >> Absolutely, so ya know the Cloud has forever changed IT's expectation of how tech needs to work, and I think the most archaic layer in a lot of ways right now is storage, and so we've done a lot within our platform to modernize for Cloud, link to the Cloud, deliver an all flash experience, but more interesting perhaps is also just reacting to the changing nature of how customers want to use storage and procure storage. >> And that means that they don't want to buy in advance of their needs. >> I think the key thing is as a service on demand right? And, ya know it's interesting when you consider both the usage and consumption as well as the purchase pattern, right? Um, if you think about the usage and consumption, it's all about on demand and automation, and perhaps one of the best examples I can give you is the transformation around containers. Um, ya know, we see all of our call home data from our customers, and how they use the arrays obviously, and your typical array has just a handful of management operations per day, where someone changes something, provision, storage, you name it. If you look at our container environment, ya know we have a tool called PSO, Pure Service Orchestrator that orchestrates our storage as part of a container environment, and a PSO based array does thousands of these operations a day. And so, it's very obvious that if you're having to deal with the fluidity of the container Cloud, there's no way you're going to have a human admin sitting there, clicking yes, yes, yes, or doing anything like that type of provision storage. You have to plumb for automation from the beginning. >> So that's a great example of the experience necessarily must be different, where you can't use a manual approach of doing things, you have to use more of an automated approach, so as you start to consider these issues, how is that informing the evolution of the modern data experience at Pure? >> I think it's an automated first world, and you have to really prepare yourself for plumbing everything for automation for APIs, for orchestration, as opposed to thinking about processes manually. Um, we've also seen as a vendor, it's changed how people want to consume, and you know, the concepts of more Opex-based on-demand consumption are also coming to storage, and so, last year, we introduced, um, ya know one of the first models in the industry in this regard that we called, at the time, ES2, and we broadened that and launched it again this year at Accelerate, expanding it to the entire Pure Business, and called it Pure as a service. >> So, what we now have is we now have, at least, from Pure, the option to think about how I'm going to match my storage consumption with my storage spend, which is especially important in a world where, by some aspect, storage or data is growing in volumes, from a volume perspective, at 35, 40% per anum. You don't want to have to buy four years of data out because you're growing that fast, and use it today. So as you think about this, what does Pure do next with the marriage of the Cloud experience and the modern date experience? >> Well, I think a key thing, particularly around this consumption world, is to give people flexibility between On-Prem and Cloud. Ya know, we did a lot in the show to announce news around how we're linking our On-Prem offerings with the Cloud with our Cloud Block Store offering to allow workloads to move back and forth, but what if I own On-Prem storage and I want to use the Cloud. And so another thing we did as part of Pure as a service is allow for that subscription to go either direction. You might be a customer that subscribes to 100 terabytes of Pure On-Prem, and then tomorrow you get the edict that says lets move half that to the Cloud. No problem, you can move 50 terabytes to the Cloud and not pay us another dime. The next day, you want to move back. You can do that again as well, and so we've thought about how we can really evolve those procurement processes such that they are just as agile and just as flexible as a Cloud model. >> Matt Kixmoeller, Pure Storage, thanks again for being on the CUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Live from San Diego, California at the cue covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back to the cube here in San Diego for cube con cloud native con 2019. It's our fourth year of doing the cube here. I'm Stu Miniman. It's my fourth time I've done this show. Joining me is Justin Warren. He's actually been to more of the coupons than the cube has, I think at least in North America. And welcome into the program to two veterans of these events from pure storage. Uh, sitting to my right is she'll be uh, Shrivastava who's a director of product marketing and sitting to her right is Anthony lay Ferrario who's a senior product manager, uh, both of you with pure storage. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, so, so we, we were kind of joking about veterans here because we know that things are moving faster and faster. You both work for storage companies. Storage is not known to be the fastest moving industry. Um, it's been fascinating for me to watch kind of things picking up the pace of change, especially when you talk about, uh, you know, how developers and you know, software and a multicloud environment, a fit-out. So she'll be maybe, you know, give us a frame for, you know, you, you know, you're in a Cooper ladies tee shirt here pures at the show. How should we be thinking about pure in this ecosystem? >>Sure. Yeah. So, uh, you're, as, you know, we, we side off as all flash on brand storage company, uh, 10 years ago and, uh, we've kept pace with constantly innovating and making sure we're meeting our customer's needs. One of the areas of course that we see a lot of enterprises moving today is two words, microservices, two words, containerized applications. And our goal that you're really is to help customers modernize, modernize their applications while still keeping that store it's seamless and keeping that, uh, invisible to the application developers. >> I think it actually lines up really well if you're do just a pure sort of steam across time has been performance with simplicity. Right? And I think the simplicity argument starts to mean something different over time, but it's a place that we still want to really focus as our customers started to use, uh, try to containerize our applications. >>There are couple of challenges. We saw continued environments, of course, they're known for their, uh, agility, uh, how portable they are. They're lightweight and they're fast. And when they're fast, storage can sometimes be a bottleneck because your storage might not necessarily scale as fast. It might not be able to provision storage volumes as fast, your container environment. And that's the challenge that we at pure why to solve with our Cuban eighties integrations. Anthony, you mentioned simplicity there. So I'm going to challenge you a bit on that because Kubernetes is generally not perceived as being particularly simple and the storage interfaces as well, like stateful sets is kind of only really stabilized over the last 18 months. So how >>is pure actually helping to make the Cuban Eddie's experience simpler for developers? Yeah, and you know, you're totally right. I don't think I was necessarily saying that someone looking for the simplest thing that could ever find would adopt Kubernetes and expect to find that. But what I really meant was, you know, on one hand you have, you know, your more traditional enterprise infrastructure type folks who are trying to build out the underlying private cloud that you're going to deploy, you know, your infrastructure on. And on the other hand, you have your developers, you have your Kubernetes, you have your cloud native applications, right? And really the interface between those is where I'm looking at that simplicity argument because traditionally pure has focused on that simple interface to the end user. But the end user, as we were talking about before, the show has shifted from a person to being a machine, right? >>And the objective for pure and what we're building on the cognitive side is how do we take that simple sort of as a service consumption experience and present that on top of what looks like a traditional infrastructure platform. So I can get more into the, the details of that if you'd like, but really that that layer is where we're focused on the simplicity and really just asking the, the, uh, the end user as few questions as we can. Right. I just want to ask you, what do you need? I don't want to ask you, well, tell me about the, you know, IQN and blah, blah. They don't want that, right? That's the simplicity I'm talking about. Yeah. Well, you run developers generally, I mean, the idea of dev ops and I challenge people whenever they mentioned dev ops, and I'm hearing a pretty consistent message that developers really don't care about infrastructure and don't want to have anything to do with it at all. >>So if you can just bake it into the system and somehow make it easier to operate it, that kind of SRE level, that infrastructure level that, that Kubernetes as a platform. So once that's solved, then as a developer, I can just get on with, with writing some code. We definitely want stories to be invisible. Yeah. So if you want, but if they want stories to be invisible, that's not so great for your brand because you actually want them to know and care about having a particular storage platform. So how do you, how do you balance that idea that we want to show you that we can have to have innovative products that you care about the storage, but you also don't need to care about the storage at all because we'll make it invisible. How does that work? >>So Coupa storage for container environments has been a challenge. And what we are trying to educate the platform level users is that with the right kind of storage, it can actually be easy stores. For QA, these can be easy. And, uh, the way we make it simple or invisible is through the automation that we provide. So pure service orchestrator is our, uh, automation for storage delivery into the containerized environments. And so it's delivered to a CSI plugin, but we tried to do a little more than just develop a plugin into your Cubanetis environments. We tried to make your scalability seamless, so it's super easy to add new storage. And, um, so yeah, I think because a container environments were initially developed for States, less applications when became to staple applications, they still think about, Oh, why should I care about storage? But people are slowly realizing that we need care about it because we don't want to ultimately be bothered by it. Right. >>And if I can make, if I can make a point to just tag on to that I, the conversations I've had at the show this week, I've even helped me sort of crystallize the way I like to explain this to people, which is at first, you know, a lot of people will say, Oh, I don't, I don't do stateful application. I'm doing stateless applications and competitors. And my response is, okay, I understand that you've decided to externalize the state of your system from your Kubernetes deployment. But at some point you have to deal with state. Now, whether that's an Oracle database, you happen to be calling out to outside of your community's cluster, whether that's a service from a public cloud like S3 or whether that's deciding to internalize that state into Coobernetti's and manage it through the same management plane you have to have state. >>Now when we talk about, you know, what we're doing in PSO and why that's valuable and why, you know, to your point about the brand, I don't necessarily worry is because when we can give a seamless experience at the developer layer and we can give the SRE or the cluster manager layer a way where they can have a trusted high performance, high availability storage platform that their developers consume without knowing or worrying about it. And then as we look into the future, how do we handle cross cluster and multi-cloud stateful workloads, we can really add value there. >>Well, yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the multi-cloud piece of it because one of the more interesting things I saw from pure this year is how pure is putting in software cloud native. Um, so when I saw that one of the questions like, okay, when I come to a show like this, how does Kubernetes and containers fit into that old discussion? So how help us connect the dots as to what was announced and everything else that's happening. >>You've heard about cloud block store, which is our software running on the AWS cloud today. And uh, that's basically what we've done is we've people have loved flash array all these years for the simplicity it provides