(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to the special Cube conversation that we're launching in conjunction with Pure Accelerate. Prakash Darji is here, is the general manager of Digital Experience. They actually have a business unit dedicated to this at Pure Storage. Prakash, welcome back, good to see you. >> Yeah Dave, happy to be here. >> So a few weeks back, you and I were talking about the Shift 2 and as a service economy and which is a good lead up to Accelerate, held today, we're releasing this video in LA. This is the fifth in person Accelerate. It's got a new tagline techfest so you're making it fun, but still hanging out to the tech, which we love. So this morning you guys made some announcements expanding the portfolio. I'm really interested in your reaffirmed commitment to Evergreen. That's something that got this whole trend started in the introduction of Evergreen Flex. What is that all about? What's your vision for Evergreen Flex? >> Well, so look, this is one of the biggest moments that I think we have as a company now, because we introduced Evergreen and that was and probably still is one of the largest disruptions to happen to the industry in a decade. Now, Evergreen Flex takes the power of modernizing performance and capacity to storage beyond the box, full stop. So we first started on a project many years ago to say, okay, how can we bring that modernization concept to our entire portfolio? That means if someone's got 10 boxes, how do you modernize performance and capacity across 10 boxes or across maybe FlashBlade and FlashArray. So with Evergreen Flex, we first are starting to hyper disaggregate performance and capacity and the capacity can be moved to where you need it. So previously, you could have thought of a box saying, okay, it has this performance or capacity range or boundary, but let's think about it beyond the box. Let's think about it as a portfolio. My application needs performance or capacity for storage, what if I could bring the resources to it? So with Evergreen Flex within the QLC family with our FlashBlade and our FlashArray QLC projects, you could actually move QLC capacity to where you need it. And with FlashArray X and XL or TLC family, you could move capacity to where you need it within that family. Now, if you're enabling that, you have to change the business model because the capacity needs to get build where you use it. If you use it in a high performance tier, you could build at a high performance rate. If you use it as a lower performance tier, you could build at a lower performance rate. So we changed the business model to enable this technology flexibility, where customers can buy the hardware and they get a pay per use consumption model for the software and services, but this enables the technology flexibility to use your capacity wherever you need. And we're just continuing that journey of hyper disaggregated. >> Okay, so you solve the problem of having to allocate specific capacity or performance to a particular workload. You can now spread that across whatever products in the portfolio, like you said, you're disaggregating performance and capacity. So that's very cool. Maybe you could double click on that. You obviously talk to customers about doing this. They were in pain a little bit, right? 'Cause they had this sort of stovepipe thing. So talk a little bit about the customer feedback that led you here. >> Well, look, let's just say today if you're an application developer or you haven't written your app yet, but you know you're going to. Well, you need that at least say I need something, right? So someone's going to ask you what kind of storage do you need? How many IOPS, what kind of performance capacity, before you've written your code. And you're going to buy something and you're going to spend that money. Now at that point, you're going to go write your application, run it on that box and then say, okay, was I right or was I wrong? And you know what? You were guessing before you wrote the software. After you wrote the software, you can test it and decide what you need, how it's going to scale, et cetera. But if you were wrong, you already bought something. In a hyper disaggregated world, that capacity is not a sunk cost, you can use it wherever you want. You can use capacity of somewhere else and bring it over there. So in the world of application development and in the world of storage, today people think about, I've got a workload, it's SAP, it's Oracle, I've built this custom app. I need to move it to a tier of storage, a performance class. Like you think about the application and you think about moving the application. And it takes time to move the application, takes performance, takes loan, it's a scheduled event. What if you said, you know what? You don't have to do any of that. You just move the capacity to where you need it, right? >> Yep. >> So the application's there and you actually have the ability to instantaneously move the capacity to where you need it for the application. And eventually, where we're going is we're looking to do the same thing across the performance hearing. So right now, the biggest benefit is the agility and flexibility a customer has across their fleet. So Evergreen was great for the customer with one array, but Evergreen Flex now brings that power to the entire fleet. And that's not tied to just FlashArray or FlashBlade. We've engineered a data plane in our direct flash fabric software to be able to take on the personality of the system it needs to go into. So when a data pack goes into a FlashBlade, that data pack is optimized for use in that scale out architecture with the metadata for FlashBlade. When it goes into a FlashArray C it's optimized for that metadata structure. So our Purity software has made this transformative to be able to do this. And we created a business model that