(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the birthplace of theCUBE. In 2010, May of 2010 at EMC World, right in this very venue, John Furrier called it the chowder and lobster post. I'm Dave Vellante. We're here at RE:INFORCE 2022, Ed Walsh, CEO of ChaosSearch. Doing a drive by Ed. Thanks so much for stopping in. You're going to help me wrap up in our final editorial segment. >> Looking forward to it. >> I really appreciate it. >> Thank you for including me. >> How about that? 2010. >> That's amazing. It was really in this-- >> Really in this building. Yeah, we had to sort of bury our way in, tunnel our way into the Blogger Lounge. We did four days. >> Weekends, yeah. >> It was epic. It was really epic. But I'm glad they're back in Boston. AWS was going to do June in Houston. >> Okay. >> Which would've been awful. >> Yeah, yeah. No, this is perfect. >> Yeah. Thank God they came back. You saw Boston in summer is great. I know it's been hot, And of course you and I are from this area. >> Yeah. >> So how you been? What's going on? I mean, it's a little crazy out there. The stock market's going crazy. >> Sure. >> Having the tech lash, what are you seeing? >> So it's an interesting time. So I ran a company in 2008. So we've been through this before. By the way, the world's not ending, we'll get through this. But it is an interesting conversation as an investor, but also even the customers. There's some hesitation but you have to basically have the right value prop, otherwise things are going to get sold. So we are seeing longer sales cycles. But it's nothing that you can't overcome. But it has to be something not nice to have, has to be a need to have. But I think we all get through it. And then there is some, on the VC side, it's now buckle down, let's figure out what to do which is always a challenge for startup plans. >> In pre 2000 you, maybe you weren't a CEO but you were definitely an executive. And so now it's different and a lot of younger people haven't seen this. You've got interest rates now rising. Okay, we've seen that before but it looks like you've got inflation, you got interest rates rising. >> Yep. >> The consumer spending patterns are changing. You had 6$, $7 gas at one point. So you have these weird crosscurrents, >> Yup. >> And people are thinking, "Okay post-September now, maybe because of the recession, the Fed won't have to keep raising interest rates and tightening. But I don't know what to root for. It's like half full, half empty. (Ed laughing) >> But we haven't been in an environment with high inflation. At least not in my career. >> Right. Right. >> I mean, I got into 92, like that was long gone, right?. >> Yeah. >> So it is a interesting regime change that we're going to have to deal with, but there's a lot of analogies between 2008 and now that you still have to work through too, right?. So, anyway, I don't think the world's ending. I do think you have to run a tight shop. So I think the grow all costs is gone. I do think discipline's back in which, for most of us, discipline never left, right?. So, to me that's the name of the game. >> What do you tell just generally, I mean you've been the CEO of a lot of private companies. And of course one of the things that you do to retain people and attract people is you give 'em stock and it's great and everybody's excited. >> Yeah. >> I'm sure they're excited cause you guys are a rocket ship. But so what's the message now that, Okay the market's down, valuations are down, the trees don't grow to the moon, we all know that. But what are you telling your people? What's their reaction? How do you keep 'em motivated? >> So like anything, you want over communicate during these times. So I actually over communicate, you get all these you know, the Sequoia decks, 2008 and the recent... >> (chuckles) Rest in peace good times, that one right? >> I literally share it. Why? It's like, Hey, this is what's going on in the real world. It's going to affect us. It has almost nothing to do with us specifically, but it will affect us. Now we can't not pay attention to it. It does change how you're going to raise money, so you got to make sure you have the right runway to be there. So it does change what you do, but I think you over communicate. So that's what I've been doing and I think it's more like a student of the game, so I try to share it, and I say some appreciate it others, I'm just saying, this is normal, we'll get through this and this is what happened in 2008 and trust me, once the market hits bottom, give it another month afterwards. Then everyone says, oh, the bottom's in and we're back to business. Valuations don't go immediately back up, but right now, no one knows where the bottom is and that's where kind of the world's ending type of things. >> Well, it's interesting because you talked about, I said rest in peace good times >> Yeah >> that was the Sequoia deck, and the message was tighten up. Okay, and I'm not saying you shouldn't tighten up now, but the difference is, there was this period of two years of easy money and even before that, it was pretty easy money. >> Yeah. >> And so companies are well capitalized, they have runway so it's like, okay, I was talking to Frank Slootman about this now of course there are public companies, like we're not taking the foot off the gas. We're inherently profitable, >> Yeah. >> we're growing like crazy, we're going for it. You know? So that's a little bit of a different dynamic. There's a lot of good runway out there, isn't there? >> But also you look at the different companies that were either born or were able to power through those environments are actually better off. You come out stronger in a more dominant position. So Frank, listen, if you see what Frank's done, it's been unbelievable to watch his career, right?. In fact, he was at Data Domain, I was Avamar so, but look at what he's done since, he's crushed it. Right? >> Yeah. >> So for him to say, Hey, I'm going to literally hit the gas and keep going. I think that's the right thing for Snowflake and a right thing for a lot of people. But for people in different roles, I literally say that you have to take it seriously. What you can't be is, well, Frank's in a different situation. What is it...? How many billion does he have in the bank? So it's... >> He's over a billion, you know, over a billion. Well, you're on your way Ed. >> No, no, no, it's good. (Dave chuckles) Okay, I want to ask you about this concept that we've sort of we coined this term called Supercloud. >> Sure. >> You could think of it as the next generation of multi-cloud. The basic premises that multi-cloud was largely a symptom of multi-vendor. Okay. I've done some M&A, I've got some Shadow IT, spinning up, you know, Shadow clouds, projects. But it really wasn't a strategy to have a continuum across clouds. And now we're starting to see ecosystems really build, you know, you've used the term before, standing on the shoulders of giants, you've used that a lot. >> Yep. >> And so we're seeing that. Jerry Chen wrote a seminal piece on Castles in The Cloud, so we coined this term SuperCloud to connote this abstraction layer that hides the underlying complexities and primitives of the individual clouds and then adds value on top of it and can adjudicate and manage, irrespective