for the automation and performance. You want to give you something similar and something enterprise grade in the public cloud. The cloud, Luxor is basically, you can think of it as a virtual flash array and on the AWS cloud. So with that, you now have D duplication, 10 provisioning capabilities in the cloud. You can, um, be brought an active cluster, which is active, active, synchronous replication between availability zones. So really making your AWS environments ready for mission critical applications. Plus with our, you know, PSO just works the same way on prem as in the cloud. So it's just great for hybrid application mobility. You have the same APIs. >>Yeah, it's actually very cool. Right? One of the, one of the, you know, fun things for me as a software developer at pure, at a software side guy at pure, um, is that the API's that our arrays have are the same API. It's actually the same underlying software version even though it's a totally different hardware, hardware back end implementation. When we run in a cloud native form factor versus when we run in a physical appliance form factor, the replication engines work between the two snapshots, clones. Um, our ability to do instant, um, restores like everything that we do and that has brought value from our, our storage software stack, we still get access to in a cloud native environment and the transports as well. I guess trying to understand, is there Kubernetes involved here or is this just natively in AWS? And then then on premises itself is a, >> is a compute orchestration layer component. So when I look at Kubernetes, I'd say Kubernetes sits above both sides, right? Or potentially above and across both sides, um, depending on how you decide to structure your environment. But the nice part is if you've developed a cloud native application, right, and that's running on Kubernetes, the ability to support that with the same storage interfaces, the same SLS, move it efficiently, copy it efficiently and do that on whatever cloud you care to do. That's where it gets really cool. >>So we developed this really cool demo where you have a container application running on PSO, on flash array, on prem. We migrated that to cloud block store and on AWS and it just runs, you use the same yanno scripts in both places. There is no need to, you know, do a massive rearchitecture anything. Your application just runs when you move it. And we take care of all the data mobility with our asynchronous replications, you can take a snapshot on prem, you can snap it out into AWS, restore it back into cloud block store. So it really opens up a lot of new use cases and make them simple for customers >>that that idea of write once run anywhere. I said I'm, I'm old enough to remember when Java was a brand new thing and that was the promise. And it never quite got there because it turns out it's really, really hard to do that. Um, but we are seeing for from pure and from a lot of vendors here at the show that there's a lot of work and effort being put in into that difficult problem so that other people don't have to care about it. So you're building that abstraction in and, and working on how this particular, how the details of this work. And, uh, I was fortunate enough to get a deep dive into the end of the architecture of cloud Brock's door, just a recent accelerate conference and the way you've actually used cloud resources as if they were kind of infrastructure components and then built the abstraction on top of it, but in the same way that it runs on site, it, that's what gives you that ability to, to keep everything the same and make it simple, is doing a lot of hard work and hard engineering underneath so that no one has to care anymore. >>Yeah. And the way we've architected CloudLock store is that, you know, be as use the highest performance performing, uh, AWS infrastructure. And the highest durability it this infrastructure. So you're actually now able to buy performance and, and durability in one through one single virtual appliance as you would. >>Yeah. How's the adoption of the products going? I know it was, it was very early when it was announced just a few months ago. So what's the feedback from customers been so far about? >>It's been really positive and actually, you know, the one use case that I want to highlight really most is actually dev ops use cases, right? This, the value add of being able to have the same deployment for that application for a test or dev infrastructure in one cloud versus a production to point them in another cloud has been very exciting for folks. So, you know, when you think about that use case in particular, right? The ability to say, okay, I'm coming up to a major quarterly release or whatever I have for my product, I need to establish a bunch more test environments. I don't necessarily want to have bought that and we're not necessarily talking about, you know, bursting over the wire anymore. Right. We're talking about local, uh, local storage under the same interfaces in the cloud that you choose to spin up all of those test environments. So cases like that are pretty interesting for folks. >>Yeah. I think that's how people have started to realize that it's that operation side of things. It's not even day to day 90 and day 147 where I want to be operating this in the same place in the same way no matter where it is because it just saves me so much heartache and time of not having to re implement differently and I don't have to retrain my resources because it all looks the same. So, uh, yeah, Def does definitely have a big use case migration through verbose. That's another use case that we are seeing a lot of customers interested in and uh, disaster recovery, using it as a disaster recovery. How do you, so you can efficiently store backups on Amazon S three, but how do you do an easy fast restore to actually run your applications there? So with CloudLock store, it is now possible to do that, to do a fast, easy restore. Also a couple of weeks ago actually, we started taking registrations for a beta program for cloud Glocks or for Azure as well. Uh, yup. Customers are going multi-cloud. We are going multi-cloud with them. >>Great. I want to give you both a final word, uh, takeaways for a pure storage participation here at the show. >>I think the biggest thing that I, that I want people to understand, and I actually gave this talk at the cloud native storage day on day zero is that cloud native storage is an approach to storage. There's not a location for storage. And I think pure storage that really defines to me the way we're going about this, we're trying to be cloud native storage wherever you need it. So that's, that's really the takeaway I'd like people to have about pure >>and cute and storage for Cuban. It is, doesn't have to be hard. We are here all day today as well. So, um, I mean this is a challenge the industry seeing today and uh, we have a solution to solve that for you. >>All right, well that's a, that's a bold statement, uh, to help end us as Shilpi. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman back with more coverage here from cube con cloud native con 2019 stay classy, San Diego. And thanks for watching the queue.

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. (air whooshes) >> Welcome to theCUBE's day two coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019 from Austin, Texas. I am Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, here is VP of Strategy Matt Kixmoeller. Kix, welcome back! >> Thank you very much, happy to be here. >> This has been a, being shot out of a cannon. Yesterday and today, lots of news. First of all, happy 10th anniversary to you and Pure. >> Thank you very much, yeah. >> Tremendous amount of innovation, as Tara Lee said yesterday, overnight in 10 years. (laughs) >> It's a really fun time at Pure. Just something about the nostalgia of 10 years gets people, naturally, to start thinking about what the next 10 years are about. And so, there's just a lot of that spirit right now at the company, so it's almost like people are really charging into the second chapter with a lot of energy, so that's cool. >> A lot of energy, I think, all fueled by this massive sea of orange that has descended on Austin. >> Absolutely. >> So, four announcements yesterday. Let's start with Cloud Block Store, what you guys are doing with AWS, and kind of this vision of Pure's cloud strategy. >> Yeah, look, the cloud discussions I've had with customers here at the show have been awesome. And I think more than anything, people have realized that we've really built something very unique with Cloud Block Store, something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry right now. And, you know, if you look at kind of other storage vendors over the time, people have certainly taken their storage OSes and put them in the cloud kind of as a test-dev experiment, a way to try things out, but never really thinking, "I want to build something "that runs tier-one applications." And that was our goal from day one. We looked at the Amazon platform and said, they really built EBS, their block offering, as kind of a way to beat boot VMs, but it was really never meant for a way to run mission-critical applications. So they've been very open in partnering with us to say, look, let's bring this capability onto the platform. And we really rearchitected our Purity Operating Environment, and so, the whole lower half of that is really optimized for the AWS services to help customers move tier-one apps to the cloud. >> Was that joint engineering, or was it really mostly Pure doing that work? >> You know, it was Pure engineering in the sense that we wrote the code, but there was a lot of co-architecture work with AWS so we could fundamentally understand the basics of all of their services and how to optimize for it. And one of the big realizations and choices that came out of that was not to base the storage layer of this on EBS, but instead to base it on S3. And if you look at your average cloud customer, they really use S3 as the storage basis for the apps they build on Amazon, and so, S3 is the 11-nines durable storage platform there. And so our whole goal here was, how do you use S3, but still deliver the level of performance you'd expect out of a tier-one block environment? >> Well, when you read the sort of cloud storage press release du jour, you can't really get into the nuance, but if I understand it correctly, you guys essentially have architected, using AWS services, a new class of block storage that runs on AWS, but looks like Pure. >> That's exactly it. >> So you're essentially front-ending cheap S3 storage with high-priority EC2s, you've got some mirroring for rights to give it high availability, and again, it looks like Pure. >> Kix: Yep. >> So you win, 'cause you're making money on the software, (laughs) AWS is selling services, and the customer has a Pure experience. Did we get that right? >> Yeah, and I think the combination, the one-two punch, that's been very interesting for customers is not only what we're doing with Cloud Block Store, but the new Pure as-a-Service offering. And so, Pure as-a-Service is our as-a-service consumption mechanism that allows you to essentially subscribe to or rent Pure arrays from Pure in your data center, but it's a license that can go between on-prem and cloud. And so, imagine you're a customer that is mostly on-prem today, but you have that mandate, "I've got to get to the cloud." You might need more storage, but the last thing you want to do is commit to another three- or five-year purchase of a storage array that just puts off that cloud journey that much longer. So a customer can subscribe to Pure as-a-Service, they'll maybe subscribe to 100 terabytes, and we put an array in their data center right now, but a year from now, they decide they're going to move 50 terabytes to Cloud Block Store in Amazon, that's just a transparent movement, they're already licensed for it. And so that-- >> And there's already, oh, sorry, sorry. >> Kix: No, go ahead. >> There's already customers that are in beta with Cloud Block Store, is that correct? >> Correct, yeah. >> Lisa: Any interesting insights that you can share without giving away secret sauce? >> Oh, absolutely. You know, I think the thing that pleased us the most about the beta was really the divergence of use cases. You know, we created this, but there's always, you create something, and you don't know what people are going to do with it, right? And so, we have this goal of going after tier-one apps. Obviously, there's a lot of people that are just focused on migration, "How do I get the tier-one app from on-prem to cloud?" And so that was what I would say would be the dominant use case. But there were a lot of interested in test-dev type use