allowed us to take advantage of this technology flexibility. >> Got it. Okay, so you got this mutually interchangeable performance and capacity across the portfolio beautiful. And I want to come back to sort of the Purity, but help me understand how this is different from just normal Evergreen, existing evergreen options. You mentioned the one array, but help us understand that more fully. >> Well, look, so in addition to this, like we had Evergreen Gold historically. We introduced Evergreen Flex and we had Pure as a service. So you had kind of two spectrums previously. You had Evergreen Gold on one hand, which modernized the performance and capacity of a box. You had Pure as a service that said don't worry about the box, tell me how many IOPS you have and will run and operate and manage that service for you. I think we've spoken about that previously on theCUBE. >> Yep. >> Now, we have this model where it's not just about the box, we have this model where we say, you know what, it's your fleet. You're going to run and operate and manage your fleet and you could move the capacity to where you need it. So as we started thinking about this, we decided to unify our entire portfolio of sub software and subscription services under the Evergreen brand. Evergreen Gold we're renaming to Evergreen Forever. We've actually had seven customers just crossed a decade of updates Forever Evergreen within a box. So Evergreen Forever is about modernizing a box. Evergreen Flex is about modernizing your fleet and Evergreen one, which is our rebrand of Pure as a service is about modernizing your labor. Instead of you worrying about it, let us do it for you. Because if you're an application developer and you're trying to figure out, where should I put my capacity? Where should I do it? You can just sign up for the IOPS you need and let us actually deliver and move the components to where you need it for performance, capacity, management, SLAs, et cetera. So as we think about this, for us this is a spectrum and a continuum of where you're at in the modernization journey to software subscription and services. >> Okay, got it. So why did you feel like now was the right time for the rebranding and the renaming convention, what's behind? What was the thing? Take us inside the internal conversations and the chalkboard discussion? >> Well, look, the chalkboard discussion's simple. It's everything was built on the Evergreen stateless architecture where within a box, right? We disaggregated the performance and capacity within the box already, 10 years ago within Evergreen. And that's what enabled us to build Pure as a service. That's why I say like when companies say they built a service, I'm like it's not a service if you have to do a data migration. You need a stateless architecture that's disaggregated. You can almost think of this as the anti hyper-converge, right? That's going the other way. It's hyper disaggregated. >> Right. >> And that foundation is true for our whole portfolio. That was fundamental, the Evergreen architecture. And then if Gold is modernizing a box and Flex is modernizing your fleet and your portfolio and Pure as a service is modernizing the labor, it is more of a continuation in the spectrum of how do you ensure you get better with age, right? And it's like one of those things when you think about a car. Miles driven on a car means your car's getting older and it doesn't necessarily get better with age, right? What's interesting when you think about the human body, yeah, you get older and some people deteriorate with age and some people it turns out for a period of time, you pick up some muscle mass, you get a little bit older, you get a little bit wiser and you get a little bit better with age for a while because you're putting in the work to modernize, right? But where in infrastructure and hardware and technology are you at the point where it always just gets better with age, right? We've introduced that concept 10 years ago. And we've now had proven industry success over a decade, right? As I mentioned, our first seven customers who've had a decade of Evergreen update started with an FA-300 way back when, and since then performance and capacity has been getting better over time with Evergreen Forever. So this is the next 10 years of it getting better and better for the company and not just tying it to the box because now we've grown up, we've got customers with like large fleets. I think one of our customers just hit 900 systems, right? >> Wow. >> So when you have 900 systems, right? And you're running a fleet you need to think about, okay, how am I using these resources? And in this day and age in that world, power becomes a big thing because if you're using resources inefficiently and the cost of power and energy is up, you're going to be in a world of hurt. So by using Flex where you can move the capacity to where it's needed, you're creating the most efficient operating environment, which is actually the lowest power consumption environment as well. >> Right. >> So we're really excited about this journey of modernizing, but that rebranding just became kind of a no brainer to us because it's all part of the spectrum on your journey of whether you're a single array customer, you're a fleet customer, or you don't want to even run, operate and manage. You can actually just say, you know what, give me the guarantee in the SLA. So that's the spectrum that informed the rebranding. >> Got it. Yeah, so to your point about the human body, all you got to do is look at Tom Brady's NFL combine videos and you'll see what a transformation. Fine wine is another one. I like the term hyper disaggregated because that to me is consistent with what's happening with the cloud and edge. We're building this hyper distributed or disaggregated system. So I want to just understand a little bit about you mentioned Purity so