from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi everybody this is dave vellante thecube and we have some news for you pure storage has acquired portworx the kubernetes specialist for 370 million dollars in an all-cash transaction charlie giancarlo is here he's the ceo of pure storage and he's joined by merlin theorem alley who is the ceo of portworx gentlemen good to see you thanks for coming on thank you dave thanks for having us so charlie uh the transaction all cash transaction north of 300 million your biggest transaction uh ever your biggest acquisition uh give us give us the hard news yeah well the the hard news is uh easy news for our customers we're bringing together uh two great companies uh pure as you know the the leader in technology and uh data storage and management and we're bringing together in uh to our team uh the port works team that is the has been the leader uh in container orchestrated uh storage systems and uh it really is gonna match uh you know the existing and and uh legacy uh hardware and application environment to the new environment of containers and we couldn't be more excited so to so tell us you know what was the rationale the sort of thesis behind the acquisition what are you hoping to accomplish charlie yeah you know uh containers is the way that uh applications are going to be developed in the future uh with with no doubt and uh containers utilize storage differently than traditional application environments whether those are rvms or even bare metal application environments and uh because of that it's a very new way of of handling data management the other thing we saw was a philosophy within um portworx very similar to pure of building cloud everywhere and make it look the same whether it's in a private data center or in the uh public uh cloud environment and so by bringing these two things together we create a very consistent environment for uh for customers whether they're utilizing and going with their existing application environment or with the new container environment for their new applications so merlin let me go to you first of all congratulations you know this isn't your your your first uh nice exit we we've known each other for a long time so so that's fantastic for you and the team uh so so bring us up to date on kind of where the company you know started and and where it's gone and and why you feel like this is such a good fit and a good exit for portworx well let's start with the company you know we've been uh at this for uh five and a half years almost six now and we started with these the very premise that that as containers were beginning to be deployed and apps started to kind of be seen everywhere containerized that data agility needed to match the app agility that people were getting from containers and that was something that was missing and so one of the things we did was really kind of take an entirely different approach to storage we turned kind of storage on its head and and designed it from the app down and effectively what we did was leverage kubernetes which was being used really until then to orchestrate really just the container part of the of this system to start orchestrating data and storage as well so northbound you know we containers are being orchestrated or orchestrated by kubernetes to manage the apps and southbound portworx now added the ability to manage data with kubernetes and what that's resulted in dave is that you know uh in in the last several years we've gained 160 customers uh household names right comcast t-mobile lufthansa ge roblox uh rbc who have all sort of deployed us in production and and really kind of built a leadership position in the ability to aid digital transformation uh of you know which customers are going through with containers hey guys i wonder if you could bring up that the chart uh i want to just introduce some etr data here so so this is one of our favorite views x y view the vertical axis is spending momentum when what we call net score higher the better and the vert and the horizontal axis is is market share and you can see i've outlined with that little pink area container orchestration and container platforms and you can see it's very elevated right there with machine learning and ai a little bit above cloud computing right there with robotic process automation this is the april survey of 1200 uh respondents uh the july survey you know robotic process automation bumps up a little bit which changes the shape but i wanted to show this picture to really explain to our audience the you know the popularity and this is where people are investing and charlie you can see storage kind of you know right there in the in the middle and you it seems to me you're now connecting the dots to containers which are gonna disperse everywhere we often think of containers sometimes as a separate thing but it's not i mean it's embedded into the entire stack i wonder if you can talk containers are just the next generation way of of building applications right and one of the great things about uh containers when you build an app on containers it becomes what's known as portable you know it can operate in the cloud it can operate on your own hardware inside your own data center and of course pure is known for making data portable as well between both private data centers and hyperscalers such as aws and uh and azure so by bringing this together making it possible not just for as we talked about container based applications but also for existing uh application environments whether those are vm or bare metal you know we create a very flexible portable environment i wonder if we could talk merely about you know just sort of the evolution of i mean vms and then and obviously containers the you know the virtual machines when we were spinning them up in the early days storage was like the second class citizen and then through a series of integrations and you know hard work you had you know storage much more native but every vm is is is kind of fat right it's sharing the same uh or has its own operating system my understanding is containers they could share a single operating system uh and and so but talk a little bit more first of all is that right and where does storage fit in in containers i mean we think of them at least at least in the early days as ephemeral uh but you're solving a different problem of persistence maybe talk about that that problem that you're solving sure dave i think you know you characterize this as uh the right way right there's kind of vms uh that have dominated sort of in in the world of infrastructure for for for the last 10 15 years now but what what is really happening here is a little bit more profound right really is if you think about it this is the transformation of a data center from being very very machine centric which is sort of the look back view of the world to being much more application centered going forward and this is being accomplished not just by you know what charlie talked about which is applications being deployed in containers but by the evolution of using kubernetes now as the new control plane for the data center so in in the last couple of years something amazing has happened right people have adopted containers and in doing so they've realized they need to orchestrate these containers and lo and behold they've kind of deployed kubernetes as they've done that they've begun to recognize that kubernetes now gives them a an amazing capability they can now let everything be application driven so kubernetes is now the new app defined control plane for the for the data center just like vms and vmware was the you know the kind of compute centered machine defined data center of the past so we're one of those modern day companies for the modern you know digital transformation stack and it doesn't just mean it's just not just products like portworx but other products in there right whether it's a rancher an open shift or or security solutions that are extensions of kubernetes so to your point what we've done is we've taken kubernetes and extended it to managing storage and data and we're doing that in a way that allows it to be fully distributed completely automated and in fact what happens is now the management of of the app and the data go hand in hand at the same time you don't have these separation of sort of responsibilities so the person who is really our buyer and buying set is a very different buyer than traditional storage and you know you know traditional storage i've talked to you about that part of the business a long time many times in the in the past our buyers are actually devops buyers so we land in devops and we expand in it ops our budgets are coming from uh a digital transformation budget like move to cloud or or even just kind of business transformation and our users are really not the classic storage user but really the the person who's driving kubernetes the person who's making automation decisions cloud architects automation architects they can now operate storage without having to know storage through products like portworx that extend kubernetes uh and and and allow it to be all application driven okay so it's much more happen so it's much more than just bringing i'd say jess much more than bringing state uh to what was originally a stateless environment it's bringing more data management uh correct so charlie connect the dots for us in terms of where pure fits in that in that value chain well as you know i mean we've developed a large number of products and capabilities that uh go well beyond storage