cases. And really interesting, I think we saw it in both directions. So we saw some customers who wanted to develop their app in the cloud, but then deploy on-prem. We saw the opposite, we saw people that wanted to develop on-prem but then deploy in the scalable infrastructure in the cloud. And so I thought that was quite interesting. >> How much of the impetus to do that offering was hardcore customer demand, "We need this," versus, "Hey, we need to embrace the cloud "and make it a tailwind and not be defensive about it"? >> You know, I think when we looked at what was going to be the buy-in criteria for the storage array of tomorrow, fundamentally, this is it, right? People want on-prem infrastructure that's connected to the cloud and provides them a roadmap or a bridge to the cloud. And I think we've seen a big change in mindset over even the last couple years. I'd say two or three years ago, the mindset from customers was, "I'm all in on cloud." I think we've seen that soften, where they've realized that the cloud is not a panacea, it's usually actually not cheaper or faster, but it is more agile, it is more flexible, and so, a combination of on-prem and cloud is the right answer. And so, what does that mean from a storage platform? Storage is the hard part. And so, I then need a storage architecture that can support both on-prem and cloud and drive commonality, as opposed to having it be totally different architecture. >> Was Outposts at all a catalyst in your thinking on this, or was this happening way before you even saw that? >> No, we started this effort before that, but I think Outposts is a good example, I believe, of how Amazon is just getting serious about saying, look, we can't ask everybody to rearchitect every application for web scale. There are certain apps that it won't make sense to rearchitect. How do we bring those to the cloud in an efficient way? And those are really the types of applications and the first-generation Cloud Block Store is perfect for. You connect your existing on-prem app, move it to the cloud without changing it, and then maybe slowly you rearchitect parts of the application, you evolve it over time, but that's not a gate to going to the cloud anymore. >> I like the way you said it, you thought about what storage is going to look like in the next 10 years. And we've said this a lot, it's the cloud experience, bringing that cloud experience to your data is what storage is going to look like, you know, wherever it lives, is going to look like in the next 10 years. >> Absolutely, and I think the other real mindset shift I think we've seen is how people are thinking about truly running their on-prem environment more like a service. You know, if you look at, the key message that we had at the show here was really the Modern Data Experience, and defining for customers what that meant. And in a lot of ways, I've been in the storage industry for a little while, I think back, 20 years ago, the buzzword was utility storage. I think one of our competitors had that as their slogan sometime in the '90s. >> Yeah, right. >> And the reality, though, is when you talk to most storage teams, they just never did that. They still ran a bunch of arrays on a project-by-project basis, and it didn't look at all like the cloud. And so, now people have learned the lessons from the public cloud and said, "We really need to apply those on-prem "to truly bring our infrastructure together "into much more of a virtual pool, "truly deliver it on demand, abstract consumption "from the back-end infrastructure to give flexibility." And so, that's really what we're trying to deliver with the Modern Storage Experience, is to say, look, let's get out of the world of array-by-array management. If a customer buys 50 or 100 of our arrays, how do they take that pool of arrays and turn it into a block service, turn it into a file service, turn it into an object service for their customers, with real abstractions and real APIs for those services that have nothing to do with the back-end infrastructure? >> Dave: Mm-hm. >> When Charlie talked yesterday, Kix, about the Modern Data Experience, the three S's pop up. >> Kix: Yeah. (clears throat) >> Simple, seamless, sustainable. But as IT is getting more and more complex, and customers are in a multi-cloud environment, not necessarily from a strategic perspective, right, acquisition, et cetera, how does Pure actually take that word, simple, from a marketing concept into reality for your customers? >> Yeah, you know, I think simple is the most underappreciated but biggest differentiator (coughs) that Pure has. I was recalling for someone, you talked to Coz earlier today. I had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of Pure, (coughs) excuse me, with Coz, and we were just debating, I mean, this is before we wrote any code at all, about, what would be Pure's long-term differentiator? And I was kind of like, "Ah, we'll be the flash people, or high-performance, or whatever," and he's like, "No, no, no, we're going to be simple. "We are going to deliver a culture that drives "simplicity into our products, "and that'll be game-changing." And I thought he was a little crazy at the time, but he's absolutely turned out to be right. And if you look over the years, that started with just an appliance experience, a 10-card install, just a really easy environment. But that's manifested itself into every product we create. And it's really hard to reverse-engineer that. It's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build into the DNA of the company. >> Yeah, he kind of shared that with us, Lisa. He was basically, my words, saying, you don't ever want to suboptimize simple to get a little knob turn on performance, because you'll be turning knobs your entire career. There's a lot of storage arrays out there that, it's all about turning the knobs. >> Kix: Yeah, well-- >> If you can't fix it, you feature it. >> Oh, and if you think about really trying to automate something, it's really hard to automate complex stuff. If something's simple, if it's consistent, it plugs into an automation framework. >> You talked about "get your 10X"-- >> Kix: Yeah. >> I think, is that what you said? And an entrepreneur who was very successful once told me, "I look for two things, a large market and a 10X impact." >> Yep. >> So, what is your 10X? >> You know, we have two 10Xs at the show this year. So first was really kind of a 10-year jump in performance. When we first entered, people were used to 10-millisecond latency from disk, and we introduced them to one-millisecond latency. Now, with the shipping in direct memory and bringing SCM into the architecture, we can do 100 microseconds. That's another 10X. And so, it's hard to ignore that. >> Lisa: That's game-changing, as you said yesterday. >> (coughs) Exactly. The other is really around our next product, FlashArray C, which brings flash to tier-two data. And there, it's all about consolidation. Most people have not used flash to fix tier one, but their biggest problem now is tier two. They have less-important applications, but because they haven't optimized that, it's taking up way too much of IT time. And so, FlashArray C is, "How do I go "and basically consolidate 10X consolidation "at that tier-two level to really bring "sanity to tier-two storage?" >> And you've got NAM pricing, we talked to Charlie about this, that it ultimately should be a tailwind for you guys as NAM pricing comes down, as NOR fab capacity's coming online in China to go after the thumb drives, right, so that's going to leave the enterprise for all the traditional flash guys that we know and love. So that should open up new markets for you. Today, if you look at pricing for flash C class storage, if I got it right, I'm guessing $1, $1.50 a gigabyte. You see hybrid still at probably half that, 65, 70 cents. Do you see that compressing over the next, let's call it 18, 24 months? >> Absolutely, I mean, what we can do with this product is really bring out flash at disk prices. And so, if you think about the difference, I mean, what we now have in the product line is two platforms, FlashArray X, optimized for performance, at hundreds of microseconds of latency, but C, at a little bit slower performance, still in the millisecond range, can really get down now to those disk prices you just mentioned. And so, it fundamentally gives customers the chance to ask, "Can I really now eliminate disk from the data center?" You know, as I said in my keynote, that the slogan from Pure from day one has been "the all-flash data center." And 10 years ago, people didn't believe it. We were maybe leaning over our skis a little bit in doing that. It now really feels possible to go and have the all-flash data center. >> Well, I'll tell you, we believed it. David Floyer picked up on it early on, and he was-- >> Kix: Yeah. >> He was actually probably too aggressive with (laughs) his forecast. We missed the NAND supply constraints. >> Kix: Yeah. >> But now that seems to be loosening up. >> Well, and, look, one of the things that really helps us build the perfect product around QLC is the work we've done to integrate with raw flash. We cannot just use QLC, but we can use it really efficiently, and the challenge there is to make it reliable. It's inherently a less-reliable flash. And so, that's what we're good at, taking things that are less reliable and making them enterprise-grade. >> And your custom flash modules allow that? >> Yeah. >> Can you add some color to that? >> Basically, what we do is we source raw NANDs, put it in our system, but then do all the work in software to manage the flash. And so, when you have a less-reliable flash medium like QLC, generally, what you have to do is add more flash to overprovision and be careful writing to it. And so, when do it globally, we don't do it inside every SSD, we can do it across the whole system, which makes the whole thing more efficient, thus allowing us to drive costs down even more. >> Hm. >> One of the things that we have heard over the last day and a half from customers, even those that were onstage yesterday, those that were on theCUBE yesterday and those that will come on today, is, they talk about the customer experience. They don't talk about FlashBlade, FlashArray, they're not talking about product names. They're talking about maybe workloads that they're running on there. But the interesting thing is, when we go to some other shows, you hear a lot of names of boxes. >> Kix: Yep. >> We haven't heard that. Talk to me a little bit about how Pure has evolved and really maybe even created this customer experience that's focused on simplicity, on outcomes, that is, in your perspective, why people aren't talking about the specific technologies-- >> Kix: Yeah. >> But rather, this single pane of glass that they have. >> Look, when we started the company, I obviously talked to a lot of customers, and I found, in general, there was frustration with products, but they also just generally didn't like their storage company. And so, from day one, we said, how do we reinvent the experience? Of course, we have to build a better product, and we can use flash as kind of an excuse to do that, but we also want to work on the business model of storage, and we also want to work on the customer experience, the support experience, the just 360 view of how you deal with a vendor. And so, from day one, we've been very disciplined about all of that. Going all-flash was a key part of the product. Evergreen has probably been our quintessential investment in just, how do you change that buying cycle? And so, you can buy into an experience and nondisrupt the way they evolve, versus replace your storage array every three to five years. And then, I think the overall customer experience just comes from the culture of the company, right? Everybody at Pure is centered on making customers happy, doing the right thing, being a vendor that you actually want to work with. And that's not something you can really legislate, that's not something you can put rules around, it's just the culture at Pure. >> When we talked about Evergreen yesterday with a number of customers, including Formula 1. I said, "You know, as a marketer, "how much of that nondisruptive operations, "take me from marketing to reality," and all of them articulated the exact value prop that you guys talk about. It was really remarkable. And another customer that we talked to, I think from a legal firm here in the U.S., didn't even do a POC, talked to a peer of his at another company that was a Pure fan-- >> Kix: Yep. >> And (snaps fingers) bought it right on the spot. So the validation that you're getting from the voice of the customer is pretty remarkable. >> Yeah, this is our number one asset, right? And I mean, so when we think about, how do we spread the religion of Pure, it's just all about giving voice to our customers, so they can share their stories. 