>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube covering your storage accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Q. We are wrapping up day two of two days of coverage. We're getting some applause. I'm pretty sure that's for us. At pure accelerate. 2019. Lisa Martin flanked by two gents Day Volante and Justin Warren. You probably know Justin, who's been on the Cube many times and less. Chief analyst. A pivot. Nine. Justin. You have been covering this event and well as an independent, so we want to get your take on this two days. We've had our 1st 2 day for the Cube covering pier storage. We've spoken with lots of people, cause Charlie kicks. I'm sure there's more nicknames that I'm forgetting customers. Partners. Dave. Let's do a quick recap of some of the trends and the themes that we've heard the last couple days. And then we'll get some independent analysis. Justin on Not just what you've heard the last three days, starting with a tech field day, but also just your history of covering and working with here. >> Well, so for my sample, its story of growth they even started pure starts all the press releases with the only company that's growing on the growth storage company. The growth in the first. So so this growth is a financial story there. Um pure is going for growth, the markets rewarding growth right now. So it's smart, double down on growth. That might change at some point on. We talked about Charlie Jean Carlo about this, and they'll decide what what they do at that point time. But But from a financial standpoint, growing fast, uh, like their balance sheet, be interesting to see if they can leverage it. Maur. But maybe they're using it for Optionality. They'll do 1.7 this fiscal year. 1.7 billion. That's good. They got 70% gross margins. It a little bit of free cash flow. Not much because they pour it back into the business. So story a growth that's number 12 was differentiation. Um, I think it it's pretty clear that their products are differentiated from the sort of big portfolio companies. I mean, it's it shows up in the numbers and the income statement, and it shows up when you talk to customers simplicity, the whole A P I thing. I guess the third is products. I mean, they're embracing the cloud, which is kind of interesting. I don't think they're gonna do a ton of business with block storage for AWS, but it's an interesting hedge, and I think it's really cool from an engineering standpoint on, I think you know, two other things. Culture but orange. They're different, They're cool. They're hip and customers, which at the end of the day, that's where the rubber meets the road. Customers happy you talk to companies are customers of companies like pure service now Splunk Nutanix >> Uh uh, >> and some others. And they're happy. They love it. It's transforming their business. Snowflake is another one. Really? How come you AI path is another one? These are the hottest companies in the business right now, and you can tell when you talk to their customers is good story >> and their customers articulate their differentiation for them pretty darn while what? You know, we've spoken to a number. I think four or five customers the last couple of days, and they're not talking about Flash Ray flash blade X M flashback. They're talking about their business and how the I T is benefiting from that and how the business is benefiting from that. You also see piers very vibrant culture being embraced organically by their customers. There's plenty of customers walking around and the brightest orange I think I've even seen here. So there they're differentiation. Their culture, their customer experience and their ability to really differentiate three that are were loud and clear for what I heard through the voice of the customer and the partners, Frankly, as well. >> So I guess, Justin, I mean, the other pieces Tam expansion 1st 10 years, Cloud New Way I workloads partnerships with backup companies growing. The Tim I've said the 1st 10 years is probably gonna be easier, and I know that's a terrible thing to say, but don't hate me for saying it pure. But then the next 10 because they're up against the flat footed E. M. C. That was getting pounded by Elliott management with pressures to go private, trying to hang on to its legacy business and then got acquired and distracted by Del. So that was a really tailwind for Pierre. Now it's like Cloud guys got their act together, you know? Aye, aye. Everybody's doing A s. Oh, so they get some challenges. But what's your take? I think I've >> still got an advantage. Talking to some customers, 11 in particular was quite clear. That they saw pure is having at least a 2 to 3 lead through 2 to 3 year lead on the technology from some of their competitors. So they shopped around and they had a look at some of his competitors, and they thought that actually they were trying to sell me technology that's 234 years old and they quite from them, was that this is something that I could do myself, so they clearly see that pure provides them with something that they can't do themselves. So pure has an advantage there. I also think that the way that the market is changing advantage is pure, a little bit as well. So you mentioned Cloud there, Dave and I think that we've all seen that people have realized that multi cloud is a thing and that not every workload is going to go to the cloud. A lot of it is going to stay on Prem, so now that that's kind of allowed, people are allowed to talk about that, That there are CEOs who would have been being pressured by