into data management so whether it's snapshotting or replication or data motion you know into uh you know from uh from on-prem into the cloud and as we've been doing that we've been building up a control plane to do this with you know traditional uh block and file storage now this is extending that set of same set of capabilities uh to the container side uh you know whether it'll be block because contain there are a lot of container systems that are looking at block but even into the object space overall so think of this as the integration of data manage of a data management control plane for both existing and new apps and and that data control plane existing not just in one location such as uh the the private data center or the private cloud but also into the public uh cloud as well so that a company can orchestrate their both their uh their container-based apps but also the data that goes along with them and the data that goes to their traditional apps with one orchestration tool so you know you mentioned you know i think when you said motion i think of vmotion uh and and if i want to move a workload from one vm to another i can preserve at state is that kind of where you're headed with with control you're thinking of it very much in a push you know i t push sense rather than just the application calling for data access and being given given it through a set of apis so again very much more dynamic environment rather than rather than it be a human uh instigated you know think of it being as as a policy and and pro and programmer initiated set of activities uh i'm glad you brought that up because i think about we think about you know we also often think in monolithic terms and and containers are not right it's really like you said we can have applications even though they run inside of vms it sort of breaks they can but they don't have to right they can run on bare metal uh but of course you know with the with vmware they they've designed it to be able to run inside of vms as well if that's what customers are most comfortable with sure ultimately you were going to add some color to that yeah i think i think you know what what what charlie is describing is really kind of a new paradigm that's a self-service paradigm where application owners and application drivers people who are creating apps deploying apps now can can self-service themselves through a kubernetes-based interface and and it's all automated right so in in a in a funny way one way to think about this is a somebody who who's you know deploying apps they are doing that with the help of kubernetes their hands never leave the kubernetes wheel and now all of a sudden they're deploying you know data and storage and doing all of that without an intimate knowledge of the storage infrastructure so that kind of idea of automation driving and it's and this app-driven self-service model really enables that agility for data in addition to the agility for uh for the app layer and and i think dave the key thing here is you know why why it why has that container bubble floated to the top of of your of your of the graph that you just showed it's because i think modern day enterprises are doing two things that are imperative for their success right one of them is the fast enterprises are gonna eat the slow so they need to move fast and the way for that fast to be translated from an app agility to the agility throughout the whole stack is enabled by this the other thing that they are doing is data is the new oil and and folks really need to be able to leverage their data whether it's their own data external data but bring it all together in real time mine it and they can't do that without automating the heck out of it right and that's what kubernetes enables also so the combination of data agility and being able to kind of create that ability to mine in real time the data through an app-oriented interface is is completely revolutionary if you think about it and in my view going forward what you're going to start seeing is that kubernetes is going to start revolutionizing not just the app world but the world of infrastructure the world of infrastructure is going to change significantly with the advent of kubernetes being used to manage infrastructure yeah we often say in the cube the data is the new development kit and and you're talking about you know infrastructure as code is the perfect instantiation here so charlie i i wonder if are developers sort of a new distribution channel for you do you see that involving yeah you know we did a lot of studying uh before bringing the two companies together and about 40 percent of the buyers of uh of uh this uh environment of of port works our customers that we do talk to regularly in the it group and about 60 in the devops environment so you know one of the beautiful things about this is we have a good head start with the people we're selling to today but also it opens up a whole new uh buying area for us with devops and one that we plan on uh investing in as we go forward so charlie i would imagine this is a pretty fast close right uh what's the yeah these are two california companies and and luckily we've we we scoot under the uh uh the uh uh legal radar of hsr so we think we'll be able to close this within 30 days great and and how will you organize it you're going to where it's going to be it's going to be a a new business unit uh reporting directly to me uh as especially as we go through the you know the early days of of integrating but really we want to learn from the way that poor works has built a successful business make sure that we combine the best of both organizations together uh and uh really understand uh you know how to best uh tie together our go-to markets uh in the uh you know with uh the combination of of legacy and container and so so emerald are you gonna hang out for a while absolutely i you know uh i was i was talking to my team earlier and i said look the journey of business success is like a thousand steps and the part of a startup is only the first 250 steps i'll tell you i think we've kind of run up those first 250 steps pretty fast but we're going to sprint through the next 750 steps with with uh you know in the company of of pure because look pure is has always been well known as a disrupter in the business uh for a long time and we are a relatively new disruptor in the kubernetes space i think this is this this level of our joint ability to disrupt that market end to end is gonna be just just uh astounding astonishing i i'm just really looking forward to kind of taking this to a greater level of accelerating our our business well charlie i mean you see in the data i mean if you pick a analyst firm the vast majority of new applications are being you know developed in using kubernetes and containers but uh give us the last word uh give us the the summary from you in your final thoughts you know i think you know for uh both pure and port work customers what they're going to see is just a great marriage of two great companies i think it's a marriage of two great technologies and they're going to see the ability to be able to orchestrate all of their data across you know their existing as well as their new application environments and across both their development of their private cloud and the public cloud environment so this is uh you know a great addition to uh the advancement that customers are seeing through orchestration orchestration both of their application environment but just as importantly the orchestration of their data storage and management excellent well gentlemen thanks so much for your time really appreciate you coming on thecube thank you david thank you all right and best of luck to you both and thank you for watching everybody this is dave vellante for the cube and we'll see you next time you

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

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

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

>> Narrator: Live, from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering, Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018! Brought to you by: Pure Storage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin, supporting the Prince look today. We're at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, this is a super cool building, 1915 it was built, and is the home of so many cool artists, so got to represent today. Dave Vellante's my co-host for the day. >> Well, I got to tell you, Charlie, thank you for wearing a tie. >> Yeah, well-- >> My tie's coming off. >> Okay, well, hey, look, you and me both. >> You have to wear yours-- >> Well, I do, I still have investors later. >> I'm not the only one who's representing musicians today. >> I got my tee shirt underneath here, all right. >> Oh, oh oh! >> Ladies and gentlemen, you will not want to miss this. >> Bill Graham, right, I'm on a Who, Lisa. >> "I'm on a Who", oh he said The Who! >> The Who! >> We got Roger Daltrey-- >> Charlie: Oh, that's fantastic. >> (laughing) >> Pete Townshend-- >> The Who! >> That's my deal. >> He's being so careful not to ruin his shirt with the buttons. >> The Who. >> I got to say-- >> Well done. >> Tower of Power was really my band. >> Oh, wow. >> They didn't play here, but Bill Graham was the first to sign him. >> Wow, representing. >> Well, I was an East Coast boy, so it was all the New York concerts and venues for me, but it was fantastic, I used to watch, you remember, Bill Graham presents? That was-- >> Yes! >> Yeah! >> I always thought if I found myself on stage, there'd be