'Cause that's so much more credible than anything we say, obviously, as a vendor. >> You're one of only two billion-dollar independent storage companies, which, we love independent storage companies, 'cause, you know, the competition's great. How far out do you look and do you think about being an independent storage company? You've seen, as a "somewhat" historian of the industry, you've seen TAM expansion, you guys are working hard on TAM expansion now, new workloads. You got backup stuff goin' on. You got the cloud as an opportunity, multi-cloud as an opportunity. So you got some runway there. >> Yeah. >> Beyond that, you've seen companies try to vertically integrate, buy backup software companies, you know, a converged infrastructure, whatever it is. How far out do you think about it from a business model standpoint? Or do you not worry about that? >> You know, look, to put it in context a little bit, you look at the latest IDC numbers, we're maybe one-third in to the transition to flash, right? The world still buys two-thirds disk, one-third flash. That's a huge opportunity. We're now five or six globally in storage. That's a few spots that we have to go, right? And so, we're not at all market-share limited, or opportunity limited, even within the storage industry, so we could make a much, much larger company. And so, that's mission number one at Pure. But when we think beyond that, that's just a launching point. And so, you've seen us do some stuff here at the show where we're getting into different types of storage. The first obvious expansion is, let's make sure anything that is a storage product comes from Pure, and there's obvious categories we don't play in today. You saw us introduce a new product around VM Analytics Pro, where we're reaching up the stack and adding real value at the VM tier, taking our Meta AI technology and using to give VM-level optimization recommendations. And so, yeah, I think we increasingly understand that IT's a full-stack game, and so storage is maybe the hardest part of the stack, and that gives us a great base to work from, but we don't constrain our engineers to say, you can only solve storage problems. >> Geography's another upside for you. I mean, most of your business, the vast majority of your business, is in the U.S., whereas you take a company like some of these other ones around here, more than half their business is outside the U.S, so. >> Yeah, no, our international businesses, we've been international five or six years now, and it felt like the first couple years are investment years, and it took time. But we're really starting to see them grow and take hold, and so, it's great to see the international business grow. And I think Pure as a company is also learning to really think internationally, not just because we want the opportunity, but the largest customers in the world that we now deal with have international operations, and they want to deal with one Pure globally. >> So when you're talking, and maybe this has even happened the last day and a half, with a prospective customer who is still investing a lot on-prem, still not yet gone the route of flash, as you were saying, those numbers speak for themselves. What do you say to them? >> If they're not on flash yet? >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah, to show them the benefits. I mean, what's that conversation like? >> It's rare, to be honest, now to find customers who haven't started with flash. But I think the biggest thing I try to encourage folks is that flash is not just about performance. And when I look at the history of people who have embraced Pure, they usually start with some performance need, but very quickly, they realize it's all about simplicity, it's all about efficiency. And if they can make storage fundamentally simpler and more efficient, they free up dollars to put towards innovation. And we unlock the ability to drive dollars towards innovation, and then we drive storage to the new innovation projects, like analytics, like AI, et cetera. And so, we just try to talk about that broader opportunity. And I think that's the hardest thing for people to grasp, because the IT history has always been lots of ROI pitches that say, "Hey, this thing costs a lot, but trust me, "you'll make it up in all these other benefits," that no one believes. And so, you just have to get them to taste it to begin with, and when they see it for themselves, that's when it clicks and they start to really understand the ROI around that. >> Well, congratulations on 10 years of Pure unlocking innovation, not just internally, but externally across the globe. We appreciate your time, Kix. >> Thank you, we're looking forward to the next 10 years. >> All right, to the next 10! For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 2019. (upbeat music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Howdy, y'all Welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Day one of pure accelerate 19 from Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin. My co host is Day Volonte. We got a couple of gentlemen here chatting with us. Next, we've got one of our alumni. Mike Bundy's back head of Cisco Worldwide alliances for appear. Mike. Welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Sporting the very dapper >> It's not ours today, but it's enough. >> I like it. Very subtle on we've got Andrew Tenant joining us for the first time Senior manager Worldwide sales at Cisco Andrew, Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we know we've had lots of conversations with Cisco and Cure Isis. Go live. Just a few months ago, Mike was on with this bright orange blazer. You guys have been partners for about four years now, Mike, let's start with you and talk about the evolution of that partnership from Bogota Market. A field A sales perspective, right? Overall partnership. How are things going? >> Well, things were great from a mo mentum perspective. We're we're on track to eclipse You know, I'm not supposed talk about a lot of numbers, but in the next year we will eclipse together a billion dollar run rate >> with partnership, which is tremendous milestone >> in a 4 to 5 year regulations. So things were, well, you know, it started from the field and what customers were requiring. And now, in the last, um, year, we've we've added about six new CDs were up to 22 we have three in the queue between now and the calendar year. So in terms of the growth, the product development and momentum, it's it's tremendous. And what we'll talk about today will be kind of one of the next generations and errors that that will hit on regarding this. >> And you guys were also we had a conversation a little bit ago with with Nathan Hall. Really, this partnership with Cisco and Pure is now getting started in the field, as you were talking about, but it's all the way down into the engineering level in terms of being very pervasive throughout. You guys have really achieve that. Yes, >> Yeah, top to bottom, right From From that field, engagement began. It was watching our customers embrace purest innovation. Right? And everywhere you turned pure was showing up, and it was it was really the field. Say, Hey, we got to get on board with this. And Tim Shanahan, who's part of our correctional organization on the descent aside, said, Hey, this is a big deal. We need to get in front of this thing. So that's really you. Mention where it started. And now we're doing everything from integrating products, right, integrating management tools to try to bring that together for our customers. And it's It's an awesome partnership. >> Absolutely. So where's the product focus. Where do we start? >> Yes, so you joked, right? Fibre channel. I think I remember Fibre Channel from many years ago. It Cisco, and then you look back and suddenly it's not dead, right? The truth is, five channels the best protocol for mission critical storage traffic that's ever been built. It's probably best critical out there for that. It's not sexy, though, right, so we can't took our eye off the ball at Cisco. But as we now develop these next generation storage technologies, there's never been a more important time to bring that switching fabric into play right It's absolutely critical that we have the right tools to accomplish what our customers trying to deliver from applications standpoint. So the agility, the visibility, just the overall performance is more important today. That was back in sort of that the heyday of fibre channel, if you will. Right? So the partnership that we're working on right now is making sure that we're we're maximizing the outcome of these investments. Custer's making with all of yours storage offerings, leveraging a sand infrastructure that's compatible with it and really gonna make it sing. >> And you're right and you go back 10 plus years and it was a vice scuzzy was coming in, but had some f f C bigots is that I will never hang on to win the NFC. Oh, we now you got N v m e over fabric. We'll talk about that. But so from pure perspective, you have always had to pay attention to that segment of the market. Guys went hard after the high end. Of'em sees business, which was heavy fiber channel, absolutely early days. >> Yeah, I mean four out of five of our razor attached fibre channel to a customer's environment. It is core to what we do. And we're excited about the resell opportunity that we just started with pure because, you know, Andrew and I joke last week, but we put pen to paper in terms of we believe our our introduction of this is a re silk and help them grow their sand business by 35 40%. And that's the kind of disruption that we're seeing with our A raise in the market. And we think because of how we're evolving customers to modernize those networks, that we can drag the Sisko Fibre Channel business right along with it. >> This is a sorry Mike. This is a re sell pure reselling wth the MDS product line. How is you the pure Channel? Responding to this news? >> They love it because it's it's a new buying center, you know that they're getting to talk to Ah, and it helps us, you know, establish Maur, you know, understanding the customers, whole business, not just from a storage perspective. So >> So how was envy? Emmy changing landscape? What do you guys seeing there? I mean, you guys, I think the first another first Charlie didn't mention it today on stage, So money first. It's hard to keep track of. But how is that affecting? You know what's going on in the field? >> Yeah. So I mean, again, it's the timing of this generational shift to next. Gen. Sarge, envy me being probably the most critical of that. If we look at what happened with all flash A raise, for example, all of those ended up on critical mission critical workloads and all ended up on fibre Channel 80. 