of physical location, Supercloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. What do you think about that concept?. How does it maybe relate to some of the things that you're seeing in the industry? >> So, standing on shoulders of giants, right? So I always like to do hard tech either at big company, small companies. So we're probably your definition of a Supercloud. We had a big vision, how to literally solve the core challenge of analytics at scale. How are you going to do that? You're not going to build on your own. So literally we're leveraging the primitives, everything you can get out of the Amazon cloud, everything get out of Google cloud. In fact, we're even looking at what it can get out of this Snowflake cloud, and how do we abstract that out, add value to it? That's where all our patents are. But it becomes a simplified approach. The customers don't care. Well, they care where their data is. But they don't care how you got there, they just want to know the end result. So you simplify, but you gain the advantages. One thing's interesting is, in this particular company, ChaosSearch, people try to always say, at some point the sales cycle they say, no way, hold on, no way that can be fast no way, or whatever the different issue. And initially we used to try to explain our technology, and I would say 60% was explaining the public, cloud capabilities and then how we, harvest those I guess, make them better add value on top and what you're able to get is something you couldn't get from the public clouds themselves and then how we did that across public clouds and then extracted it. So if you think about that like, it's the Shoulders of giants. But what we now do, literally to avoid that conversation because it became a lengthy conversation. So, how do you have a platform for analytics that you can't possibly overwhelm for ingest. All your messy data, no pipelines. Well, you leverage things like S3 and EC2, and you do the different security things. You can go to environments say, you can't possibly overrun me, I could not say that. If I didn't literally build on the shoulders giants of all these public clouds. But the value. So if you're going to do hard tech as a startup, you're going to build, you're going to be the principles of Supercloud. Maybe they're not the same size of Supercloud just looking at Snowflake, but basically, you're going to leverage all that, you abstract it out and that's where you're able to have a lot of values at that. >> So let me ask you, so I don't know if there's a strict definition of Supercloud, We sort of put it out to the community and said, help us define it. So you got to span multiple clouds. It's not just running in each cloud. There's a metadata layer that kind of understands where you're pulling data from. Like you said you can pull data from Snowflake, it sounds like we're not running on Snowflake, correct? >> No, complimentary to them in their different customers. >> Yeah. Okay. >> They want to build on top of a data platform, data apps. >> Right. And of course they're going cross cloud. >> Right. >> Is there a PaaS layer in there? We've said there's probably a Super PaaS layer. You're probably not doing that, but you're allowing people to bring their own, bring your own PaaS sort of thing maybe. >> So we're a little bit different but basically we publish open APIs. We don't have a user interface. We say, keep the user interface. Again, we're solving the challenge of analytics at scale, we're not trying to retrain your analytics, either analysts or your DevOps or your SOV or your Secop team. They use the tools they already use. Elastic search APIs, SQL APIs. So really they program, they build applications on top of us, Equifax is a good example. Case said it coming out later on this week, after 18 months in production but, basically they're building, we provide the abstraction layer, the quote, I'm going to kill it, Jeff Tincher, who owns all of SREs worldwide, said to the effect of, Hey I'm able to rethink what I do for my data pipelines. But then he also talked about how, that he really doesn't have to worry about the data he puts in it. We deal with that. And he just has to, just query on the other side. That simplicity. We couldn't have done that without that. So anyway, what I like about the definition is, if you were going to do something harder in the world, why would you try to rebuild what Amazon, Google and Azure or Snowflake did? You're going to add things on top. We can still do intellectual property. We're still doing patents. So five grand patents all in this. But literally the abstraction layer is the simplification. The end users do not want to know that complexity, even though they ask the questions. >> And I think too, the other attribute is it's ecosystem enablement. Whereas I think, >> Absolutely >> in general, in the Multicloud 1.0 era, the ecosystem wasn't thinking about, okay, how do I build on top and abstract that. So maybe it is Multicloud 2.0, We chose to use Supercloud. So I'm wondering, we're at the security conference, >> RE: INFORCE is there a security Supercloud? Maybe Snyk has the developer Supercloud or maybe Okta has the identity Supercloud. I think CrowdStrike maybe not. Cause CrowdStrike competes with Microsoft. So maybe, because Microsoft, what's interesting, Merritt Bear was just saying, look, we don't show up in the spending data for security because we're not charging for most of our security. We're not trying to make a big business. So that's kind of interesting, but is there a potential for the security Supercloud? >> So, I think so. But also, I'll give you one thing I talked to, just today, at least three different conversations where everyone wants to log data. It's a little bit specific to us, but basically they want to do the security data lake. The idea of, and Snowflake talks about this too. But the idea of putting all the data in one repository and then how do you abstract out and get value from it? Maybe not the perfect, but it becomes simple to do but hard to get value out. So the different players are going to do that. That's what we do. We're able to, once you land it in your S3 or it doesn't matter, cloud of choice, simple storage, we allow you to get after that data, but we take the primitives and hide them from you. And all you do is query the data and we're spinning up stateless computer to go after it. So then if I look around the floor. There's going to be a bunch of these players. I don't think, why would someone in this floor try to recreate what Amazon or Google or Azure had. They're going to build on top of it. And now the key thing is, do you leave it in standard? And now we're open APIs. People are building on top of my open APIs or do you try to put 'em in a walled garden? And they're in, now your Supercloud. Our belief is, part of it is, it needs to be open access and let you go after it. >> Well. And build your applications on top of it openly. >> They come back to snowflake. That's what Snowflake's doing. And they're basically saying, Hey come into our proprietary environment. And the benefit is, and I think both can win. There's a big market. >> I agree. But I think the benefit of Snowflake's is, okay, we're going to have federated governance, we're going to have data sharing, you're