a couple of security guys dragging me off. >> Love that line! >> Nobody today, and you got a lot of applause, a lot of confetti. So Charlie, kick things off this morning at the Third Annual Accelerate, packed house, orange as far as the eye can see, but just a couple days ago-- >> Sea of orange. >> Exactly, sea of orange, a proud sea of orange. >> Right. >> Just two days ago, on the 21st of May, you guys announced your fiscal 19 first quarter results. Revenue up 40%, year over year, you added 300 new customers, including the U.S. Department of Energy, Paige.ai, and the really amazing transformational things they're doing for cancer research. You also shared today your NPS score: over 83! >> Correct. >> Big numbers shared today. >> These are big numbers. >> You've been the CEO for about nine months or so now, tell us what's going on, how are you sustaining this? Stocks going up? >> Right, right, stock's up about 80% year over year right now, so that's very good, but really I think it's a recognition that Pure is playing a very important role in the data processing, in the high-tech landscape, right? I think, you know, storage was really, I think up until now, really viewed as maybe an aging technology, something that was becoming commoditized, something where innovation wasn't really important, and Pure was the one company that actually thought that storage was important. As I mention in my keynote talk, you know, I really view technology as being a three-legged stool. That is, it's comprised as three elements: compute, networking, and storage. If any of one of them falls behind, you know, it becomes unbalanced, and frankly, you know, computers has advanced 10X over the last 10 years, networking has advanced more than 10X over the last 10 years, and storage didn't keep up at the same time that data was exploding, right? Pure is the one company that actually believes that there's real innovation to be had in storage. Paige.ai is a great example of that, I know it tugs on all of our heartstrings, but Paige.ai took lots of analog data, what was it, we're talking about cancer samples that were on slides, okay, they took literally millions of samples, digitized it, and fed it into an AI machine learning engine. Now, if you understand the way machine learning operates, it has to practice on thousands, or actually tens of thousands, millions, of samples. It could take all year, or it can take hours. What you want it to do is take minutes or hours, and if the data can't be fed fast enough into that engine, you know, it's going to take all year. You want your cancer pathology to be analyzed, you know, really quickly. >> Immediately. >> Immediately, right? That's what this engine can do, and it can do it because we can feed the data at it fast, at the rate it needs to be able to analyze that cancer. Data is just becoming the core of every company's business, it's becoming, if you will, the currency, it's becoming the gold mine, where companies now want to analyze their data. Right now, only about a half of 1% of the data that companies have can even be analyzed, because it's being kept in cold storage, and at Pure, we believe in no cold storage, you know, it's all got to be hot, it's all got to be available, able to be analyzed, able to be mined. >> Do you think, I got to ask you this, do you think that percentage will rise faster than the amount of data that's going to be created? Especially when you're thinking things at the edge. >> It's a great question, and I think absolutely! The reason is because it's not only the data that's being generated, or saved now, that's important. If you really want to analyze trends and get to know your customers, you know, the last five years, the last 10 years of data, is just as important. Increasingly, I think you may know this just from online banking, right, it used to be that maybe you'd have last month's checks available to you, but now you want to go back a year, you want to go back five years, and see, you know, you get audited by the IRS, they say: "Well, prove to us you did this," you need to find those checks and banks are being expected to have that information available to you. >> I got to ask you, you're what we call a tech-athlete, you were showing your tech-chops on stage, former CTO, but you've been a CEO, a board member of many prominent companies, why, Charlie, did you choose to come back in an operating role? You know, why at Pure, and why in an operating role? >> You know, I love being part of a team, it's really that. You know, I've had great fun throughout my career, but being part of a team that is focused on innovation, and is enabling, you know, not just our industry but frankly, allowing the world's business to do a better job. I mean, that's what gets me thrilled. I like working with customers every day, with our sales people, with our engineers. It's just a thrilling life! >> You did say in your keynote this morning that you leave the office, at the end of the day, with a smile, and you get to the office in the morning with a smile, that's pretty cool. >> I do, and if you asked my wife she'd tell you the same thing right, so I really enjoy being part of the team. >> Dave: So, oh, go ahead, please >> Oh, thank you sir. One of the things that Pure has done well is: partners, partnerships. We're going to be talking with NVIDIA later today, so this is going to be on, you guys just announced the new AIRI mini, and I was just telling Dave: I need to see that box, cause it looks pretty blinged out on the website. Talk to us about, though, what you guys are doing with your partnerships and how you've seen that really be represented in the successes of your customers. >> Right, well there are several different types of partnerships that we could talk about. First of all, we're 100% channel lead in our organization. We believe in the channel. You know, this is ancient history now, but when I arrived at Cisco, they were 100% direct at that time, no partners whatsoever. >> Belly to belly. >> Belly to belly, and I was very much apart of driving Cisco to be 100% partner over that period of time. So, you know, my history and belief in utilizing a channel to go to market is very well known, and my view is: the more we make our partners successful, the more we make our customers successful, the more successful we will be. But then, there are other types of partnerships as well. There are technology partnerships, like what we have with Cisco and NVIDIA, and again, we need to do more with other companies to make the solutions that we jointly provide, easier for our customers to be able to use. Then, there are system integration partners, because, let's face it, with as much technology as we build, customers often need help from experts of system integrators, to be able to pull that all together, to solve their business problems. Again, the more we can work with these system integrators, have them understand our products, train them to use them better, the better off our customers will be. >> Charlie, Pure has redefined, in my opinion, escape velocity in the storage business, it used to be getting to public, you saw that with 3PAR, Compel, Isilon, Data Domain, you guys are the first storage to hit one billion dollars since NetApp-- >> Right, 20 years ago. >> Awesome milestone, I didn't think it was possible eight years ago, to be honest, so now, okay, what's next? Can you remain an independent company? In order to remain independent, you got to grow, NetApp got to five billion in a faster growing market, you guys got to gain-share, how do you continue to do that? >> Well, you're right, each and every day we have to compete. We have to, you know, kill for what we eat. Our European sales lead calls it, our competition, on an account basis, a: knife fight in a phone booth. So the competition is tough out there, but we are bringing innovations to market, and more importantly, we're investing in the technology at a rate that I think our competitors are not going to be able to keep up with. We invest close to 20% of our revenue every year in R&D. Our competitors are in single-digits, okay, and this is a technology business, you know, eventually, if you don't keep up with the technology, you're going to lose, and so, that I think is going to allow us to continue growing and scaling. You're right, growth is important for us to be able to stay independent, but I looked very deeply at the entire industry before joining, and you know, I was in private equity for awhile, so we know how to analyze an industry, right? My view was that all of the other competitors are either no longer investing, and that's either internally, or in terms of large acquisitions, or they've already made their beds, and so I didn't really see a likely acquirer for Pure, and that was going to give us, if you will, the breathing room to be able to grow to a scale where we can continue to be independent. >> Almost by necessity! >> Almost by necessity, yeah. >> It's good to put the pressure on yourselves. >> So, in terms of where you are now, how is Pure positioned to lead storage growth in infrastructure for AI-based apps? There's this explosion of AI, right, fueled by deep-learning, and GPUs, and big data. How are you positioned to lead this charge is storage growth there? >> That's such a great question, you know, to get to the part of, you know, I started hearing about AI when I graduated college, which is a really long time ago now, and yet why is it exploding now? Well, computing has done its job, right, we're here today with NVIDIA, with GPUs that are just, you