boards and so on to say we have to go all in on the cloud. Now they can come back to them and say, Well, actually, weaken, stay on side. That means that we should be looking at some of these onside products, like pure so that we can go on put in storage. A race in a data center may not be our Dana Senate might be in Coehlo, but we have this on site method of doing things. Not everything has to go to the cloud. So I think that will help them with some of the growth. >> So I'm left thinking, What would Andy say? Okay to >> be >> It's the number one hottest company, you know, notwithstanding some smaller companies right now, cos moving the market is a W s obviously Microsoft with the trillion dollar valuation. But Amazon, to me, is the benchmark it. So I feel like Jassy would say, Well, so Hey, Andy, you've acknowledged hybrid, you know? Actually, yeah, I guess he uses that word. Um, and you're doing some stuff one prim, but I think he would say we still believe that the vast majority of workloads are gonna land in the public cloud. And what you just said is what everybody else believes. And to me, they're in conflict and I don't necessarily have the answer. But you got the big gorilla. Now the big claw gorilla is moving. The markets say with one philosophy and they've made some good calls and the entire i t industry. Yeah, the other the inspector. >> Except that AWS has outpost have a product that actually sits on site. And they did. And Jesse last year said that he did say that the boat inward, multi cloud, >> you know, So, uh, sorry. Used the word multi cloud used hybrid hybrid cloud. They don't say that. That's for Boden, but no. But my point is they've acknowledged hybrid, which they never used to talk about hybrid. So they capitulated there The end where capitulated on their claws on its cloud strategy. But he has not capitulated on the belief the firm belief that most workloads are gonna be in the club. I'm not sure he's wrong. >> That may be true, but on what Time horizon? So that's not going to happen next year. But I >> think for sure, >> I pointed out that the agile manifesto came out in 2001. That's 18 years ago. Not every shop is doing software in agile, so enterprises take a long time to change, so there's plenty of room for pure to grow. While that changes going on, even if it if it does go all their own cloud, it's gonna take a long time to get there. And people can make plenty of money in the meantime. >> But I believe you're sorry. I believe pure is growing in what is a crappy market. Yeah, I think the storage market is a crap market right now. It's one that's very difficult. The leader Deli emcees growing at 0%. And that's a goodness because they're gaining share. Ned ABS down last quarter, not minus 16% IBM, minus 21% hp thrilled with whatever 3% or whatever. They're at a minus three. I can't remember now. Here is the only one that showing any substantive growth on my premises there, doing that by having a superior product and business model, and they're stealing share. So and then I ask you this. I I believe in hybrid, by the way. But I'm just playing kind of devil's advocate here. Cloud is growing and it's consistently growing and everybody talks about repatriation. You don't see it in the numbers. Every talks about the large of the law of large numbers like in other words, they hit a wall. You don't see that in the numbers. What you see is the traditional IittIe spaces flattish. The new stuff that they're all developing is not growing fast enough to offset the old stuff. You see that? Certainly. See that IBM. You see that now? Adele, even though they had good bounce back last year. But now you're seeing that Adele Oracle ekes out 1% growth. So the big, uh, legacy companies are growing there, hanging on there, throwing off tons of cash. They got good, strong balance sheets, maybe taking on some cheap debt. But the cloud continues to grow at a pace that I think it's stealing share from traditional I t. >> That's that's a reasonable sort of announcing something. Yeah, whether or not we'll see an increase in growth of onsite, particularly things like EJ computing way, maybe you need Thio redefine what we think of as a data center, and maybe we're not thinking about a broad enough market. I actually think that a lot of those workloads that we would traditionally have said would go on site and cola. I don't think Cola Data Center is actually growing all that much, but I think we are going to see growth in things like EJ. >> So that's a really great point I want. I want to come back to that. But the big question is, then okay. Can cloud be before we get ahead, you can cloud be a tail wind for pure. They've embraced it. 20 years ago, the leaders of a company would say, Oh, no, it's cloud his crap about a peace Caesar of toys You remember that pure embracing cloud, I think, is impressive only from an engineering perspective but business model. So can they make in your opinion cloud a tail wind and an opportunity? Maybe that's where Multi Cloud comes in. >> Yeah, it's tricky. I think it will become more of an advantage once good things like kubernetes and containers matures a bit further and people are used to being able to deploy things in that way, both in Cloud and on site. I think that that's the portability play, and it's more about making onsite more cloudy rather than making the cloud more enterprising, which I think was one of the messages that we had here. Because enterprises a lot of what yours messaging so far. And it's product development, particularly around cloud