going to have access to all the ecosystem players. >> Yep. >> And as everything's going to be controlled and you know what you're getting. The flip side of that is, Databricks is the other end >> Yeah. >> of that spectrum, which is no, no, you got to be open. >> Yeah. >> So what's going to happen, well what's happening clearly, is Snowflake's saying, okay we've got Snowpark. we're going to allow Python, we're going to have an Apache Iceberg. We're going to have open source tooling that you can access. By the way, it's not going to be as good as our waled garden where the flip side of that is you get Databricks coming at it from a data science and data engineering perspective. And there's a lot of gaps in between, aren't there? >> And I think they both win. Like for instance, so we didn't do Snowpark integration. But we work with people building data apps on top of Snowflake or data bricks. And what we do is, we can add value to that, or what we've done, again, using all the Supercloud stuff we're done. But we deal with the unstructured data, the four V's coming at you. You can't pipeline that to save. So we actually could be additive. As they're trying to do like a security data cloud inside of Snowflake or do the same thing in Databricks. That's where we can play. Now, we play with them at the application level that they get some data from them and some data for us. But I believe there's a partnership there that will do it inside their environment. To us they're just another large scaler environment that my customers want to get after data. And they want me to abstract it out and give value. >> So it's another repository to you. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So I think Snowflake recently added support for unstructured data. You chose not to do Snowpark because why? >> Well, so the way they're doing the unstructured data is not bad. It's JSON data. Basically, This is the dilemma. Everyone wants their application developers to be flexible, move fast, securely but just productivity. So you get, give 'em flexibility. The problem with that is analytics on the end want to be structured to be performant. And this is where Snowflake, they have to somehow get that raw data. And it's changing every day because you just let the developers do what they want now, in some structured base, but do what you need to do your business fast and securely. So it completely destroys. So they have large customers trying to do big integrations for this messy data. And it doesn't quite work, cause you literally just can't make the pipelines work. So that's where we're complimentary do it. So now, the particular integration wasn't, we need a little bit deeper integration to do that. So we're integrating, actually, at the data app layer. But we could, see us and I don't, listen. I think Snowflake's a good actor. They're trying to figure out what's best for the customers. And I think we just participate in that. >> Yeah. And I think they're trying to figure out >> Yeah. >> how to grow their ecosystem. Because they know they can't do it all, in fact, >> And we solve the key thing, they just can't do certain things. And we do that well. Yeah, I have SQL but that's where it ends. >> Yeah. >> I do the messy data and how to play with them. >> And when you talk to one of their founders, anyway, Benoit, he comes on the cube and he's like, we start with simple. >> Yeah. >> It reminds me of the guy's some Pure Storage, that guy Coz, he's always like, no, if it starts to get too complicated. So that's why they said all right, we're not going to start out trying to figure out how to do complex joins and workload management. And they turn that into a feature. So like you say, I think both can win. It's a big market. >> I think it's a good model. And I love to see Frank, you know, move. >> Yeah. I forgot So you AVMAR... >> In the day. >> You guys used to hate each other, right? >> No, no, no >> No. I mean, it's all good. >> But the thing is, look what he's done. Like I wouldn't bet against Frank. I think it's a good message. You can see clients trying to do it. Same thing with Databricks, same thing with BigQuery. We get a lot of same dynamic in BigQuery. It's good for a lot of things, but it's not everything you need to do. And there's ways for the ecosystem to play together. >> Well, what's interesting about BigQuery is, it is truly cloud native, as is Snowflake. You know, whereas Amazon Redshift was sort of Parexel, it's cobbled together now. It's great engineering, but BigQuery gets a lot of high marks. But again, there's limitations to everything. That's why companies like yours can exist. >> And that's why.. so back to the Supercloud. It allows me as a company to participate in that because I'm leveraging all the underlying pieces. Which we couldn't be doing what we're doing now, without leveraging the Supercloud concepts right, so... >> Ed, I really appreciate you coming by, help me wrap up today in RE:INFORCE. Always a pleasure seeing you, my friend. >> Thank you. >> All right. Okay, this is a wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow. I'll be solo. John Furrier had to fly out but we'll be following what he's doing. This is RE:INFORCE 2022. You're watching theCUBE. I'll see you tomorrow.

>> 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)

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's The Cube covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Good morning. From Austin, Texas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is our second day. We just came from a very cool, interesting, keynote, Dave whenever there's astronauts my inner NASA geek from the early 2000s. She just comes right back up Leland Melvin was on >> Amazing, right? >> With a phenomenal story. Talking about technology and the feeling of innovation but also a great story of inspiration from a steam perspective science, technology, engineering, arts, math, I loved that and, >> Dave: And fun >> Very fun. But also... >> One of the better talks I've ever seen >> It really was. It had so many elements that I think you didn't have to be a NASA fan or a NASA geek or a space geek to appreciate the all of the lessons that Leland Melvin learned along the way that he really is inspiring, everybody the audience to take note of. It was I thought it was... >> And incredibly accomplished, right? I mean scientist, MIT engineer, played in the NFL, went to space, he had some really fun stuff when they were, you know, messing around with with gravity. >> Lisa: Yes. >> I never knew you could do that. He had like this water. >> Lisa: Water, yeah. >> Bubble. >> I'd never seen that before and they were throwing M&M's inside (laughter) and he, you know consumed it choked on it, which is pretty funny. >> Yeah, well it was near and dear to me. I worked with NASA my first job out of grad school. >> Dave: Really? >> I did, and managed biological pilots that flew on the space shuttle and the mission that the he talked about that didn't land, Colombia. That was the mission that I worked on. So when he talked about that countdown clock going positive. I was there on the runway with that. So for me, it just struck a chord of, >> Dave: so this is of course the 50th anniversary of the moonwalk. And you know I have this thing about watches, kind