know, we're talking about, you know, giga-flops, you know, just incredible speeds of compute. Networking has done its job, we're now at 100 gigabits, and we're starting to talk about 400 gigabit per second networks, and storage hadn't kept up, right, even though data is exploding. So, we announced today, as you know, our data-centric architecture, and we believe this is an architecture that really sets our customers' data free. It sets it free in many ways. One of which, it allows it to always be hot, at a price that customers can afford, not only can afford, it's cheaper than what they're doing today, because we're collapsing tiers. No longer a hot tier, warm tier, cold tier, it's all one tier that can serve many, many needs at the same time, and so all of your applications can get access to real-time data, and access it simultaneously with the other applications, and we make sure that they get the quality of service they need, and we protect the data from being, you know, either corrupted or changed when other applications want it to be the same. So, we do what is necessary now, to allow the data to be analyzed for whether it's analytics, or AI, or machine learning, or simply to allow DEV-ops to be able to operate on real-time data, on live data, you know, without upsetting the operation's environment. >> I want to make sure I understand this, so you're democratizing tiering, essentially-- >> Charlie: Democratizing tiering. >> So how do you deal with, you know, different densities, QLC, et cetera, is that through software, is that? >> Well, so we hide that from the customer, right, so we're able to take advantage of the latest storage because we speak directly to the storage chips themselves. All of our competitors use what are called SSDs, solid state drives. Now, think about that for a moment. There's no drive in a solid state drive, these things are designed to allow Flash to mimic hard disk, but hard disk has all these disadvantages, why do you want Flash to mimic hard disk? We also set Flash free. We're able to use Flash in parallel, okay, we're able to take low quality Flash and make it look like high quality Flash, because our software adapts to whatever the specific characteristics of the flash are. So we have this whole layer of software that does nothing other than allow Flash to provide the best possible performance characteristics that Flash can provide. It allows us to mix and match, and completely hide that from the customer. >> With MVME, you're taking steps to eliminate what I call: the horrible storage stack. >> Charlie: That's exactly right. >> So, you talked earlier about the disparity between storage and the other two legs of the stool, so as you attack that bottle neck, what's the new bottle neck? Is it networking, and do you see that shaking out? >> It's a great question, I think the new bottle neck, I would actually put it at a higher layer, it's the orchestration layer that allows all this stuff to work together, in a way that requires less human interaction. There are great new technologies on the horizon, you know, Kubernetes, and Spark, and Kafka, a variety of others that will allow us to create a cloud environment, if you will, both for the applications and for the data, within private enterprises, similar to what they can get in the cloud, in many cases. >> You also talked about, innovation, and I want to ask you about the innovation equation, as both a technologist and a CEO who talks to a lot of other CEOS. We see innovation as coming from data, and the application of machine intelligence on that data, and cloud economics at scale, do you buy that? And where do you guys fit in that? >> We do buy that, although cloud economics, we believe, that we can create an environment where customers and their private data centers can also get cloud economics, and in fact, if you look at cloud economics, they're very good for some workloads, not necessarily good for other workloads. They're good at low scale, but not initially good at high scale. So, how do we allow customers to be able to easily move workloads between these different environments, depending on what their specific needs are, and that's what we view as our job, but also point something else out as well. About 30% of our sales are in the cloud providers themselves. They're in softwares that service, infrastructures that service, platforms as a service. These vendors are using our systems, so as you can see, we are already designed for cloud economics. We also already get to see how these leading-edge, very high scale customers construct their environments, and then we're able to bring that into the enterprise environment as well. >> I mean, I think we buy that. You're an arm's dealer to the cloud, you know, maybe not the tier zero to use that term, which is, but also, you're helping your On-Prem customers bring the cloud operating model to their data, cause they can't just stuff it into the cloud. >> It won't always be the right solution for everyone, now, it'll be the right solution for many, and we're doing more and more to allow the customers to bridge that, but we think that it's a multi-cloud environment, including private data centers, and we want to create as much flexibility as we can. >> Would you say Pure is going to be an enabler of companies being able to analyze way more than a half a percent of their data? >> If we don't do that, then there's no good reason for us to be in business. That is exactly what we're focused on. >> Last question for you Charlie, you've been the CEO about nine months now; cultural observations of Pure Storage? >> Oh, you know, you've seen the sea of orange that's here, and by the way, the orange is being sported not just by Puritans, not just by our employees, but by our partners and our customers as well. It's a bit infections, I have to be honest, I had one piece of orange clothing when I started this job, and you know, my mother's into it, she's sending me orange, you know, all sorts of orange clothing, some of which I'll wear, some of which I won't. My wife, everyone, there's a lot of enthusiasm about this business, it has a bit of a cult-like following, and Puritans are really very, very dedicated, not just to the customer, I mean, people become dedicated, you know, not to an entity, they become dedicated to a cause, and the cause for Pure is really to make our customers successful, and our employees feel that it's what drives them every day, it's what brings them to work, and hopefully it's what puts a smile on their face when they go home at night. >> Charlie Giancarlo, CEO of Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today! >> Thank you, thank you. >> For The Who Vallante, I'm Prince Martin, and we are live at Pure Accelerate 2018, in San Francisco, stick around, Who and I will be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> The ascendancy of cloud and SAS has shown new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once sought after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays, and maximizing server utilization has been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros, developers with expertise in microservices, container, application development, and like. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. Begs the question, is hardware going the way of Coball? Well, not likely. Software has to run on something, but the labor needed to deploy, and troubleshoot, and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting. At the same time, we've seen the value flow also shifting in hardware. Once a world dominated by X86 processors value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and arm based designs. Moreover, other componentry like NICs, accelerators, and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated, and increasingly important. The question is, does it matter? And if so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs, and the broader society? Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we've organized a special power panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question, does hardware still matter? Allow me to introduce the panel. Bob O'Donnell is president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. David Nicholson is a CTO and tech expert. Keith Townson is CEO and founder of CTO Advisor. And Marc Staimer is the chief dragon slayer at Dragon Slayer Consulting and oftentimes a Wikibon contributor. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending some time here. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay before we get into it, I just want to bring up some data from ETR. This is a survey that ETR does every quarter. It's a survey of about 1200 to 1500 CIOs and IT buyers and I'm showing a subset of the taxonomy here. This XY axis and the vertical axis is something called net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. It's essentially the percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular area than those spending less. You subtract the lesses from the mores and you get a net score. Anything the horizontal axis is pervasion in the data set. Sometimes they call it market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just the percentage of activity in the data set as a percentage of the total. That red 40% line, anything over that is considered highly elevated. And for the past, I don't know, eight to 12 quarters, the big four have been AI and machine learning, containers, RPA and cloud and cloud of course is very impressive because not only is it elevated in the vertical access, but you know it's very highly pervasive on the horizontal. So what I've done is highlighted in red that historical hardware sector. The server, the storage, the networking, and even PCs despite the work from home are depressed in relative terms. And of course, data center collocation services. Okay so you're seeing obviously hardware is not... People don't have the spending momentum today that they used to. They've got other priorities, et cetera, but I want to start and go kind of around the horn with each of you, what is the number one trend that each of you sees in hardware and why does it matter? Bob O'Donnell, can you please start us off? >> Sure Dave, so look, I mean, hardware is incredibly important and one comment first I'll make on that slide is let's not forget that hardware, even though it may not be growing, the amount of money spent on hardware continues to be very, very high. It's just a little bit more stable. It's not as subject to big jumps as we see certainly in other software areas. But look, the important thing that's happening in hardware is the diversification of the types of chip architectures we're seeing and how and where they're being deployed, right? You refer to this in your opening. We've moved from a world of x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD to things like obviously GPUs, DPUs. We've got VPU for, you know, computer vision processing. We've got AI-dedicated accelerators, we've got all kinds of other network acceleration tools and AI-powered tools. There's an incredible diversification of these chip architectures and that's been happening for a while but now we're seeing them more widely deployed and it's being done that way because workloads are evolving. The kinds of workloads that we're seeing in some of these software areas require different types of compute engines than traditionally we've had. The other thing is (coughs), excuse me, the power requirements based on where geographically that compute happens is also evolving. This whole notion of the edge, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more detail later is driven by the fact that where the compute actually sits closer to in theory the edge and where edge devices are, depending on your definition, changes the power requirements. It changes the kind of connectivity that connects the applications to those edge devices and those applications. So all of those things are being impacted by this growing diversity in chip architectures. And that's a very long-term trend that I think we're going to continue to see play out through this decade and well into the 2030s as well. >> Excellent, great, great points. Thank you, Bob. Zeus up next, please. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing when you look at this chart to remember too is, you know, through the pandemic and the work from home period a lot of companies did put their office modernization projects on hold and you heard that echoed, you know, from really all the network manufacturers anyways. They always had projects underway to upgrade networks. They put 'em on hold. Now that people are starting to come back to the office, they're looking at that now. So we might see some change there, but Bob's right. The size of those market are quite a bit different. I think the other big trend here is the hardware companies, at least in the areas that I look at networking are understanding now that it's a combination of hardware and software and silicon that works together that creates that optimum type of performance and experience, right? So some things are best done in silicon. Some like data forwarding and things like that. Historically when you look at the way network devices were built, you did everything in hardware. You configured in hardware, they did all the data for you, and did all the management. And that's been decoupled now. So more and more of the control element has been placed in software. A lot of the high-performance things, encryption, and as I mentioned, data forwarding, packet analysis, stuff like that is still done in hardware, but not everything is done in hardware. And so it's a combination of the two. I think, for the people that work with the equipment as well, there's been more shift to understanding how to work with software. And this is a mistake I think the industry made for a while is we had everybody convinced they had to become a programmer. It's really more a software power user. Can you pull things out of software? Can you through API calls and things like that. But I think the big frame here is, David, it's a combination of hardware, software working together that really make a difference. And you know how much you invest in hardware versus software kind of depends on the performance requirements you have. And I'll talk about that later but that's really the big shift that's happened here. It's the vendors that figured out how to optimize performance by leveraging the best of all of those. >> Excellent. You guys both brought up some really good themes that we can tap into Dave Nicholson, please. >> Yeah, so just kind of picking up where Bob started off. Not only are we seeing the rise of a variety of CPU designs, but I think increasingly the connectivity that's involved from a hardware perspective, from a kind of a server or service design perspective has become increasingly important. I think we'll get a chance to look at this in more depth a little bit later but when you look at what happens on the motherboard, you know we're not in so much a CPU-centric world anymore. Various application environments have various demands and you can meet them by using a variety of components. And it's extremely significant when you start looking down at the component level. It's really important that you optimize around those components. So I guess my summary would be, I think we are moving out of the CPU-centric hardware model into more of a connectivity-centric model. We can talk more about that later. >> Yeah, great. And thank you, David, and Keith Townsend I really interested in your perspectives on this. I mean, for years you worked in a data center surrounded by hardware. Now that we have the software defined data center, please chime in here. >> Well, you know, I'm going to dig deeper into that software-defined data center nature of what's happening with hardware. Hardware is meeting software infrastructure as code is a thing. What does that code look like? We're still trying to figure out but servicing up these capabilities that the previous analysts have brought up, how do I ensure that I can get the level of services needed for the applications that I need? Whether they're legacy, traditional data center, workloads, AI ML, workloads, workloads at the edge. How do I codify that and consume that as a service? And hardware vendors are figuring this out. HPE, the big push into GreenLake as a service. Dale now with Apex taking what we need, these bare bone components, moving it forward with DDR five, six CXL, et cetera, and surfacing that as cold or as services. This is a very tough problem. As we transition from consuming a hardware-based configuration to this infrastructure as cold paradigm shift. >> Yeah, programmable infrastructure, really attacking that sort of labor discussion that we were having earlier, okay. Last but not least Marc Staimer, please. >> Thanks, Dave. My peers raised really good points. I agree with most of them, but I'm going to disagree with the title of this session, which is, does hardware matter? It absolutely matters. You can't run software on the air. You can't run it in an ephemeral cloud, although there's the technical cloud and that's a different issue. The cloud is kind of changed everything. And from a market perspective in the 40 plus years I've been in this business, I've seen this perception that hardware has to go down in price every year. And part of that was driven by Moore's law. And we're coming to, let's say a lag or an end, depending on who you talk to Moore's law. So we're not doubling our transistors every 18 to 24 months in a chip and as a result of that, there's been a higher emphasis on software. From a market perception, there's no penalty. They don't put the same pressure on software from the market to reduce the cost every year that they do on hardware, which kind of bass ackwards when you think about it. Hardware costs are fixed. Software costs tend to be very low. It's kind of a weird thing that we do in the market. And what's changing is we're now starting to treat hardware like software from an OPEX versus CapEx perspective. So yes, hardware matters. And we'll talk about that more in length. >> You know, I want to follow up on that. And I wonder if you guys have a thought on this, Bob O'Donnell, you and I have talked about this a little bit. Marc, you just pointed out that Moore's laws could have waning. Pat Gelsinger recently at their investor meeting said that he promised that Moore's law is alive and well. And the point I made in breaking analysis was okay, great. You know, Pat said, doubling transistors every 18 to 24 months, let's say that Intel can do that. Even though we know it's waning somewhat. Look at the M1 Ultra from Apple (chuckles). In about 15 months increased transistor density on their package by 6X. So to your earlier point, Bob, we have this sort of these alternative processors that are really changing things. And to Dave Nicholson's point, there's a whole lot of supporting components as well. Do you have a comment on that, Bob? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Dave. And one thing to bear in mind as well, not only are we seeing a diversity of these different chip architectures and different types of components as a number of us have raised the other big point and I think it was Keith that mentioned it. CXL and interconnect on the chip itself is dramatically changing it. And a lot of the more interesting advances that are going to continue to drive Moore's law forward in terms of the way we think about performance, if perhaps not number of transistors per se, is the interconnects that become available. You're seeing the development of chiplets or tiles, people use different names, but the idea is you can have different components being put together eventually in sort of a Lego block style. And what that's also going to allow, not only is that going to give interesting performance possibilities 'cause of the faster interconnect. So you can share, have shared memory between things which for big workloads like AI, huge data sets can make a huge difference in terms of how you talk to memory over a network connection, for example, but not only that you're going to see more diversity in the types of solutions that can be built. So we're going to see even more choices in hardware from a silicon perspective because you'll be able to piece together different elements. And oh, by the way, the other benefit of that is we've reached a point in chip architectures where not everything benefits from being smaller. We've been so focused and so obsessed when it comes to Moore's law, to the size of each individual transistor and yes, for certain architecture types, CPUs and GPUs in particular, that's absolutely true, but we've already hit the point where things like RF for 5g and wifi and other wireless technologies and a whole bunch of other things actually don't get any better with a smaller transistor size. They actually get worse. So the beauty of these chiplet architectures is you could actually combine different chip manufacturing sizes. You know you hear about four nanometer and five nanometer along with 14 nanometer on a single chip, each one optimized for its specific application yet together, they can give you the best of all worlds. And so we're just at the very beginning of that era, which I think is going to drive a ton of innovation. Again, gets back to my comment about different types of devices located geographically different places at the edge, in the data center, you know, in a private cloud versus a public cloud. All of those things are going to be impacted and there'll be a lot more options because of this silicon diversity and this interconnect diversity that we're just starting to see. >> Yeah, David. David Nicholson's got a graphic on that. They're going to show later. Before we do that, I want to introduce some data. I actually want to ask Keith to comment on this before we, you know, go on. This next slide is some data from ETR that shows the percent of customers that cited difficulty procuring hardware. And you can see the red is they had significant issues and it's most pronounced in laptops and networking hardware on the far right-hand side, but virtually all categories, firewalls, peripheral servers, storage are having moderately difficult procurement issues. That's the sort of pinkish or significant challenges. So Keith, I mean, what are you seeing with your customers in the hardware supply chains and bottlenecks? And you know we're seeing it with automobiles and appliances but so it goes beyond IT. The semiconductor, you know, challenges. What's been the impact on the buyer community and society and do you have any sense as to when it will subside? >> You know, I was just asked this question yesterday and I'm feeling the pain. People question, kind of a side project within the CTO advisor, we built a hybrid infrastructure, traditional IT data center that we're walking with the traditional customer and modernizing that data center. So it was, you know, kind of a snapshot of time in 2016, 2017, 10 gigabit, ARISTA switches, some older Dell's 730 XD switches, you know, speeds and feeds. And we said we would modern that with the latest Intel stack and connected to the public cloud and then the pandemic hit and we are experiencing a lot of the same challenges. I thought we'd easily migrate from 10 gig networking to 25 gig networking path that customers are going on. The 10 gig network switches that I bought used are now double the price because you can't get legacy 10 gig network switches because all of the manufacturers are focusing on the more profitable 25 gig for capacity, even the 25 gig switches. And we're focused on networking right now. It's hard to procure. We're talking about nine to 12 months or more lead time. So we're seeing customers adjust by adopting cloud. But if you remember early on in the pandemic, Microsoft Azure kind of gated customers that didn't have a capacity agreement. So customers are keeping an eye on that. There's a desire to abstract away from the underlying vendor to be able to control or provision your IT services in a way that we do with VMware VP or some other virtualization technology where it doesn't matter who can get me the hardware, they can just get me the hardware because it's critically impacting projects and timelines. >> So that's a great setup Zeus for you with Keith mentioned the earlier the software-defined data center with software-defined networking and cloud. Do you see a day where networking hardware is monetized and it's all about the software, or are we there already? >> No, we're not there already. And I don't see that really happening any time in the near future. I do think it's changed though. And just to be clear, I mean, when you look at that data, this is saying customers have had problems procuring the equipment, right? And there's not a network vendor out there. I've talked to Norman Rice at Extreme, and I've talked to the folks at Cisco and ARISTA about this. They all said they could have had blowout quarters had they had the inventory to ship. So it's not like customers aren't buying this anymore. Right? I do think though, when it comes to networking network has certainly changed some because there's a lot more controls as I mentioned before that you can do in software. And I think the customers need to start thinking about the types of hardware they buy and you know, where they're going to use it and, you know, what its purpose is. Because I've talked to customers that have tried to run software and commodity hardware and where the performance requirements are very high and it's bogged down, right? It just doesn't have the horsepower to run it. And, you know, even when you do that, you have to start thinking of the components you use. The NICs you buy. And I've talked to customers that have simply just gone through the process replacing a NIC card and a commodity box and had some performance problems and, you know, things like that. So if agility is more important than performance, then by all means try running software on commodity hardware. I think that works in some cases. If performance though is more important, that's when you need that kind of turnkey hardware system. And I've actually seen more and more customers reverting back to that model. In fact, when you talk to even some startups I think today about when they come to market, they're delivering things more on appliances because that's what customers want. And so there's this kind of app pivot this pendulum of agility and performance. And if performance absolutely matters, that's when you do need to buy these kind of turnkey, prebuilt hardware systems. If agility matters more, that's when you can go more to software, but the underlying hardware still does matter. So I think, you know, will we ever have a day where you can just run it on whatever hardware? Maybe but I'll long be retired by that point. So I don't care. >> Well, you bring up a good point Zeus. And I remember the early days of cloud, the narrative was, oh, the cloud vendors. They don't use EMC storage, they just run on commodity storage. And then of course, low and behold, you know, they've trot out James Hamilton to talk about all the custom hardware that they were building. And you saw Google and Microsoft follow suit. >> Well, (indistinct) been falling for this forever. Right? And I mean, all the way back to the turn of the century, we were calling for the commodity of hardware. And it's never really happened because you can still drive. As long as you can drive innovation into it, customers will always lean towards the innovation cycles 'cause they get more features faster and things. And so the vendors have done a good job of keeping that cycle up but it'll be a long time before. >> Yeah, and that's why you see companies like Pure Storage. A storage company has 69% gross margins. All right. I want to go jump ahead. We're going to bring up the slide four. I want to go back to something that Bob O'Donnell was talking about, the sort of supporting act. The diversity of silicon and we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades. You know, we asked, you know, is Moore's law dead? We say it's moderating. Dave Nicholson. You want to talk about those supporting components. And you shared with us a slide that shift. You call it a shift from a processor-centric world to a connect-centric world. What do you mean by that? And let's bring up slide four and you can talk to that. >> Yeah, yeah. So first, I want to echo this sentiment that the question does hardware matter is sort of the answer is of course it matters. Maybe