>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to New York City everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at Tavern On the Green, a beautiful facility. I'm surrounded by Yankee fans so I'm like a fish out of water. But that's okay, it's a great time of the year. We love it, we're still in it up in Boston so we're happy. Dave Vellante here, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Nathan Hall is here, he's the field CTO at Pure Storage. Nathan, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> So you guys made some announcements today with Veritas, what's that all about? >> It's pretty exciting and Veritas, being the market leader in data protection software. Now our customers are able to take Veritas's net backup software and use it to drive the policy engine of Snapshots for our FlashArrays. They're also able to take Veritas and back up our data hub, which is our new strategy with FlashBlade to really unify all of data analytics onto a single platform. So Veritas really is the solution net back up that's able to back up all the workloads and Pure is the solution that's able to run all the workloads. >> So what if I could follow-up on that, maybe push you a little bit? A lot of these announcements that you see, we call them Barney deals, I love you, you love me, we go to market together and everything's wonderful. Are we talking about deeper integration than that or is just kind of press release? >> Absolutely deeper integration. So you'll see not just how-to guides, white papers, et cetera, but there's actual engineering-level integration that's happening here. We're available as an advanced disk target within that back up, we've integrated into CloudPoint as well. We certify all of our hardware platforms with Veritas. So this is deep, deep engineering-level integration. >> Yeah, we're excited about Pure, we followed you guys since the early days. You know we saw Scott Dietzen, what he built, very impressive modern architecture, you won't be a legacy for 20, 25 years so you've got a lot going for you. Presumably it's easier to integrate with such a modern architecture, but now at the same time you got to integrate with Veritas, it's been around for about 25 years. We heard a lot about how they're investing in API-based architectures, and microservices, and containers and the like, so what is that like in terms of integrating with a 25-year-old company? >> Well I think, from Pure's perspective we are API first, we're RESTfull APIs first. We've done a ton of integrations across multiple platforms whether it's Kubernetes, Docker, VMware, et cetera, so we have a lot of experience in terms of how to integrate with various flavors of other infrastructure. I think Veritas has done a lot of work as well in terms of maturing their API to really be this kind of cloud-first type of API, this RESTful API, that made our cross-integration much easier. >> You guys like being first, there were a number of firsts, you guys were kind of the first, or one of the first with flash for block. You were kind of the first for file. You guys have hit AI pretty hard, everybody's now doing that. You guys announced the first partnership with NVIDIA, everybody's now doing that. (laughs) You guys announced giving away NVME as part of the Stack for no upcharge, everybody's now doing that. So, you like to be first. Culturally, you've worked at some other companies, what's behind that? >> Well culturally, this is best company I've worked at in terms of culture, period, and really it all starts with the culture of the company. I think that's why we're first in so many places and it's not just first in terms of first to market. It's really about first in terms of customer feedback. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant we're up, we've been at leaders quadrant for five years in a row. But this year, we're indisputably the leader. Furthest to the right on the X-axis, furthest north on the Y-axis and that's all driven by just a customer-obsessed culture. We've got a Net Promoter Score of 86.6 which is stratospheric. It's something that puts us in the top 1% of all business-to-business companies, not just tech companies. So, it's really that culture about customer obsession that drives us to be first. Both to market, in a lot of cases, but also just first in terms of customer perception of our technology. >> You guys were a first at really escape velocity, the billion dollar unicorn status, and now you're kind of having that fly-wheel effect where you're able to throw off different innovations in different areas. Can you talk more about the data hub and the relevance to what you're doing with Veritas and data protection? Let's unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, sure, the data hub, we had a great keynote this morning with Jyothi the VP of Marketing for Veritas and he had an interesting customer tidbit. He had some sort of unnamed government agency customer that actually gets penalized when they're unable to retrieve data fast enough. That's not something that many of our customers have, but they do get penalized in terms of opportunity costs. The reason why is 'cause customers just have their data siloed into all these different split-up locations and that prevents them from being able to get insight out of that data. If you look at AI luminaries like Andrew Ng or even people like Dominique Brezinski at Apple, they all agree that you have to, in order to be successful with your data strategy, you have to unify these data silos. And that's what the data hub does. For the first time we're able to unify everything from data warehousing, to data lakes, to streaming analytics, to AI and now even backup all onto a single platform with multidimensional performance. That's FlashBlade and that is our data hub, we think it's revolutionary and we're challenging the rest of the storage industry to follow suit. Let's make less silos, let's unify the data into a data hub so that our customers can get real actionable information out of their data. >> I was on a crowd chat the other day, you guys put out an open letter to the storage community, an open challenge, so that was kind of both a little controversial but also some fun. That's a very important point you're making about sort of putting data at the core. I make an observation, it's not so much true about Facebook anymore 'cause after the whole fake news thing their market value dropped. But if you look at the top five companies in terms of market value, include Facebook in there, they and Berkshire keep doing this, but let's assume for a second that Facebook's up there. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, top five in terms of US market value. Of course markets ebb and they flow, but it's no coincidence that those are data companies. They all have a lot of hard assets at those companies. They've got data at their core so it's interesting to hear you talk about data hub because one of the challenges that we see for traditional companies, call them incumbents, is they have data in stovepipes. For them to compete they've got to put it in the digital world, they've got to put data at their core. It's not just for start-ups and people doing Greenfield, it's for folks that are established and don't want to get disrupted. Long-winded question, how do they get, let's think of traditional company, an incumbent company, how do they get from point A to point B with the data hub? >> I think Andrew Ng has a great talked-point on this. He basically talks about your data strategy and you need to think about, as a company, how do you acquire data and then how do you unify into a single data hub? It's not just around putting it on a single platform, such as FlashBlade. A valuable byproduct of that is if you have all the stove-piped data, though you probably in terms of your data scientist trying to get access to it, now have to, they have 10 different stovepipes you've got 10 different VPs that you have to go talk to in order to get access to that data. So it really starts with stopping the bleeding and starting to have a data strategy around how do we acquire and how do we make certain or storing data in the same place and have a single unified data hub in order to maximize the value we are able to get out of that data. >> You know when I talked to, I'll throw my two cents in, I talk to a lot of chief data officers. To me, the ones that are most insightful talk about their five imperatives. First of all, is they got to understand how data contributes to monetization. Whether it's saving money or making money, it's not necessarily selling your data. I think a lot of people make that mistake, oh I'm going to monetize my data, I mean I'm going to sell my data, no, it's all about how it contributes to value. The second is, what about data sources? And then how do I get access to data sources? There's a lot implied there in terms of governance and security and who has access to that. And in the same time, how do I scale up my business so that I get the right people who can act on that data? Then how do I form relationships with a line of business so that I can maximize that monetization? Those are, I think, sensible steps that aren't trivial. They require a lot of thought and a lot of cultural change and I would imagine that's what a lot of your customers are going through right now. >> I think they are and I think as IT practitioners out there, I think that we have a duty to get closer to our business and be able to kind of educate them around these data strategies. To give them the same level of insight that you're talking about, you see in some chief data officers. But if I looked out at the, there's a recent study on the Fortune 50, the CXOs, and these aren't even CIOs, they're actually, we think as IT practitioners that the cloud is the most disruptive thing that we see, but the CEOs and the CFOs are actually five times more likely to talk about AI and data as being more disruptive to their business. But most of them have no data strategy, most of them don't know how AI works. It's up to us as IT practitioners to educate the business. To say here's what's possible, here's what we have to do in order to maximize the value out of data, so that you can get a business advantage out of this. It's incumbent on us as IT leaders. >> So Nathan, I think again, that's really insightful because let's face it, if you're moving at the speed of the CIO, which is what many companies want to do, because that's the so called, fat middle and that's where the money is. But you're behind, I mean we're moving into a new era, the cloud era, no pun intended, is here, it's solid but we're entering that data of machine intelligence and we built the foundation with the dupe even, there's a lot of data now what do we do with it? We see, and I wonder if you could comment on this, is the innovation engine of the future changing it? It use to be Moore's Law, we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for years. Now it's data applying machine intelligence and then, of course, using the cloud for scale and attracting start-ups and innovation. That's fine because we want to program infrastructure, we don't want to deploy infrastructure. If you think about Pure, you got data for sure. You're going hard after machine intelligence. And cloud, if I understand your cloud play, you sell to cloud providers whether they're on-prem or in the public cloud but what do you think about those? That innovation sandwich that I just described and how do you guys play? >> Well, cloud is where we get over 30% of our revenue so we're actually selling to the cloud, cloud service providers, et cetera. For example, one of the biggest cloud service providers out there that I think today's announcement helps them out a lot from a policy perspective actually used FlashBlade to reduce their SLAs, to reduce their restore time from, I think, it was 30 hours down to 38 minutes. They were paying money before to their customers. What we see in our cloud strategy is one of empowering cloud providers, but also we think that cloud is increasingly, at the infrastructure layer, going to be commoditized and it's going to be about how do we enable multicloud? So how do we enable customers to get around data gravity problems? I've got this big, weighty database that I want to see if I can move it up to the cloud but that takes me forever. So how do we help customers be able to move to one cloud or even exit a cloud to another or back to on-prem? We think there's a lot of value in applying our, for example deduplication technology, et cetera, to helping customers with those data gravity problems, to making a more open world in terms of sharing data to and from the cloud. >> Great, well we looked at Pure and Veritas getting together, do some hard core engineering, going to market, solving some real problems. Thanks Nathan for hanging out, this iconic beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, Dave Vallante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Day, #VeritasVision, be right back. (digital music)