of like what you have with shoes (chuckles) >> Lisa: Hey, handbags. >> Is that not true? Oh, It's handbags for you? (laughing) >> Dave: I know this really that was a terrible thing for me to say. >> That's okay. >> Dave: You have great shoes so I just I just assumed that not good to make assumptions. So I bought a moon watch this year which was the watch that Neil Armstrong used to not the exact one but similar one, right? >> Lisa: Yeah. And it actually has an acrylic face because they're afraid if it cracked in space you'd have glass all over the place. [Lisa] Right. So that's a little nostalgia there. >> Well one of the main things too as you look at the mission that President John F. Kennedy established in the 60's for getting a man in space in that 10-year period. That being accomplished and kind of a parallel with what Pure Storage has done in its first 10 years of tremendous innovation. This keynote again Day 2, standing room only at least about 3000 people or so here. Storage as James Governor said, your friend and also who keynoted after Leland this morning you know, (mumbles) Software's eating the world storage is eating the world we have to have secure locations to store all this data so that we can extract maximum value from it. So nice parallel between the space program and Pure Storage. >> James is really good, isn't he? I mean he had to follow Leland and I mean again one of the better talks I've ever heard, but James is very strong, he's funny, he's witty he's he cuts to the chase. >> Lisa: Yes. >> He always tells it like it is. He's a very Monkchips is very focused on developers and they do a really good job there, one of the things he talked about was S3 and how Amazon uses this working backwards methodology which maybe a lot of people don't know about but what they do is they write and rewrite and rewrite and vet and rewrite the press release before they announce the product and even before they develop the products they write the press release and then they work backwards from there. So this is the outcome that we are trying to achieve, and it's very disciplined process that they use and as he said they may revise it hundreds and hundreds of times and he put up Andy Jassy's quote from 2004, around S3. That actually surprised me. 2000...Maybe I read it wrong. >> Lisa: No, it was 2004. >> Because S3 came out after EC2 which was 2006 so I don't know. Maybe I'm getting my dates wrong or I think James actually got his dates wrong but who knows, maybe you know what? Maybe he got a copy of that from the internal working document, working backwards doc that could be what it was but again the point being they envisioned this simple storage that developers didn't have to think about >> Lisa: Right. >> That was virtually unlimited in capacity, highly available and you know, dirt cheap which is what people want and so he talked about that and then he gave a little history of the Dell technology families and I tweeted out this in a funny little you know basically pivotal VM ware EMC and Dell and their history Dell was basically IPO 1984 and then today. There was a few things in between I know but he's got a great perspective on things and I think it resonated with the audience then he talked a lot about Kubernetes jokingly tongue-in-cheek how Kubernetes everybody thought was going to kill VMware but his big takeaway was look you got all these skills of (mumbles) Skills, core database skills, I would even add to that you know understanding how storage works and I always joke if your career is based on managing lawns you might want to rethink your career. But his point was which I liked was look all those skills you've learned are valuable but you now have to step up your game and learn new skills. You have to build on top of those skills so the history you have and the knowledge that you've built up is very valuable but it's not going to propel you to the next decade and so I thought that was a good takeaway and it was an excellent talk. >> So looking back at the conversations yesterday the press releases that came out the advancements of what Pure is doing, with AWS, with Nvidia, with the AI data-hub for example, delivering more of their portfolio as a service to allow businesses whether it's a law-firm like we talked to yesterday utility or Mercedes AMG Petronas Motor-sport, to be able to access data securely, incredibly quickly, recover it restore it absolutely critical and really can be game-changing depending on the type of organization. I want to get your perspectives on some of the things you heard anecdotally yesterday after we wrapped in terms of the atmosphere, the vibe, the thoughts on Pure's next 10 years. >> Yeah, so several things, just some commentary so it's always good at night you go around you get a lot of data we sometimes call it metadata. I think one of the more interesting announcements to me was the block-storage on AWS. I don't necessarily think that this is going to be a huge product near term for Pure in terms of meaningful revenue, but I think it's interesting that they're embracing the trend of the Cloud and are actually architecting Cloud solutions using Amazon services and blending in their own super gluing their own, I mean it's not really superglue but blending in their own software for their customers to extend. Now, you know some of the nuances I don't think they are going to have they have better right performance I think they'll have better read performance clearly they have better availability I think it's going to be a little bit more expensive. All these things are TBD that's just my take based on looking at what I've seen and talking to some people but to me the important thing is that Pure's embracing that Cloud model. Historically, companies that are trying to defend an existing business, they retreat. You know, they denigrate they don't embrace. We know that Pure's going to make more money on pram than it does in the Cloud. At least I think. And so it's to their advantage for companies to stay on-prem but at the same time they understand that trend is your friend and they're embracing that so that was kind of one thing. The second thing I learned is Charlie Giancarlo spent a lot of time with them last night as did you. He's a bit of a policy wonk in very certain narrow areas. He shared with me some of the policy work that he's done around IP protection and not necessarily though on the side that you would think. You would think that okay IP protection that's a good thing but a lot of the laws that were trying to be promoted for IP protection were there to help big companies essentially crush small companies so he fought against that. He shared with me some things around net neutrality. You would think you know you think you know which side of net neutrality he'd be on not necessarily so he had some really interesting perspectives on that. We also talked to and I won't share the name of the company but a very large financial institution that's that's betting a lot on Pure was very interesting to me. This is one of the brand names everybody would know it if you heard it. And their head of storage infrastructure was here, at the show. Now I know this individual and this person doesn't go to a lot of shows >> Maybe a couple a year. >> This person chose to come to