the real question should be, should you care about it? And the answer to that is it depends who you are. If you're an end user using an application on your mobile device, maybe you don't care how the architecture is put together. You just care that the service is delivered but as you back away from that and you get closer and closer to the source, someone needs to care about the hardware and it should matter. Why? Because essentially what hardware is doing is it's consuming electricity and dollars and the more efficiently you can configure hardware, the more bang you're going to get for your buck. So it's not only a quantitative question in terms of how much can you deliver? But it also ends up being a qualitative change as capabilities allow for things we couldn't do before, because we just didn't have the aggregate horsepower to do it. So this chart actually comes out of some performance tests that were done. So it happens to be Dell servers with Broadcom components. And the point here was to peel back, you know, peel off the top of the server and look at what's in that server, starting with, you know, the PCI interconnect. So PCIE gen three, gen four, moving forward. What are the effects on from an interconnect versus on performance application performance, translating into new orders per minute, processed per dollar, et cetera, et cetera? If you look at the advances in CPU architecture mapped against the advances in interconnect and storage subsystem performance, you can see that CPU architecture is sort of lagging behind in a way. And Bob mentioned this idea of tiling and all of the different ways to get around that. When we do performance testing, we can actually peg CPUs, just running the performance tests without any actual database environments working. So right now we're at this sort of imbalance point where you have to make sure you design things properly to get the most bang per kilowatt hour of power per dollar input. So the key thing here what this is highlighting is just as a very specific example, you take a card that's designed as a gen three PCIE device, and you plug it into a gen four slot. Now the card is the bottleneck. You plug a gen four card into a gen four slot. Now the gen four slot is the bottleneck. So we're constantly chasing these bottlenecks. Someone has to be focused on that from an architectural perspective, it's critically important. So there's no question that it matters. But of course, various people in this food chain won't care where it comes from. I guess a good analogy might be, where does our food come from? If I get a steak, it's a pink thing wrapped in plastic, right? Well, there are a lot of inputs that a lot of people have to care about to get that to me. Do I care about all of those things? No. Are they important? They're critically important. >> So, okay. So all I want to get to the, okay. So what does this all mean to customers? And so what I'm hearing from you is to balance a system it's becoming, you know, more complicated. And I kind of been waiting for this day for a long time, because as we all know the bottleneck was always the spinning disc, the last mechanical. So people who wrote software knew that when they were doing it right, the disc had to go and do stuff. And so they were doing other things in the software. And now with all these new interconnects and flash and things like you could do atomic rights. And so that opens up new software possibilities and combine that with alternative processes. But what's the so what on this to the customer and the application impact? Can anybody address that? >> Yeah, let me address that for a moment. I want to leverage some of the things that Bob said, Keith said, Zeus said, and David said, yeah. So I'm a bit of a contrarian in some of this. For example, on the chip side. As the chips get smaller, 14 nanometer, 10 nanometer, five nanometer, soon three nanometer, we talk about more cores, but the biggest problem on the chip is the interconnect from the chip 'cause the wires get smaller. People don't realize in 2004 the latency on those wires in the chips was 80 picoseconds. Today it's 1300 picoseconds. That's on the chip. This is why they're not getting faster. So we maybe getting a little bit slowing down in Moore's law. But even as we kind of conquer that you still have the interconnect problem and the interconnect problem goes beyond the chip. It goes within the system, composable architectures. It goes to the point where Keith made, ultimately you need a hybrid because what we're seeing, what I'm seeing and I'm talking to customers, the biggest issue they have is moving data. Whether it be in a chip, in a system, in a data center, between data centers, moving data is now the biggest gating item in performance. So if you want to move it from, let's say your transactional database to your machine learning, it's the bottleneck, it's moving the data. And so when you look at it from a distributed environment, now you've got to move the compute to the data. The only way to get around these bottlenecks today is to spend less time in trying to move the data and more time in taking the compute, the software, running on hardware closer to the data. Go ahead. >> So is this what you mean when Nicholson was talking about a shift from a processor centric world to a connectivity centric world? You're talking about moving the bits across all the different components, not having the processor you're saying is essentially becoming the bottleneck or the memory, I guess. >> Well, that's one of them and there's a lot of different bottlenecks, but it's the data movement itself. It's moving away from, wait, why do we need to move the data? Can we move the compute, the processing closer to the data? Because if we keep them separate and this has been a trend now where people are moving processing away from it. It's like the edge. I think it was Zeus or David. You were talking about the edge earlier. As you look at the edge, who defines the edge, right? Is the edge a closet or is it a sensor? If it's a sensor, how do you do AI at the edge? When you don't have enough power, you don't have enough computable. People were inventing chips to do that. To do all that at the edge, to do AI within the sensor, instead of moving the data to a data center or a cloud to do the processing. Because the lag in latency is always limited by speed of light. How fast can you move the electrons? And all this interconnecting, all the processing, and all the improvement we're seeing in the PCIE bus from three, to four, to five, to CXL, to a higher bandwidth on the network. And that's all great but none of that deals with the speed of light latency. And that's an-- Go ahead. >> You know Marc, no, I just want to just because what you're referring to could be looked at at a macro level, which I think is what you're describing. You can also look at it at a more micro level from a systems design perspective, right? I'm going to be the resident knuckle dragging hardware guy on the panel today. But it's exactly right. You moving compute closer to data includes concepts like peripheral cards that have built in intelligence, right? So again, in some of this testing that I'm referring to, we saw dramatic improvements when you basically took the horsepower instead of using the CPU horsepower for the like IO. Now you have essentially offload engines in the form of storage controllers, rate controllers, of course, for ethernet NICs, smart NICs. And so when you can have these sort of offload engines and we've gone through these waves over time. People think, well, wait a minute, raid controller and NVMe? You know, flash storage devices. Does that make sense? It turns out it does. Why? Because you're actually at a micro level doing exactly what you're referring to. You're bringing compute closer to the data. Now, closer to the data meaning closer to the data storage subsystem. It doesn't solve the macro issue that you're referring to but it is important. Again, going back to this idea of system design optimization, always chasing the bottleneck, plugging the holes. Someone needs to do that in this value chain in order to get the best value for every kilowatt hour of power and every dollar. >> Yeah. >> Well this whole drive performance has created some really interesting architectural designs, right? Like Nickelson, the rise of the DPU right? Brings more processing power into systems that already had a lot of processing power. There's also been some really interesting, you know, kind of innovation in the area of systems architecture too. If you look at the way Nvidia goes to market, their drive kit is a prebuilt piece of hardware, you know, optimized for self-driving cars, right? They partnered with Pure Storage and ARISTA to build that AI-ready infrastructure. I remember when I talked to Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure about when the three companies rolled that out. He said, "Look, if you're going to do AI, "you need good store. "You need fast storage, fast processor and fast network." And so for customers to be able to put that together themselves was very, very difficult. There's a lot of software that needs tuning as well. So the three companies partner together to create a fully integrated turnkey hardware system with a bunch of optimized software that runs on it. And so in that case, in some ways the hardware was leading the software innovation. And so, the variety of different architectures we have today around hardware has really exploded. And I think it, part of the what Bob brought up at