block stories, to make the cloud look more like an enterprise. Where's what we actually needed it to go the other way. Pure is doing things in that in that regard with pure storage optimizer, which which takes a lot of the decision making a way that from the way you would normally do things on side the way we've gotten used to it, manually configuring things, it's actually turning it into software on just letting computers handle it. That integration with things like the M, where is making things operate a lot more like cloud? So once enterprises become used to operating on a lot more like clouds, I think that's going to be an advantage for pure. To be ableto have that operations be in cloud and then they'll bring in products into in time for that to happen. >> You have the opportunity just in a couple days ago to tend the technical field day, the TFT that pure dead. So you got that double click the day before all the press releases broke about. Some of you know, we talked about the expansion into cloud with aws Maur, their portfolio delivered as a service. The aye aye data hub. But if we look at one of the things that stuck out today was differentiation. We've talked about that a number of levels in the last minutes. But talk to us about the technical differentiation that you've not only heard this week from pure, but that you've been engaging with them for years. You have an interesting story of Of John Cosgrove caused their CEO and founder really describing something very unique. That seems to be quite a technical level of differentiation that you even said We don't see this from a lot of their competitors. Give us a little snapshot of that. >> Yeah, you don't sort of get that level of detail in some of the briefings as well. So it was another tech Field day event some years ago on was talking about flash array and we sat in a room, and they had a flash array in front of us, and I think they were talking about the newest kind of flash they were putting into this. But they described some of the technical decisions they made about the architecture inside the blade. So at that time, and I hope I'm getting all these details correct, they had designed and asic, so to go in front, off the flash so that they could essentially create a layer above above the flash that they could speak to within their software. That meant that it didn't matter which flash foundry they bought it from, because it's slut. There are certain differences around the way that flash works, and they do address the flash directly, unlike buying SS D's and putting them inside the box. So that gives them a performance advantage because you don't have a whole bunch of software translation going on to get into the flash. But that decision meant that they could then change flash foundry without changing the experience off the awful. The software developers up the stack inside their array, so that meant that there cadence of being able to bring out new products and gradually dropped down the cost of the supply of flash, which makes up a large amount of the calls on these particular devices. It provided them with better options so they could maintain, maintain optionality essentially and be very, very flexible and react to the things that they can't predict. So Charlie mentioned in the briefing yesterday that you know, in this industry, you might get a 20% drop in the cost of flash in one month, which will then affect them their revenues in coming months after that, because clearly they want to pass on some of those cost drops to customers. But it needs to be done a certain, more manage way. When you have that kind of dynamic behavior happening in the market, being able to react to that well in something where the hardware design time can be 18 months to two years, building that into your product so that it then provides you with business options as a technology, that's a really impressive way of thinking about how all the different pieces of your company have to interact with each other. So it's not just about the technology, it's about the business and the technology working hand in hand, >> and those lower flash prices should open up new markets for them. Flash a racy I think they call it, is still not at the price of hybrid, I wouldn't think, although they saying it will be. Hybrid arrays are priced around 70 60 70 cents a gigabyte today is according Thio Gardner analysis. Big >> Challenge with hybrid of rays Which flat, which flash around flash or a C wouldn't actually wouldn't have? This problem is the reliability of the Leighton see and predictability. So with an old flash array, you don't get Layton. See sparks if you suddenly exhaust the amount of flash that you have in a hybrid of rain that has to go back to the disk. So if you need that predictable performance, that's why people have gone with flesh arrayed very beginning, absolutely getting that as a capacity tear. I think that provides a lot of reliability, for particularly when you've got large amounts of data need to write flesh >> and the price is coming down and it's maybe it's double now on a per gigabyte basis, that'll come down further. But I welcome back to EJ because I think you bring up a good point And we didn't Thankfully, here a ton about EJ. I think we heard anything about EJ at this show. We didn't get inundated with edge, which we always do with these big shows. And I'm happy about that because I think that that a lot of the companies that we re attend I think they got it wrong. They're taking a box and they're throwing over the fence to trying to do a