this show because they're making an investment in Pure. In a fairly big way and they spent a lot of time with Pure management, expressing their desires as part of an executive form that Pure holds they didn't really market that a lot they didn't really tell us too much about it because it was a little private thing but I happen to know this individual and and I learned several things. They like Pure a lot, they use it for a lot of their workloads, but they have a lot of other storage, they can't necessarily get rid of that other storage for a lot of reasons. Inertia, technical debt, good tickets at the baseball game, all kinds of politics going on there. I also asked specifically about some hybrid companies products where the the cost structure's a little bit better so this gets me to flash array C and we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about this about his flash prices come down and it and opens up new markets. I got some other data yesterday and today that you know that flash array C is not going to be quite priced we don't think as well as hybrid arrays closing the gap it's between one and one and a quarter, one and a half dollars per gigabyte whereas hybrid arrays you are seeing half that, 70 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes as low as 60 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes higher, sometimes high as a dollar but the average around 65-70 cents a gigabyte so there's still a gap there. Flash prices have to come down further. Another thing I learned I'm going to just keep going. >> Lisa: Go ahead! >> The other thing I learned is that China is really building a lot of fab capacity in NAND to try to take out the thumb-drive market-place so they are going to go after the low-end. So companies like Samsung and Toshiba, Toshiba just renamed the company, I can't remember the name of the company but Micron and the NAND flash NAND manufacturers are going to have to now go use their capacity and go after the enterprise because China fab is going to crush the low-end and bomb the low-end pricing. Somebody else told me about a third of flash consumption is in China now. So interesting things going on there. So near term, flash array C is not going to just crush spinning disk and hybrid, it's going to get closer and it's going to slowly eat away at that as NAND prices come down it really could more rapidly eat away at that. So I just learned some other stuff too but I'll take a breath. (laughter) >> So one of the things I think we are resounding with it we heard not just yesterday on the program day but even last night at the executive event we were at is that from this large financial services company that you mentioned, Pure storage is a strategic partner to many organizations from small to large that is incredibly valued to your point the Shuttleman only goes to maybe a couple of events a year and this is one of them? >> Dave: Right. >> This is a company that in its first 10 years has embraced competition head on and I loved how you talked about yesterday 10 years ago they just drove a truck through EMC's market and sort of ripping and replacing. They're bold but they're also doing it in a way that's very methodical. They're working on bringing you know changing companies' perspectives of even backup data as becoming an asset to put it on flash. Because if you can't rapidly restore that, if there's an outage whether it is an attack or it's unintentional human related, that data can't be recovered quickly, you're in a big big problem. And so them as a strategic component of this isn't in any industry I think it was a very resounding sentiment that I heard and felt yesterday. >> Yeah, this ties into tam expansion of what we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about new workloads with AI as an example flash or AC lowering prices will open up those some of those new workloads data protection backup is clearly an opportunity and I think it's interesting, you're seeing a lot of companies now announce a lot of vendors announce flash based recovery systems I'll call them recovery systems because I don't even consider them backup anymore it's not about backup, it's about recovery. Oracle was actually one of the first to use that kind of concept with the zero data loss recovery appliance they call it recovery. So it's all about fast and near instantaneous recovery. Why is that important? It's because it's companies move toward a digital transformation and what does that mean? And what is a digital business? Digital business is all about how you use data and leveraging data in new ways to create new value to monetise or cut cost. And so being able to have access to that data and recover from any inaccess to that data in a split-second is crucial. So Pure can participate in that, now Pure's not alone You know, it's no coincidence that Veritas and Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik they work with Pure, they work with HPE. They work with a lot of the big players and so but so Pure has to you know, has some work to do to win its fair share. Staying on backup for a moment, you know it's interesting to see, behind us, Veritas and Veeam have the biggest sort of presence here. Rubrik has a presence here. I'm sure Cohesity is here maybe someway, somehow but I haven't seen them >> I haven't either. >> Maybe they're not here. I'll have to check that up, but you know Veeam is actually doing very well particularly with lower ASPs we know that about Veeam. They've always come at it from the mid-market and SMB. Whereas Cohesity and Rubrik and Veritas traditionally are coming at it from a higher-end. Certainly Cohesity and Rubrik on higher ASPs. Veeam's doing very well with Pure. They're also doing very well with HPE which is interesting. Cohesity announced a deal with HPE recently I don't know, about six months ago somebody thought "Oh maybe Veeaam's on the outs." No, Veeam's doing very well with HPE. It's different parts of the organization. One works with the server group, one works with the storage group and both companies are actually doing quite well I actually think Veeam is ahead of the curve 'cause they've been working with HPE for quite some time and they're doing very well in the Pure base. By partnering with companies, Pure is able to enter that market much in the same way that NetApp did in the early days. They have a very tight relationship for example with Commvault. So, the other thing I was talking to Keith Townsend last night totally not secretor but he's talking about Outpost and how Amazon is going to be challenged to service Outpost Outpost is the on-prem Amazon stack, that VMware and Amazon announced that they're co-marketing. So who is going to service outpost? It's not going to be Amazon, that's not their game in professional service. It's going to have to be the ecosystem, the large SIs or the Vars the partners, VMware partners 'cause that's not Vmwares play either. So Keith Townsend's premise, I'd love to have him on The Cube to talk about this, is they're going to have trouble scaling Outpost because of that service issue. Believe it or not when we come to these conferences, we talk about other things than just, Pure. There's a lot of stuff going on. New Relic is happening this week. Oracle open world is going on this