85% of those end up on that legacy technology because it was so capable of getting the job done. Envy me is gonna take us another leap forward so customers will be challenged toe have something that lives both in the what they have today and bridges them to that future proof state. Right? So it's absolutely critical that you have tools that are gonna let you adopt envy me as it makes sense on carry it operationally alongside the same modality that you had for those workloads in the past, right? That's the key. Is that the folks we're gonna own this stuff going forward to the ones who own it now, right? Just with maybe older technology >> and the business impact is what you could do more with less performance, lower costs, more >> last performance, visibility right so you can help. Troubleshoot way had a situation not that long ago where a customer had Honore, not it was a competitive ray, right? It was getting hammered and it was locking up. And when they looked at the the forensics coming off, the rate said they had 4000 I ops off of that array. A very nominal amount. It should have been the problem. It shifted the focus elsewhere. Well, using some of the telemetry built into the MPs platform, it was obvious that there were 25,000 I ops hitting that array because VM, where was doing a lot of command control traffic to the array. So having that visibility at the's scales and speeds, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't see what's going on. You could be flying blind and struggling and everybody loses there. So >> you know we're excited about this because we don't want to bring our rays into an environment that's not suited for high end performance and reliability, cause that's what we've kind of made our brand on when it comes to customer networks, especially with the X 60 and nineties that we launched the year ago. They're all envy me ready. So we want to make sure that, as we did, ploy that that the entire infrastructure's ready and Cisco, in my opinion, has the best. Every product is 64 gig capable. It's envy me today. And so we're ready, you know, envy me, you know, in the end, if you will. So when when the host are ready to take advantage of this full network and full storage system, we're ready. Um, an Andrew also mentioned analytics. So, you know, >> we we >> extract ourselves on the analytics capabilities of our system as it works today with after one and so that allows us to, you know, very quickly using machine learning solve most of our customers problems. In fact, we open about 85% of our own customers tak cases for them because we predict when things were going to get rough and bumpy. So as we extend and bridge that together with what Cisco has and their Sandwich Analytics capability, it's gonna make the experience way different than it would be on a competitive sand fabric and a competitive storage array, whether it's flash or not. So that's that's what we're doing together, which makes fiber Channel better and more unique than it has been in the past. >> In terms of adoption. You mentioned when the host guys already, What's the blocker? There's just silicon. Is it just, >> you know, you could You could take Cisco's example. You know, they're they're looking at the new memory technology. And how do they apply that to the interface adapter? And how do you handle that situation? So, you know, as they evolve their next platform, it will be pervasive in that. And I'm sure that the other you know, host providers are gonna be doing >> standards standards. Low hanging fruit was envy me over converge Ethernet, right, because that was kind of the first place to start. But reality is weaken were the only vendor who can provide both of those in the Cisco side. Right. So we have the same tooling on the same, actually administrative tooling on on either. Right. So that's ah, terrific. >> And it's not just the infrastructure from the hostess, the operating system as well. So you know Lennox can take advantage of it in a different way. So, you know, we're seeing most of our deployments today, our fibre channel over Ethernet, because the the customer base that air deploying that are purely a Linux based environment. So they're able to do that. So, as you know, not all of our enterprising and commercial customers run that environment. So it's It's a little bit of the technology. It's a little bit of the Intel cycle. It's a little bit of the operating system, but the point is, we're ready. And there's a long, long road map. You know, for customers if we go this route, >> when should customers start thinking about this terms >> immediately? Right? Ultimately, it's not a question of if it's a question of when, but if they're, if they're getting things ready now, if you're making investment today, you can make an investment today that accommodates what you're doing today. Like back in the day. If we were selling a storage platform, the sandwich is sort of this necessary thing behind the scenes. That wasn't necessarily you could actually let it sit there for a couple of generations of the storage it was supporting. That's no longer going to be the case right, because, quite simply, the evolution on the storage front. And it's so much faster that you need to make sure the thing you're plugging it into. That's a simple question for any customer there. What'd you plugging this into right? Because at the end of the day, if it's just that that old san you have sitting around it may or may not be capable. Regardless of Endor, right, it's it's gonna actually diminished value you get in the time value of that investment you've made in this incredible platform. >> So where are you having these customer conversations that we talk about the joint go to market in the field? You know, it's It's not just about fibre channel and speed and storage, these air business critical work loads that are being protected and run and access to be able to extract all these insights. When you're talking with customers, where are you? You're not at the storage. I've been level. I imagine this is a much more business intensive conversation. It's a >> great question. Go ahead. >> So I think you know people that are driving the cloud platform strategy for the infrastructure. They obviously need to understand how. How does this work in a hybrid cloud or multi cloud environment? Then you've got, you know, the people that are developing the mission Mission critical business APS. Whether that's you know, Oracle s a p et cetera, et cetera. But it's also the non traditional business APS that are coming to play things that leverage stores that are file or object oriented, or kubernetes or things like that. It's so you're having discussions with the teams that are deploying the apse for the business and that will drive and dictate the requirements. Is that you know, we're trying to help the infrastructure on the cloud infrastructure teams adapt to >> multi cloud piece gets interesting here, right? Because us now talk about building massively scalable distributed systems, and you're not gonna be able to You don't want to necessarily ship all your data around, but you want to ship the metadata and be smart enough to know where the data is so you can go ship to compute right to the data, right? And I >> think that that's another interesting thing. And a positive aspect of leveraging some things we've already done with Cisco is you know they have the concept of a C I anywhere. No, you know, just like we're doing with Cloud Block store of extending that storage capability into the cloud. Cisco has done the same with a C I. So it's not just it's not sure, making sure the workload in the data payload our mobile, but also the application. And that's, you know, yes, that that may not be the case today for Fibre Channel, but the technology is there if the customer demands it. So that's 60% of Cisco's revenue in the data center comes from his networking core. That's what we're more excited about. The next generation's partnership is we feel like we've done a good job and built momentum with the computer part of their business, and I think as we evolve into this part of the business, it's gonna It's gonna be better for customers. In the end, >> it's either today, customers gonna spend more time operating this than anything, right, and really, that's all about visibility. Meantime, the resolution just how quickly they can make sure that those this thing's running and and as proactively get in front of congestion and issues at a time if they can. So it's Ah, it's a complimentary hardware software problem solved. You have to be able to do things at extremely high rates of speed with visibility I've never seen before. So analytics built into a six incredibly important stuff to get that streaming right out of the chip so you could tell what's going on at any level of the stack. Where is Like I said today, we've seen many cases now where their challenges in the network and in the sand and on the array and everyone's blind to it because our >> engineers love it because the monitoring and the scoping capability that were required, a lot of sand fabrics to deploy would require extra tools. Extra tap kits Cisco has at built in the A six so literally. It's just enable that with software. And you can do all the diagnostics you ever wanted to do at the at the wire and the fiber level, >> as opposed to a discreet probe. Exactly a disruptive drives the >> costs way out. The complexity reduces risk troubleshooting floor space, you know, the whole you know >> that's big time >> based. So today there's an issue. Last night Hey, Mike, what happened last night? I know. Let me know. That happens again. That's pretty much the ticket Close, right? We could actually go back in time now kind of a DVR and actually see now for the first time in a sand fabric what's actually happening and go back and reconstruct it to figure out how we proactively prevent it going on from the next time. So >> so, Mike, Last question. We're out of time. But last question for you. Everybody says future proof. Pardon? Everybody says future proved how are is pure delivering that with Cisco. What is it gonna mean to that business leader that I have an infrastructure in place that will truly be the food? Your proof? >> Good question. So you know, it's evergreen is the term that pure uses for you know what we do. So you never buy the same storage twice, right? And if you look at the platform that Cisco has for MDS, it is clearly capable to 400 gig capability. And today most networks are purchased for 30 to get capable with 16 gig optics, so they have 32 64. There's a long way to go here so the platform and their innovation will continue this to be, you know, a future proof network that marries up with our evergreen story. So we were excited We wouldn't get in this relationship if we felt that it was not gonna provide the same level of benefits and standard that we have for our own customers. So >> correct. Mike Andrew. Thank you for joining David me on the Q. But way. Look forward to hearing what happens in your five of the pure Cisco relationship. I know. We'll probably stay tuned. I know we'll see you again. Thank you for your time. Thanks for David. Dante. I Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from pure accelerate 19.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome to Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is the fourth pure accelerate. I'm here with my co host, David. Dante and David are pleased to be welcoming back to the Cube, the chairman and CEO of Pier storage. Charlie Giancarlo. Charlie, Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thank you. Such a pleasure to be here >> already. Getting loud on the keynote. Just rapping about 3000 folks here. Standing room only. We just came from the keynote. Something symbolic. Besides, the location of this event is that you are just about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of pure storage >> of our founding. October 1st. >> Yes, just around the corner. Tremendous innovation. As you say it. Overnight success in 10 years delivering 10 X and prevents us a little bit of a preview about what you shared in the Kino. What's to come in the next 10 years? >> Exactly right. It is wonderful to be able to sell. They celebrated birthday and able to talk about what you've delivered over the 1st 10 years. But it also gave us the opportunity to really say Okay, what's the second decade going to be about? What is it gonna be like? And way were planning not only for this, but for the year that we were gonna put in place of development. We said, Well, you know, we've brought a lot of things to storage and to the storage array. We made it much simpler. We made it upgradeable, non disruptive Lee, meaning that customers would have a continuously new product in their environment. Andi started to bring it into the cloud. And we said, You know, for our second decade, we want to transform the entire storage experience. We don't want it to be about boxes and a raise. We wanted to be about a storage system for the entire enterprise. That's multi protocol, multi cloud, multi tearing or what we call storage classes and entirely automated so that when an application calls for storage, service is it's delivered automatically without humans getting involved. That is completely as a service consumed as a service, delivered as a service entirely automated in the back end. So this is the goal that we have for our second decade. We think we're going to deliver it over the next several years. But of course, for us to go down the entire customer journey is a great mission for us for next decade. >> So in terms of, you know, I don't want to make it sound like the first decade was easy because you were really the only all flash array company. Thio reach escape velocity and many. But at the same time you caught DMC flat footed. You drove a truck through their install base and obviously the rest is history. I feel like the main job of the CEO is too. Is Tam expansion, right? You're focused on that. There's a I there's new workloads. There's the cloud, there's multi cloud. And in your entering new territory now, yes, maybe no. Guys like eight of us, they're not flat footed, right? You've got Europe against Google and Cisco and Microsoft in the multi cloud arena. But you're a specialist on one. If you could talk about your vision in terms of tam expansion, >> thank you very much for that question. The TAM expansion really is following where solid state takes us. You know, we've gone from a world that was where believe it or not, most computers still had mechanical systems operating them. It's sort of like having a mechanical