top down model to the edge. Hey, here's a server or here's a storage device and we're gonna put it at the edge. It's like, OK, well, I think the edge is going to evolve as a software development. You know, play not isn't over. The top is gonna be bottoms up innovation. Now, I don't know question about you know, whether Amazon at the edge vm wear at the edge. Um, but I don't see any traditional i t companies crushing it at the edge there talking about it. They're trying to build out ecosystems, and but nobody's has meaningful revenue today at the edge. But it's a new way to think about this. Distributed massive compute engine >> on. I think we'll start to see that mature as people start to bring out products that actually do operated the way heard from Nvidia about some of their ideas that they have about doing a I processing at the edge for things like image recognition systems, where you train your model on leg large data sets in a cloud or in a data center. And then you shoot those models out two devices that operate on a smaller data set. But for a lot of these things, you need to do data collection at the edge. So Formula One is a classic example based given for the F one racing team is an I. O. T. Company that is connected to a nail and analytics company. Really? >> Yeah, that's right. We did hear about EJ and that an actual use case is in college edge, so there's going to be >> a lot more of that. We have things like sensors are just all over the place, so you know, in anything in retail, if you have fridges in retail and you need to monitor the sensors in those to find out whether or not is the temperature going out out of control or outside of your control limits because that will affect the food that's in that. There's a whole bunch of kind of boring examples that are actually all I OT. So I think some of those will start to push more data into into devices at the edge. And as people's understanding of how to use machine learning and I matures away from the hype, I think we're pretty peak hype at the moment. Once we do actually drop that back a notch and we see that people they're doing really use riel riel world use cases with real world business value that will start to drive a lot more of the growth of practical. And that will drive growth in data, which will need to get close throughout the weather's device. >> I think you're right. I think that date is gonna be at the edge of a lot of that data. I would say most of that date is going to stay at the edge. It's probably it's not gonna says it. Probably it's definitely not going to sit in a million dollar storage array, and it's gonna comprise a lot of alternative processing arm, Uh, GP use versus conventional microprocessors. So >> and that's where I think he was thinking about, like the white pure One works, for example, pure. One works the same no matter what products you have from pure, and they have been very clear in stating that they want to make sure that when they bring out a new array or a new product, it works with pure one. So it's that consistency of experience for their customers, which I think is fairly unique in the industry, is a lot of other products that will come out. And they only partly supported, not full support for their entire race tagging. AMC struggle with that for a long time simply because it has so many products and needed to kill a whole bunch of them first. So when when you have that kind of engineering discipline built built into your company, when you go out and you have customers who have edge devices or you have stuff in the cloud and they have devices on their phones which they used to showing off a conference and say, Hey, come and have a look at my array, it runs on software on my phone that's pure one that software ability that pure has of being able to address this data wherever it is. I think >> there's >> a real opportunity for pure that put that kind of intelligence on to age things. Even if they don't actually sell any flash a raise to those people, they could start to sell them software. >> All right, guys. So 15 seconds each since arose at a time. Computers competitive. Positioning your thoughts in a quick summary about what you've heard the last few days and what Justin has >> to me if I would expect continued growth, forgetting about the macro for a moment, even in gonna grow faster than the market place. Um and yeah, they said they don't throw off as much cash as the big guys. So it's gonna be a game of the big guys do in stock buybacks, free cash flow and pure storage. Investing in growth. >> Excellent. Justin. >> Yes, I agree. I think they're going to double down on the R and D spend to make sure that they maintain a technological advantage over their competitors. The biggest risk of pure is if the other players, you know, the deal emcee other plays in that big online storage market. If they actually get their act together and start bringing out competitive products, that's the biggest threat to fuel. But pure has a big lead on them. I would say, >> Yeah, I think the last thing cloud, you know, kind of a question Mark. And I think the m where to me, Del. Of course I care about storage is huge business for them. They're all above the M where and to the extent that they can leverage VM where, you know, as a competitive weapon, they'll use it against anybody you know. Damn the ecosystem. >> Excellent. Well, thanks, guys, for a great wrap up to our two days here for Justin Warren and Day Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the cubes. Coverage of pure accelerate 2019.