week. John Furrier just got back from AWS Bahrain, and of course we're here at Pure Accelerate. >> We are and this is our second day of two days of coverage. We've got Coz on next who I think has never been on The Cube. >> Dave: Not to my knowledge. >> We've got Kix on later. A great lineup, more customers Rob Lee is going to be on. So we're going to be digging more into Pure's Cloud strategy, the next ten years, how they're going to accelerate that and pack it into the next couple of years. >> I'll tell you one of the things I want to do, Lisa. I'll just call it out. An individual from Dell EMC wrote a blog ahead of Pure Accelerate I think it was last week, about four or five days ago and this individual called out like one, two, three, four.... five things that we should ask Pure so we should ask them, we should ask Coz we should ask Kix. There was criticism, of course they're biased. These guys they always fight. >> Lisa: Naturally. >> They have these internecine wars. >> Lisa: Yep. >> Sometimes I like to call them... no I won't say it. So scale out, question mark there we want to ask Coz about that and Kix. Pure uses proprietary flash modules. They do that because it allows them to do things that you can't do with off-the-shelf flash. I want to ask and challenge them that. I want to ask about their philosophy on tiering. They don't really believe in tiering, why not? I want to understand that better. They've made some acquisitions, Compuverde is one acquisition, it's a file system. What does that mean for flash play? >> Now we didn't hear anything about that yesterday, so that's a good point that we should dig into that. >> Yeah, so we'll bring that up. And then the Evergreen competitors hate Evergreen because Pure was first with it they caught everybody off guard. I said it yesterday, competitors hate Evergreen because competitors live off of maintenance and if you're not on their maintenance they just keep jacking up the maintenance prices and if you don't move to the new system, maintenance just keeps getting more and more and more and more expensive and so they force you, you're locked in. Force you to move. Pure introduced this different model. You pay for the CapEx up front and then, you know, after three years you get a controller swap. You know, so... >> To your point competitors hate it, customers love it. We heard a lot about that yesterday, we've got a couple more customers on our packed program today, Dave so let's get right to it! >> Great. >> Let's wrap up so we can get Coz on stage. >> Dave: Alright, awesome. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube from Pure Accelerate 2019, day two. Stick around 'Coz' John Colgrove, CTO, founder of Pure, will be on next. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From Austin, Texas it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host. I'm at Pure accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas and Dave and I are really pleased to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, John Colgrove, Coz, CTO and founder of Pure Storage, Coz, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ah, I'm glad to be here thanks for having me. >> And happy 10th anniversary. So, 10 years ago I'm sure you couldn't have envisioned 3, 000 people, Austin being taken over by a sea of orange. But let's go back 10 years, Why did you found Pure Storage? >> Why did I found it? Well, I wasn't really ready to be retired yet. Flash, I started have seen from when I worked at Amdahl many years ago all the way through Veritas, I saw disks continuing to get bigger and bigger and effectively slower and slower. Cause when they don't get any faster and they get bigger, they get slower from by their data. And flash was a catalyst that was going to to change that. But it was the catalyst. What we really wanted to do was to completely change the storage industry. Everything that had annoyed me about the storage industries through all the years in Veritas, All the complexity, all the bad customer practices that the industry forced on people, I wanted to change all that. think of what you demand from your personal tech from your iphone or your laptop or your tablet. Customers should demand that kind of quality, service ability, ease of use from their enterprise IT gear. >> When I started my career in the early '80s I was at IDC and they didn't have a storage analyst. And I started following mainframes and I learned a lot about channel command words and IO subsystems and I came to the conclusion that this is a really hard thing, hard problem to solve. And, so, I got interested in it. You obviously did as well. I'm interested in when you went from Amdahl to Veritas, you had to do some unnatural acts with software to make IO better, 'cause of the spinning disk and understanding the latencies and the scatty chatty protocols and everything else. When you went and thought about Pure and when you think about great architects and I've obviously put you in that category, you chose flash, others like another great architect, Moshe have said you know what I can even squeeze more out of spinning disks. What led you to flash versus trying to squeeze more blood from the spinning disk stone? If I can phrase it that way. >> I think I tend to be more of an extremist on things like that. And I think that's been the key to Pure's success. We were not the first all flash startup. We were the first to focus on affordable flash. Right, if you're going to change the world you have to make something for everyone not for an elite few. But the other thing was we were all flash. There were a lot of other startups that were hybrids that were squeezing more out of the disk and we just went all flash from the beginning. Everything about us is all flash. So, as the future goes more and more towards all flash, we're in a stronger and stronger position. >> And you think that was the game changer that led Pure to be that unicorn that IPO'd four years ago versus those other startups who are trying to do similar things with flash? >> So, that focus helped us a lot with that. The biggest thing that, as I said before flash was a catalyst. The biggest thing we brought to the industry is the simplicity and the evergreen business model. And it's really cool to see all the big companies that we've competed against all these years mimicking a lot of that, but that's the differentiator. Flash was the catalyst that lets you do that. >> Well, so, I'm interested as a little bit of an industry historian and some of the factors that led to your ability to achieve escape velocity which used to be defined as an IPO. I mean, I would argue the 3PAR achieved its escape velocity, I was a $250 million company before it got acquired for 2.5 billion or whatever it was, never reached a billion never even came close. You were the first storage company since NetApp to achieve billion dollar revenue. And you're well on your way to 2 billion, you'll do probably 1.7 this year. In addition to what you've said are there other factors that we should consider in our B school case study on Pure? >> I think one of the things we've tried to do is we've tried to build a company that's going to be in it for that long term. So, we never wanted to settle for an acquisition. We want to build a long term enduring great brand