calculator rather than Elektronik calculator, right? We had mechanical discs in our computers literally spinning rust, right? And it's only been in the last decade where a semiconductor, you know, where solid state has taken the place of that called Flash, right? Well, as that continues to get less expensive, we now can bring not only flash performance into disc economics, but more importantly, now we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for having greater flexibility with our data. As data grows it. Now we say it has gravity. That is, it gets heavy. It gets hard to manage hard, hard to move between different environments. And now a lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data, managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data center environment. We want to eliminate all that. We want to automate all of that, you know, on the theme of decades. Two decades ago, every application had its own individual communication stack. There were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company. One decade ago, every application had its own custom hardware stack and custom operating system stack. Well, today there's one network. It's called the Internet. Today, everything, every application, every server is virtualized, allowing mobility. And yet storage is still static way want this decade a bit to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment? >> So >> what if you >> could compare this opportunity to some other mega trends that you've been part of? You were there in the early days of wireless when nobody wanted to buy wireless saw the I P changeup. People think the minicomputer was killed by the microprocessor in apart. It was, but it was I p. It was destroyed. Many computer everybody had their own networks. >> Where do you >> put so that the trend that you're after? How do you compare and what are your expectations? >> I think it's an analogous trend, and it's you know, this long term trend of vertical, whether it's vertical industries or vertical technology's going to becoming horizontal. So let's just give a couple of examples again. Networking was tightly tied to the application, and every application had its own network and its own set of protocols right that was vertically tied. Now networking is horizontal. It's all I P. Right again, we'll go back to applications. Applications had a vertical stack. The entire stack hardware and software was tied to specific application today that's been made virtualized and therefore horizontal. You could move applications among different servers. Storage is still vertical. It's still tied very tightly to the to the rack. And there are a lot of good reasons for that. You needed a high speed interface. High speed networking didn't exist. Disks were slow. They could only support one application at a time, with solid state that no longer exists. So now weaken, make storage free. We can make it ah, horizontal layer rather than tightly tied to any individual application. And that's what the next decades gonna be about >> Business leaders today, I feel there's so much more open than when we started in this. In this industry, where you know the famous line about Ken Olsen, Unix is snake oil and those that you old enough to remember that business leaders today they recognize the trend is your friend right. So gentleman from AWS at 88% of the customers and a gardener survey said their cloud first, but 86% are still spending on Prem. Right In the old days, when I said I'll keep it on Prime and Amazon so we'll keep it in the cloud. And yet you guys, customers, they're sort of forcing you to come together. Yes, I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic and specifically your cloud strategy? >> Absolutely So our cloud strategy is really quite simple. We want to make the cloud and every cloud appear to an application developer to be the same as it is on Prem. With all the advanced service is the advanced applications. It interfaces the same AP eyes because largely applications have been especially primary to your applications have been developed for with on Prem interfaces and on Prem service is the cloud, while wonderful from the standpoint of being able to be dynamic, does not have sophisticated service is for data. And so by making it appear to be the same to the application into the developer on premise in the cloud, it just makes the entire system or dynamic it allows for for companies to more easily move applications to the cloud or to another cloud or back on Prem. And it changes the dynamic and the decision making of enterprises not to. How much work do we have to do to move something to the cloud? But where is it best placed economically and based on service is we take it out of being a technology decision and make it more of an economic decision. >> Why were you in a unique position relative to your competition? I mean, why can't deli emcee or net app for IBM sort of take that same AP I economy mentality and drive it through their portfolio and get to market fast? And why is your pure unique? >> Well, for one, it takes investment will invest 18% of revenue in R and D this year. Nearly all of our competitors are spending less than 5% there, really viewing storage as an old antiquated market, not as a high tech market. They're reaping, if you will, rather than selling on re really view storage as next frontier off great innovation and our competitors largely don't see that. >> Let's talk about a little bit digging into the evolution of your Amazon Web service is relationship. We talked about that a minute ago when you guys talked about Announce Cloud Block store. There's dozens of customers in beta. Are they viewing it as this bridge, the hybrid cloud? And what are some of the benefits? If you could talk about it from any of those customers that are abated, what are they? What are you starting to see so far? That's really exciting, that this is the delivering or will be the modern data experience Way had >> a great speaker from eight of us onstage today, and I think he summed it up really well. At the end of his talk, he said that now the migration to cloud is easy because pure has done all the heavy listed lifting for you to take your enterprise applications and move them into the cloud. I mean, I think all the cloud players recognize that while they have provided some great capabilities, especially for Dev ops, that the level of of sophistication and the completion of service is for things like very complex enterprise. APS have not been fully accomplished yet, and so they recognize that experts like pure who have been delivering against enterprise primary tier applications for a long time have a lot to add in terms of the sophistication of our product in their environment. I think what they also recognize is that it's hard for customers to rewrite their applications to a completely different set of data. AP eyes and mind. You'd not only does, for example, he ws have different AP eyes in their cloud than customers have on Prem. But Azure has different AP eyes and then Amazon. Google has yet different, and so for a customer to write their application three or four times is really beyond what is in the interest of most customers. We have taken all that heavy lifting and enabled a customer to take their applications. They've already written, whether on cloud or in the print on Prem, and to move it in those other environments with much less investment. >> And let me let me try to explain, as I understand it, and make sure I got a right is essentially, What you've done is take the pure software stack and management framework and then using AWS Service's E C two High Priority E. C two's front ended on s3 cheap Best three created block storage. That's higher availability, probably faster rights, right? Three Real Boat reads and writes, are probably comparable with the pure experience. That's right on, Baby. You got to pay a little bit more for that. But you get you get better availability and there's value there. >> Actually, the beautiful thing is that we create an environment in AWS where it's faster, that is, the storage is faster. That it has a very higher reliability has. All of the service is that customers want tohave such as snapshots, replication and encryption. And the entire bill between what they pay for pure and what they pay for eight of us is no more than what they would pay for A W S on its own. For those storage service is >> because you're using cheaper s3. To me, this is brilliant. Eight others is happy because they're selling E. C. To an s3. You're happy because you're making money on your software. Stock was happy because they get the pure experience in the cloud. It's exactly actually quite innovative. >> It's almost matching >> quickly. Talk about Nan pricing. I know that was an issue this quarter. It hurt revenues a little bit on the stock drop, but then when you saw everybody else announced, the stock went back up because you're was 28% growth to everybody else's minus 16 minus 21 0 was the best. But to me, lower Nan pricing is a is an opportunity for you. It's a tailwind to go eat into more of the spinning dis market. Do you see it that way? >> No. Absolutely right. I mean, when it all hits in 1/4 it could be a challenge. But over time, the consistent and fast decrease in Nan pricing simply means that we will eventually get to solid state for all storage. I have no doubt about that. The days of disk are certainly numbered, and what that does is open up the entire storage market. Today, disc is only by terabytes. 15% of the storage market flashes only 15%. So it eventually we have 85% of storage market still to go after, and we believe that one day that will be all solid state. >> I want to ask you about the macro you guys said on the call. You really not concerned about the macro. You don't win on pricing. You don't lose on pricing that even a downturn. You guys feel like you can gain share. And I would agree with that. By the way, of course, we don't want a downturn. Got it? But if you don't have a downturn, But what are your thoughts on your ability to compete independent of Of of the macro. >> Right. So, you know, we have from day one, obviously, we had no sales when we got started. Right? So every sale we've made has always been a competitive sale. There was always someone that we had to displace, right? Some some incumbent. And that speaks to the type on the quality of the sales and marketing team that we have, right? Not only they aggressive, but you know, in the parlance of the industry, they're hunters. I think a lot of companies, once you become more mature, you develop more farmers in your in your sales force, right? Managing the customer account, managing the install base and so forth. And when the macro is flat or down, you suffer. You know, from you suffer overall from that because you haven't been used to expanding your footprint. In our case, I think even when the Makri is down not that we won't be hurt by it. We will. But because we have a team of hunters, we continue to gain market share away. Will >> you >> change it? It's hard to predict, right, But But Frank's Lupin once told me, Hey, if things change, I can turn this on. And we could become an a T. M when he was running the service. Now, right now, you're going for growth in the street rewards growth. You got a three plus X revenue multiple. Everybody else is lucky to get one X so that they're rewarding you for growth. Do you feel like if things change that you might turn those knobs a little bit? Or is it you know, >> So I don't expect things to change for quite some time, but, you know, we produce 70% gross margin in the last quarter, right? I mean, most of our competitors are in the fifties, right? If not, if not the forties. So clearly growth costs money in this business, right? You have to build your sales force before they start producing for you. You have to invest in marketing before they start producing. And because of our high focus around R and D right, which is all about new products again, your front ending your costs before the before the growth actually comes in. So now we're gonna continue to focus on growth. And as long as we believe that the medium to long term growth for us is in the thirties, you know, high twenties, thirties, even maybe even forties, we're going to continue to operate profitably but relatively lower profit once growth slows down. Yeah. I mean, it will all start flowing. >> Reassess it at that time. At least our data and the data shows that pure is in a position from a spending intention standpoint to continue to gain share. We don't see any change to that in the next several quarters. >> Last question for you, Charlie. We got to talk about a I we talked about at every conference. When we're looking at pure and