there's this software obviously is the enabler here, but what's under the covers? Is it like a virtualizer or megaload balancer, metadata manager, what's the tech behind this? >> Yeah, so we'll do a little bit of a double tech, right? So we have this concept of drives where in Purity, we build our own software for direct flash that takes the NAND and we do the NAND management as we're building our drives in Purity software. Now ,that advantage gives us the ability to say how should this drive behave? So in a FlashArray C system, it can behave as part of a FlashArray C and its usable capacity that you can write because the metadata and some of the system information is in NVRAM as part of the controller, right? So you have some metadata capability there. In a legend architecture for example, you have a distributed Blade architecture. So you need parts of that capacity to operate almost like a single layer chip where you can actually have metadata operations independent of your storage operations that operate like QLC. So we actually manage the NAND in a very very different way based on the persona of the system it's going into, right? So this capacity to make it usable, right? It's like saying a competitor could go ahead name it, Dell that has power max in Isilon, HPE that has single store and three power and nimble and like you name, like can you really from a technology standpoint say your capacity can be used anywhere or all these independent systems. Everyone's thinking about the world like a system, like here's this system, here's that system, here's that system. And your capacity is locked into a system. To be able to unlock that capacity to the system, you need to behave differently with the media type in the operating environment you're going into and that's what Purity does, right? So we are doing that as part of our direct Flex software around how we manage these drives to enable this. >> Well, it's the same thing in the cloud precaution, right? I mean, you got different APIs and primitive for object, for block, for file. Now, it's all programmable infrastructure so that makes it easier, but to the point, it's still somewhat stovepipe. So it's funny, it's good to see your commitment to Evergreen, I think you're right. You lay down the gauntlet a decade plus ago. First everybody ignored you and then they kind of laughed at you, then they criticized you, and then they said, oh, then you guys reached the escape velocity. So you had a winning hand. So I'm interested in that sort of progression over the past decade where you're going, why this is so important to your customers, where you're trying to get them ultimately. >> Well, look, the thing that's most disappointing is if I bought 100 terabytes still have to re-buy it every three or five years. That seems like a kind of ridiculous proposition, but welcome to storage. You know what I mean? That's what most people do with Evergreen. We want to end data migrations. We want to make sure that every software updates, hardware updates, non disruptive. We want to make it easy to deploy and run at scale for your fleet. And eventually we want everyone to move to our Evergreen one, formerly Pure as a service where we can run and operate and manage 'cause this is all about trust. We're trying to create trust with the customer to say, trust us, to run and operate and scale for you and worry about your business because we make tech easy. And like think about this hyper disaggregated if you go further. If you're going further with hyper disaggregated, you can think about it as like performance and capacity is your Lego building blocks. Now for anyone, I have a son, he wants to build a Lego Death Star. He didn't have that manual, he's toast. So when you move to at scale and you have this hyper disaggregated world and you have this unlimited freedom, you have unlimited choice. It's the problem of the cloud today, too much choice, right? There's like hundreds of instances of this, what do I even choose? >> Right. >> Well, so the only way to solve that problem and create simplicity when you have so much choice is put data to work. And that's where Pure one comes in because we've been collecting and we can scan your landscape and tell you, you should move these types of resources here and move those types of resources there, right? In the past, it was always about you should move this application there or you should move this application there. We're actually going to turn the entire industry on it's head. It's not like applications and data have gravity. So let's think about moving resources to where that are needed versus saying resources are a fixed asset, let's move the applications there. So that's a concept that's new to the industry. Like we're creating that concept, we're introducing that concept because now we have the technology to make that reality a new efficient way of running storage for the world. Like this is that big for the company. >> Well, I mean, a lot of the failures in data analytics and data strategies are a function of trying to jam everything into a single monolithic system and hyper centralize it. Data by its very nature is distributed. So hyper disaggregated fits that model and the pendulum's clearly swinging to that. Prakash, great to have you, purestorage.com I presume is where I can learn more? >> Oh, absolutely. We're super excited and our pent up by demand I think in this space is huge so we're looking forward to bringing this innovation to the world. >> All right, hey, thanks again. Great to see you, I appreciate you coming on and explaining this new model and good luck with it. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thanks for watching. This is David Vellante, and appreciate you watching this Cube conversation, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> 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)