and part of that you have to build more of a partnership with your customers. You have to be a good partner to your partners. Right, if you are short-term focused if you try to squeeze every dollar you can out of people, they don't like you, they don't want to come back. If you build something great and you partner well with the environment around you you can build something long lasting. And we wanted to do that from the beginning, we focused a lot on culture and things like that to help us do that. >> Well it's impressive, congratulations are in order, 'cause 3PAR couldn't do it, Compelling couldn't do it, Isilon, on and on and on. And and EMC at the time was really about EMC that's how you went after. They were able to do virtualization and freeze the market on 3PAR . They were able to do a low cost call it the compellant killer. They were never able to figure out, now maybe they got distracted with elliot management and everything else, but they were never able to figure out how to squash you guys. And that's impressive that you're able to live through that. >> Well, thanks. I mean one of the things we've always tried to do is be supremely disruptive, and that does make it harder for them. >> So, I got to ask I got to challenge you on a couple of things that have come out largely from your competitors but I want to get your take on it. The first one is scale out how come Pure doesn't scale out? I'll leave it there. I have my own thoughts that I've shared with Lisa but. Two controller design. >> Yeah one thing I'd point out is well, FLashBlade, one of our products, is scale out. Flash array, our first product, is not scale out. Scale out isn't a capability for a customer, it's an architecture in how you build the product. When I scale out I have more complicated software. I have more components. More components lead to more failures. Right, if I have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and I have 10 pieces of memory, I'm going to fail it 10 times that same rate. So, scale out introduces complexity, it introduces more components. And then you have to say what do you get from it. So, if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering, if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product, we'd then react to that and go build scale out. Where the flash array sells, we don't see that as a major market need, it's more of a niche. Where FlashBlade sells, then there is much more of a need for that and that's why FlashBlade was scale out from day one. >> Well my correct to that the other thing you get from scale out is non disruptive controller swaps but you've solved that in other ways right? >> You say you get non disruptive controller swaps, I will point out that if you look at these scale out architectures out there there's a set of them that do provide that, but actually the larger set of them don't provide it. Because what they're doing is they're making what they view and what the customer views as one monolithic array built from a set of scale out components. So, in those architectures you can't swap out one part of the scale out, you have to swap out the whole thing. >> The other thing I heard, I love this analogy is you don't really see planes anymore. You see them but you really don't want to fly 'em cause they're old with four engines versus two engines 'cause the two engine planes are so, much more reliable. All right the other question is on proprietary flash modules. You guys have chosen your philosophies, do things that you can't do with just off the shelf components. So, you've gone proprietary and this history there, I mean 3PAR with Custom ASICs but I'd like you to share with us your philosophy on what you're doing there. >> So, kind of, there's a couple dimensions to that. Number one, we have gone with proprietary flash modules but in our flash array, we could plug in off-the-shelf drives any time we want. And in fact today our XR2 line, the lower end models use off the shelf flash and the higher end models use the proprietary. What we get with the proprietary is our own firmware on there. Right, it's the same nanochips, the same nanocontrollers, it's all the same components but it's our firmware. And our firmware only has to support one application, our purity operating system. However the customer reads and writes data into the array, we write it the same way down to the flash. We read it back the same way from the flash. So, by making simpler firmware that only has to solve that one problem, we get better performance out of the flash. We get longer life out of the flash and we get order less that one third of the failures of flash drives. Now the flash drives we were using were already failing, a lot less than disk drives. But we've gotten better than three times the reliability by going to our own flash modules. >> Tiering, your philosophy on tiering. Five, 10 years ago there was a big thing on automated tiering, we're going to put the hot data on the high performance either disk or flash and the slow data on the cheap stuff. Your philosophy on tiering, I think I infer you don't believe in tiering. Why not? Or maybe I don't want to put words in our mouth. >> Well so, tiering is another thing that it adds complexity. So, why do you tier? You tier because you say oh I can't afford all of the better things so, I'm going to layer it in with something that's a little cheaper. If you can get by without tiering that's a better solution it's a simpler solution. >> Simplicity is a theme here. The copy of your acquisition your a file system guru to my knowledge what I've read about them, strong file system. What do you intend to do with that? it's concerned about it forking your existing products. How do you respond? >> So, the compuverde file system, we're going to put that on top of our flash array line and make that a unified architecture where you can support block in file. Compuverde is a very complete file protocol stack. And file protocols are a lot more complex than block protocols. Implementing all of the SMB protocol is not an easy thing it takes a bunch of time. So, it's a way to accelerate that and get a very complete protocol stack for that product. Flash blade will continue on with its own scale out file protocols, file and object protocols independent of that. >> Last question I had is on, there's some criticism that's been laid on you guys on the evergreen. The controller, performance of controller upgrades which I we have not heard, we didn't hear that from customers, we've asked some customers that, but I'd love to get your take on, why is there no guarantee of performance improvements as you go to subsequent controller swap outs. Your thoughts? >> So, what we guarantee is you'll get the like or better. So, you might get a new set of controllers that are perform about the same, you might get one a little better. Generally speaking every time we've done it so far it's moved to better. It doesn't move to radically better, but it moves to the better. So, we are guaranteeing that, it's just a question of how much do you chose to deliver with that. What you're doing is you're keeping the array new. It's not so much about making huge strides in the performance it's about keeping the array new. >> But there's another nuance there that I want to test I