customer conversations, it's about data data. Is oil lifeblood gold, currency, whatever you wanna call it? How? What is that conversation that that tape, urine and video have together in customers about? How can data ignite our workloads. Help companies identify new products. New service is deliver more automation. This is >> probably one of my favorite topics. When I'm talking to customers is how to make data actually useful. Not so much the, you know, the bits and bytes of how do you actually store it? But you know, what does it mean to them is a business but also to their customers because a lot of times they're using it for overall customer benefit. And the great part of that conversation and whether it's us or in video or both of us together, is we both use it for our to improve our business and our customers lives as well. You know, we talk today about how we have 15 petabytes of operational data from our customers, a raise, right, how they're performing. And we analyze that on a on an hour by hour basis toe look to see. Is the customer getting to the point where they need where they didn't need to modify how they're operating or where they need to upgrade, or where they need to add or even reduce more capacity so that they don't fall? You know they don't trip over things that will get their business in trouble. So it And now we even allow the customer to analyze their business. And do what if scenario plant planning to say, Well, if I'm going to double the amount of customer transactions I have, you know, what will that mean from an infrastructure Sandpoint? You know? Well, I need to change your upgrade. So, you know, this has been great fun because we are in the same boat as our customers, depending on a I to improve our our mutual customers experience. But >> this conversation is best. Very insightful. Charlie, Thank you for joining David Me on the Cube today. Again. Happy 10th anniversary. Here we look forward to the next two days >> and happy 10th year to you. >> Thanks very much. >> That's right for day, Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from pure accelerate. 19

(bright instrumental music) >> Hi everyone, I'm John Furrier. Here in the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, for a special Cube conversation on some big news from PureStorage. We're here with Chadd Kenney, who's the Vice President of Product and Solutions at PureStorage. Big Cloud news. A historic announcement from PureStorage. One of the fastest growing startups in the storage business. Went public, I've been following these guys since creation. Great success story in Silicon Valley and certainly innovative products. Now announcing a Cloud product. Cloud data services, now in market. Chadd, this is huge. >> It's exciting time. Thank you so much for having us. >> So you guys, obviously storage success story, but now the reality is changed. You know we've been saying in the Cube, nothing changes, you get storage computer networking, old way, new way in the Cloud. Game is still the same. Storage isn't going away. You got to store the data somewhere and the data tsunami is coming. Still coming with Edge and a bunch of other things. Cloud more important than ever. To get it right is super important. So, what is the announcement of Cloud Data Service. Explain what the product is, why you guys built it, why now. >> Awesome. So, a couple different innovations that are part of this launch to start with. We have Cloud Block Store which is taking Purity, which is our operating system found on-prem and actually moving it to AWS. And we spent a bunch of time optimizing these solutions to make it so that, we could actually take on tier one, mission critical applications. A key differentiator is that most folks were really chasing after test-dev and leveraging the Cloud for that type of use case. Whereas Cloud Block Storage, really kind of industry strength and ready for mission critical applications. We also took protection mechanisms from FlashArray on-premises and actually made it so that you could use CloudSnap and move and protect data into the public Cloud via portable snapshot technology. Which we can dig into a little bit later. And then the last part is, we thought it was really ripe to change data protection, just as a whole. Most people are doing kind of disc to disc, to tape, and then moving tape offsite. We believe the world has shifted. There's a big problem in data protection. Restoring data is not happening in the time frame that its needed, and SLAs aren't being met, and users are not happy with the overall solution as a whole. We believe that restorations from Flash are incredibly important to the business, but in order to get there you have to offset the economics. So what we're building is a Flash to Flash to Cloud solution which enables folks to be able to take the advantages of the economics of Cloud and be able to then have a caching mechanism of Flash on-premises. So that they can restore things relatively quickly for the predominant set of data that they have out there. >> And just so I get everything right here. You guys only been on-premises only, this is now a cloud solution. It's software. >> Correct. >> Why now? Why wait 'til now, is the timing right? What's the internal conversation? And why should customers know, is this the right time. >> So, the evolution of cloud has been pretty interesting as we've gone through it. Most customers went from kind of a 100% on-premises, the Cloud came out and said, hey, I'm going to move everything to the Cloud. They found that didn't work great for enterprise applications. And so they kind of moved back and realized that hybrid cloud was going to be a world with they wanted to leverage both. We're seeing a lot of other shifts in the market. VMware already having RDS in platform. Now it's true hybrid cloud kind of playing out there. Amazon running an AWS. It's a good mixture just to showcase where people really want to be able to leverage the capabilities of both. >> So it's a good time because the customers are re-architecting as well. >> It's all about- >> Hybrid applications are definitely what people want. >> 100% and the application stack, I think was the core focus that really shifted over time. Instead of just focusing on hybrid cloud infrastructure, it was really about how applications could leverage multiple types of clouds to be able to leverage the innovation and services that they could provide. >> You know, I've always been following the IT business for 30 years or so and it's always been an interesting trend. You buy something from a vendor and there's a trade-offs. And there's always the payback periods, but now I think with this announcement that's interesting is you got the product mix that allows customers to have choice and pick what they want. There's no more trade-offs. If they like cloud, they go to cloud. If they like on-premise, you go on-premises. >> It sounds like an easy concept, but the crazy part to this is the Cloud divide is real. They are very different environments. As we've talked to customers, they were very lost on how it was going to take and enterprise application and actually leverage the innovations within the Cloud. They wanted it, they needed it, but at the same time, they weren't able to deliver up on it. And so, we realized that the data layer, fundamentally was the area that could give them that bridge between those two environments. And we could add some core values to the Cloud for even the next generation developer who's developing in the Cloud to bring in, better overall resiliency. Management and all sorts of new features that they weren't able to take advantage of in traditional public cloud. >> You know Chugg wants to do minimal about the serviceless trend and how awesome that is. It's just, look at the resource pool as a serviceless pool of resource. So is this storageless? >> So it's still backed by storage, obviously. >> No, I was just making a joke. No wait, that you're looking at it as what serviceless is to the user. You guys are providing that same kind of storage pool, addressable through the application of, >> Correct >> as if it's storageless. And what's great about taking 100% software platform and moving it to the Cloud is, customer can spin this up in like minutes. And what's great about it is, they can spend many, many, many instances of these things for various different use cases that they have out there, and get true utility out of it. So they're getting the agility that they really want while not having to offset the values that they really come to love about PureStorage on-premises. Now they can actually get it all on the public cloud as well. >> I want to dig into the products a little bit. Before we get there, I want you to answer the question that's probably on people's minds. I know you've been at Pure, really from the beginning. So, you've seen the history. Most people look at you guys and say, well you're a hardware vendor. I have Pure boxes everywhere, you guys doing a great job. You've pioneered the Flash, speed game on storage. People want, kill latency as they say. You guys have done a great job. But wait a minute, this is software. Explain how you guys did this, why it's important. People might not know that this is a software solution. They might be know you for hardware. What's the difference? Is there a difference? Why should they care and what's the impact? >> So, great question. Since we sell hardware products, most people see us as a hardware company. But at the end of the day, the majority of vinge and dev is software. We're building software to make, originally, off the shelf components to be enterprise worthy. Over time we decided to optimize the hardware too, and that pairing between the software and hardware gets them inherently great values. And this is why we didn't just take our software and just kind of throw it into every cloud and say have it, to customers. Like a lot of folks did. We spent a lot of time, just like we did on our hardware platform, optimizing for AWS to start with. So that we could truly be able to leverage the inherent technologies that they have, but build software to make it even better. >> It's interesting, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld, and he's a chairman of Arista. He's called, Les Peckgesem calls him the Rembrandt of motherboards. And he goes, "John, we're in the software business." And he goes, "Let me tell ya, hardware's easy. Software's hard." >> I agree. >> So everyone's pretty much in the software business. This is not a change for Pure. >> No, this is the same game we've been in. >> Great. Alright, let's get into the products. The first one is Cloud Block Store for AWS. Which is the way Amazon does the branch. So it's on Amazon, or for Amazon as they say. They use different words. So this is Pure software in the Cloud. Your company, technically Pure software. >> Yup. >> In the Cloud as software, no hardware. >> Yup. >> A 100% storage, API support, always encrypted, seamless management and orchestration, DR backup migration between clouds. >> Yup. >> That's kind of the core premise. So what does the product do, what's the purpose of the product. On the Amazon piece, if I'm a customer of Pure or a prospect for Pure, what does the product give me? What's the capabilities? >> Great. I would say that the biggest thing that customers get is just leverage for their application stack to be able to utilize the Cloud. And let me give you a couple of examples 'cause they're kind of fun. So first off, Cloud Block Storage is just software that sits in the Cloud that has many of the same utilities that run on-premises. Any by doing so, you get the ability to be able to do stuff like I want to replicate, as a DR target. So maybe I don't have a secondary site out there, and I want to have a DR target that spin up in the event of a disaster. You can easily set up bi-directional replication to the instance that you have running in the Cloud. It's the exact same experience. The exact same APIs and you get our cloud data management with Pure1 to be able to see both sites. One single pane of glass, and make sure everything is up and running and doing well. You could also though, leverage a test-dev environment. So let's saying I'm running production on-premises, I can then go ahead and replicate to the Cloud, spin up an instance for test-dev, and running reporting, run analytics. Run anything else that I wanted on top of that. And spin up compute relatively quickly. Maybe I don't have it on-prem. Next, we could focus on replicating for protection. Let's say for compliance, I want to have many instances to be able to restore back in the event of a disaster or in the event that I just want to look back during a period of time. The last part is, not just on-prem to the Cloud, but leveraging the Cloud for even better resiliency to take enterprise applications and actually move them without having to do massive re-architecture. If you look at what happens, Amazon recommends typically, that you have data in two different availability zones. So that when you put an application on top of it, it can be resilient to any sort of failures within an AZ. What we've done is we've taken our active cluster technology which is active-active replication between two instances, and made it so that you can actually replicate between two availability zones. And your application now doesn't need to be re-architected whatsoever. >> So you basically, if I get this right, you had core software that made all that Flash, on the box which is on-premise, which is a hardware solution. Which sounds like it was commodity boxes so this, components. >> Just like the Cloud. >> You take it to the Cloud as an amazing amount of boxes out there. They have tons of data centers. So you treat the Cloud as if it's a virtual device, so to speak. >> Correct. I mean the Cloud functionally is just compute and storage, and networking on the back end has been abstracted by some sort of layer in front of it. We're leveraging compute resources for our controllers and we're leveraging persistent storage media for our storage. But what we've done in software is optimize a bunch of things. An example just as one is, in the Cloud when you, procure storage, you pay for all of it, whether you leverage it or not. We incorporate de-dupe, compression, thin provisioning, AES 256 encryption on all data arrest. These are data services that are just embedded in that aren't traditionally found in a traditional cloud. >> This makes so much sense. If you're an application developer, you focus on building the app. Not worrying about where the storage is and how it's all managed. 'Cause you want persistent data and uni-managed state, and all this stuff going on. And I just need a dashboard, I just need to know where the storage is. Is it available and bring it to the table. >> And make it easy with the same APIs that you were potentially running on, on-premises. And that last part that I would say is that, the layered services that are built into Purity, like our snapshot technology and being able to refresh test-dev environments or create 10 sandboxes for 10 developers in the Cloud and add compute instances to them, is not only instantaneous, but it's space saving as you actually do it. Where as in the normal cloud offerings, you're paying for each one of those instances. >> And the agility is off the charts, it's amazing. Okay, final question on this one is, how much is it's going to cost? How does a customer consume it? Is it in the marketplace? Do I just click a button, spin up things? How's the interface? What's the customer interaction and engagement with the product? How they buy it, how much it costs? Can you share the interaction with the customer? >> So we're just jumping into beta, so a lot of this is still being worked out. But what I will tell you is it's the exact same experience that customers have come to love with Pure. You can go download the Cloud formation template into your catalog with an AWS. So you can spin up instances. The same kind of consumption models that we've built on-prem will be applied to cloud. So it will be a very similar consumption model, which has been super consumer friendly that customers have loved from us over the years. And it will be available in the mid part of next year, and so people will be able to beta it today, test it out, see how it works, and then put it into full production in mid part of next year. >> And operationally, in the work flows, the customers don't skip a beat. It's the same kind of format, languages and the words, the word flow. It feels like Pure all the way through. >> Correct. And not only are we a 100% built on a rest API, but all of the things we've built in with, Python libraries that automate this for developers, to PowerShell toolkits, to Ansible playbooks. All the stuff we've built on codeupyourstorage.com are all applicable to both sites and you get Pure1, our Cloud based management system to be able to see all of it in one single pane of glass. >> Okay, let's move on. So the next piece I think is interesting. I'll get your thoughts on this is that the whole protection piece. On-premises, really kind of held back from the Cloud, mainly to protect the data. So you guys got CloudSnap for AWS, what does this product do? Is this the protection piece? How does this work? What is the product? What's the features and what's the value? >> So, StorReduce was a recent acquisition that we did that enables de-duplication on top of an S3 target. And so it allows you to store an S3 de-duplicated into a smaller form factor and we're pairing that with both an on-premises addition which will have a flash plate behind it for super fast restores. So think of that as a caching tier for your backups, but then also be able to replicate that out to the public cloud and leverage store reduce natively in the public cloud as well. >> So that's the store reduce product. So store reduce on it is that piece. As an object store? >> It is, yes. And we pair that with CloudSnap which is natively integrated within FlashArray, so you can also do snapshots to a FlashBlade for fast restores for both NFS, and you can send it also to S3 in the public cloud. And so you get the inherent abilities to even do, VM level granularity or volume level granularity as well from a FlashArray directly, without needing to have any additional hardware. >> Okay so the data services are the; Block Storage, Store Reduce and CloudSnap on a four AWS. >> Correct. >> How would you encapsulate this from a product and solution standpoint? How would you describe that to a customer in an elevator or just a quick value statement? What's in it for them? >> Sure. So Pure's been seen by customers as innovation engine that optimized applications and allowed them to do, I would say, amazing things into the enterprise. What we're doing now, is we're evolving that solution out of just an on-premises solution and making it available in a very agile Cloud world. We know this world is evolving dramatically. We know people really want to be able to take advantage of the innovations within the Cloud, and so what we're doing is we're finally bridging the gap between on-premises and the Cloud. Giving them the same user experience that they've come to love with Pure and all of the Clouds that they potentially need to develop in. >> Okay so from the announcement standpoint, you guys got Cloud Block Storage limited public beta, right out of the gate. GA in mid 2019. CloudSnap is GA at announcement and Store Reduce is going into beta, first half of 2019. >> Correct, we're excited about it. >> So for the skeptics out there who are- Hey you know, Chadd, I got to tell ya. I love the Cloud, but I'm a little bit nervous. How do I test and get a feeling for- this is going to be simple, if I'm going to jump in and look at this. What should I look at first? What sequence, should I try this? Do you guys have a playbook, for them to either kick the tires or how should they explore to get proficient in the new solution. >> Good question. Right, so for one if you're a FlashArray customer, CloudSnap gives you the ability to be able to take this new entity, called a portable Snapshot. Which is data paired with metadata, and allow you to be able to move data off of a FlashArray. You can put it to an NFS target or you can send it to the Cloud. And so that's the most logical one that folks will probably leverage first because it's super exciting for them to be able to leverage the Cloud and spin up instances, if they'd like to. Or protect back to their own prem. Also, Cloud Block Storage, great because you can spin it up relatively quickly and test out applications between the two. One area that I think customers are going to be really excited about is you could run an analytics environment in the Cloud and spin up a bunch of compute from your production instance by just replicating it up into the Cloud. The last part is, I think backup is not super sexy. Nobody like to talk about it, but it's a significant pain point that's out there, and I think we can make some major in-roads in helping businesses get better SLAs. We're very, very interested to see the great solutions people bring with- >> So, I'm going to put you on the spot here and ask you, there's always the, love the cliche, is it a vitamin or is it an Asprin. Is there a pain point? So obviously backup, I would agree. Backup and recovery, certainly with the disaster, you see the wildfires going on here in California. You can't stop thinking about what the, disaster recovery plan and then you got top line growth with application developers. The kind of the vitamin, if you will. What are the use cases, low hanging fruit for someone to like test this out from a pain point standpoint. Is it backup and what's the growth angle? I wanted to test out this new solution, what should I look at first? What would you recommend? >> It's a very tough question. So, CloudSnap is obviously the easy one. I'd say Cloud Block Store is one that I think, people will. I look at my biggest, customers biggest challenges out there it's how do I get application portable. So I think Cloud Block Store really gives you the application portability. So I think it's finally achieving that whole, hybrid cloud world. But at the end of the day, backup is really big pain point that the enterprise deals with, like right this second. So there's areas where we believe we can add inherent values to them with being able to do fast restores from Flash. That meets SLA's very quickly and is an easy fix. >> And you guys feel good about the data protection aspect of this? >> Yes, very much so. >> Awesome. I want to get your personal take on this. You were early on in Pure. What's the vibe inside the company? This is Cloud and people love Cloud. There's benefits for Cloud, as well as on-premises. What's the mood like inside PureStorage? You've seen from the beginning, now you're a public company and growing up really, really fast. What's the vibe like inside PureStorage? >> It's funny, it hasn't really changed all that much, in the cultural side of the thing, of the business. I love where I work because of the people. The people bring so much fun to the business, so much innovation and we have a mindset that's heavily focused on customer first. And that's one of the things. I always tell this kind of story is, when we first started, we sat in a room on a whiteboard and wrote up, what is everything that sucks about storage. And instead of trying to figure out how we make a 2.0 version of some storage array, we actually figured out what are all the customer pain points that we needed to satisfy and then we built innovations to go do that. Not go chase the competition, but actually go alleviate customer challenges. And we just continue to kind of focus on customer first and so the whole company kind of, rallies around that. And I think you see a very different motion that what you do in most companies because we love hearing about customer results of our products. Engineering just will rally around when a customer shows up just to hear exactly their experience associated to it. And so with this, I think what they see is a continued evolution of the things we've been doing and they love seeing and providing customer solutions in areas that they were challenged to deal with in the past. >> What was some of the customer feedback when you guys started going, hey, you've got a new product, you're doing all of that early work. And you got to go talk to some people and knock on the, hey, what do you think, would you like the Cloud, a little bit of the Cloud. How would you like the Cloud to be implemented? What was some of the things you heard from customers? >> A lot of them said, if you can take your core tenets, which was simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and customer focus around consumption, and if you could give that to me in the Cloud, that would be the Nirvana. So, when we looked at this model, that's exactly what we did. We said, let's take what people love about us on-prem, and give 'em the exact same experience in the Cloud. >> That's great and that's what you guys have done. Congratulations. >> Thanks so much. >> Great to hear the Cloud story here Chadd Kenney, Vice President of Products and Solutions at PureStorage. Taking the formula of success on-premises with Flash and the success there, and bringing it to the Cloud. That's the big deal in this announcement. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. (upbeat instrumental music)