mean, just conceptionally it seems to me, because the way you ship software constantly that you're making incremental improvements throughout that three year period. First of all is that an accurate assertion? >> it's actually very accurate. The first time we started really looking at how much better we realized that we had moved the needle on the old gear about, I think it was about 60% up during the time period so, yeah there was sort of a little less gains. >> Okay, so, the proper measurement is okay from what's the performance from day one delta to the controller upgrade? That is more significant versus the controller swap day, whatever and plus one if that makes sense. >> Well, I think both are valid ways to look at it. The biggest thing is the customer doesn't have to migrate and the migrations are the most horrible event in storage. Right it's like moving your house for everyone who has moved, you got to pack everything up. Things could get broken things could get lost, it's just a mess. You don't have to do that and the array just gets bigger, denser, more power efficient it gets better and better over time. And you're on that forever, we are happy to do controller swaps after three years, six years, nine years, 12 years. We will continue to do that as long as customers are paying for that it's our job to keep improving it and to keep making it better. >> We've done a lot of research on array migrations. At a minimum, your anti to do a array migration is $50,000. That's what our data shows. We talk to a very large practitioner last night he said, "When I'm doing an array migration I start six "to eight months ahead of time because it takes that long "to do an array migration, array migrations are horrendous "and anything you can do to avoid those is worth it." So, that's all I had that awesome. Thank you for addressing those questions. >> So, the acceleration, pun intended, that Pure has achieved in its first 10 years we talk about customers all the time we've had a number on yesterday from law firms to utilities to F1, we'll have more on today. But in order to achieve what Pure has, you have had to build a culture that's pretty unique. One, this vibrant orange color that just screams energy, boldness too, we're in Austin, Texas, Dell Technology's backyard. Give us a little bit as we wrap here about how you and your co-founders have developed and really fostered this culture of passion that is delivering more than your competitors would like to see. >> Well, so, one of the things that was a key part of the culture is we didn't just hire a bunch of storage people. We had a few early on cause you need some experience in the history but an awful lot of the people we hired came from other backgrounds. Other engineers, marketing people, et cetera, they did not come from storage. And what we challenge people to do when they come in the door is we're hiring them because of their brain power, right. We don't own minimal rights somewhere, we don't have buildings we don't have a lot of assets. Our asset is our people and what they can produce. And obviously if you think back, well, when I was the only employee, right, I was doing every job. Ideally everyone we've hired since can do whatever we've hired them to do a lot better than I could do it. And that's a philosophy you want to keep going. Every person in Pure should be focused on using their brains, using their creativity to deliver the most value possible to disrupt things where they can, to always look for how we do things better, and to always be looking to hire better than them. >> So, it kind of gets into the next 10 years. Don't hate me for saying this but in retrospect the first 10 years you had it kind of easy. You caught EMC off guard, you drove a truck through their install base, NetApp miss flash. You guys executed obviously, we talked about that billion dollar company. Next 10 years, a little different. Where's the TAM expansion come from in the next 10 years? It's Multicloud, it's new AI workloads, it's lower cost solutions that get you more of the market, it's partnering with backup. But you got cloud, you got competitors that are starting to figure it out. How do you see the next 10 years to go from beyond where you are and that next pike. >> Well, so, I'll start by saying when you start a company, you dream of success and the first 10 years have been as good as you could possibly have dreamt. So, A, hopefully the next 10 years will continue that way. I think you touched upon one thing is the cloud. People have been through the hype cycle of saying the entire world is going to be cloud, there's only going to be three data centers in the world and it's going to be Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They now understand the cloud is a tool and you need to use it properly. So, one of the focuses we're going to be working on over the next several years is making sure that someone can have their data, their application on prem. They can decide I want to put it in the cloud. Move there seamlessly. Move there as easily as you move from one of your cell phones to the next model. Move from one cloud to another cloud. Move from that cloud back on prem. Whether you want to move the data, the applications, both and get the same kind of service, the same kind of experience. That's going to be a big thing. >> You got a lot of work to do there, but yeah. But there's an opportunity isn't there? >> It's the way everybody wants to run, it's the way everybody should run. Running an IT service to deliver value to your company, value to your organization should not be rocket science. And our job at Pure is to make that accessible to everybody so, everybody can deliver that kind of quality experience to their organization. >> And it's an obvious question but you see that as technically feasible over the next five to 10 years? >> Yeah it is technically feasible. This goes back to one of the things that I was mentioning before with flash as a catalyst. One of the thing flash helps do to make this simpler is it frees you from the geometry constraints of disk. You don't have to care as much. Another thing that's making it possible, is faster networking, right. And better networking. And then again you have all the compute and GPUs and co-processors and things pushing things. As you get to where resources are more plentiful, then you have the ability to trade off some of the I've got to get like every microsecond out of this thing for the simplicity, for that ease of use. And that lets you deliver something better in the long run. Right, if I perfectly tune something I might be able to do a little bit better but I'm not going to be able to keep it in tune and I'm going to spend my whole life retuning it and retuning it and finding it out of sync. Simplicity, that drives so much efficiency. Agility, that drives so, much value. >> Well, Coz, thank you so, much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE this morning from Accelerate day two. You talked about flash being a catalyst that sounds to me like Coz has been one of the major catalysts of Pure's success. Happy 10th anniversary, we look forward to the next 10. >> Thanks a lot and thanks for having me. >> For Coz and Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate, 2019. (techno music)