the beginning about the different chip design. >> Yeah, Bob talked about that earlier. Bob, I mean, most AI today is modeling, you know, and a lot of that's done in the cloud and it looks from my standpoint anyway that the future is going to be a lot of AI inferencing at the edge. And that's a radically different architecture, Bob, isn't it? >> It is, it's a completely different architecture. And just to follow up on a couple points, excellent conversation guys. Dave talked about system architecture and really this that's what this boils down to, right? But it's looking at architecture at every level. I was talking about the individual different components the new interconnect methods. There's this new thing called UCIE universal connection. I forget what it stands answer for, but it's a mechanism for doing chiplet architectures, but then again, you have to take it up to the system level, 'cause it's all fine and good. If you have this SOC that's tuned and optimized, but it has to talk to the rest of the system. And that's where you see other issues. And you've seen things like CXL and other interconnect standards, you know, and nobody likes to talk about interconnect 'cause it's really wonky and really technical and not that sexy, but at the end of the day it's incredibly important exactly. To the other points that were being raised like mark raised, for example, about getting that compute closer to where the data is and that's where again, a diversity of chip architectures help and exactly to your last comment there Dave, putting that ability in an edge device is really at the cutting edge of what we're seeing on a semiconductor design and the ability to, for example, maybe it's an FPGA, maybe it's a dedicated AI chip. It's another kind of chip architecture that's being created to do that inferencing on the edge. Because again, it's that the cost and the challenges of moving lots of data, whether it be from say a smartphone to a cloud-based application or whether it be from a private network to a cloud or any other kinds of permutations we can think of really matters. And the other thing is we're tackling bigger problems. So architecturally, not even just architecturally within a system, but when we think about DPUs and the sort of the east west data center movement conversation that we hear Nvidia and others talk about, it's about combining multiple sets of these systems to function together more efficiently again with even bigger sets of data. So really is about tackling where the processing is needed, having the interconnect and the ability to get where the data you need to the right place at the right time. And because those needs are diversifying, we're just going to continue to see an explosion of different choices and options, which is going to make hardware even more essential I would argue than it is today. And so I think what we're going to see not only does hardware matter, it's going to matter even more in the future than it does now. >> Great, yeah. Great discussion, guys. I want to bring Keith back into the conversation here. Keith, if your main expertise in tech is provisioning LUNs, you probably you want to look for another job. So maybe clearly hardware matters, but with software defined everything, do people with hardware expertise matter outside of for instance, component manufacturers or cloud companies? I mean, VMware certainly changed the dynamic in servers. Dell just spun off its most profitable asset and VMware. So it obviously thinks hardware can stand alone. How does an enterprise architect view the shift to software defined hyperscale cloud and how do you see the shifting demand for skills in enterprise IT? >> So I love the question and I'll take a different view of it. If you're a data analyst and your primary value add is that you do ETL transformation, talk to a CDO, a chief data officer over midsize bank a little bit ago. He said 80% of his data scientists' time is done on ETL. Super not value ad. He wants his data scientists to do data science work. Chances are if your only value is that you do LUN provisioning, then you probably don't have a job now. The technologies have gotten much more intelligent. As infrastructure pros, we want to give infrastructure pros the opportunities to shine and I think the software defined nature and the automation that we're seeing vendors undertake, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo take your pick that Pure Storage, NetApp that are doing the automation and the ML needed so that these practitioners don't spend 80% of their time doing LUN provisioning and focusing on their true expertise, which is ensuring that data is stored. Data is retrievable, data's protected, et cetera. I think the shift is to focus on that part of the job that you're ensuring no matter where the data's at, because as my data is spread across the enterprise hybrid different types, you know, Dave, you talk about the super cloud a lot. If my data is in the super cloud, protecting that data and securing that data becomes much more complicated when than when it was me just procuring or provisioning LUNs. So when you say, where should the shift be, or look be, you know, focusing on the real value, which is making sure that customers can access data, can recover data, can get data at performance levels that they need within the price point. They need to get at those datasets and where they need it. We talked a lot about where they need out. One last point about this interconnecting. I have this vision and I think we all do of composable infrastructure. This idea that scaled out does not solve every problem. The cloud can give me infinite scale out. Sometimes I just need a single OS with 64 terabytes of RAM and 204 GPUs or GPU instances that single OS does not exist today. And the opportunity is to create composable infrastructure so that we solve a lot of these problems that just simply don't scale out. >> You know, wow. So many interesting points there. I had just interviewed Zhamak Dehghani, who's the founder of Data Mesh last week. And she made a really interesting point. She said, "Think about, we have separate stacks. "We have an application stack and we have "a data pipeline stack and the transaction systems, "the transaction database, we extract data from that," to your point, "We ETL it in, you know, it takes forever. "And then we have this separate sort of data stack." If we're going to inject more intelligence and data and AI into applications, those two stacks, her contention is they have to come together. And when you think about, you know, super cloud bringing compute to data, that was what Haduck was supposed to be. It ended up all sort of going into a central location, but it's almost a rhetorical question. I mean, it seems that that necessitates new thinking around hardware architectures as it kind of everything's the edge. And the other point is to your point, Keith, it's really hard to secure that. So when you can think about offloads, right, you've heard the stats, you know, Nvidia talks about it. Broadcom talks about it that, you know, that 30%, 25 to 30% of the CPU cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offloads, or networking or security. It seems like maybe Zeus you have a comment on this. It seems like new architectures need to come other to support, you know, all of that stuff that Keith and I just dispute. >> Yeah, and by the way, I do want to Keith, the question you just asked. Keith, it's the point I made at the beginning too about engineers do need to be more software-centric, right? They do need to have better software skills. In fact, I remember talking to Cisco about this last year when they surveyed their engineer base, only about a third of 'em had ever made an API call, which you know that that kind of shows this big skillset change, you know, that has to come. But on the point of architectures, I think the big change here is edge because it brings in distributed compute models. Historically, when you think about compute, even with multi-cloud, we never really had multi-cloud. We'd use multiple centralized clouds, but compute was always centralized, right? It was in a branch office, in a data center, in a cloud. With edge what we creates is the rise of distributed computing where we'll have an application that actually accesses different resources and at different edge locations. And I think Marc, you were talking about this, like the edge could be in your IoT device. It could be your campus edge. It could be cellular edge, it could be your car, right? And so we need to start thinkin' about how our applications interact with all those different parts of that edge ecosystem, you know, to create a single experience. The consumer apps, a lot of consumer apps largely works that way. If you think of like app like Uber, right? It pulls in information from all kinds of different edge application, edge services. And, you know, it creates pretty cool experience. We're just starting to get to that point in the business world now. There's a lot of security implications and things like that, but I do think it drives more architectural decisions to be made about how I deploy what data where and where I do my processing, where I do my AI and things like that. It actually makes the world more complicated. In some ways we can do so much more with it, but I think it does drive us more towards turnkey systems, at least initially in order to, you know, ensure performance and security. >> Right. Marc, I wanted to go to you. You had indicated to me that you wanted to chat about this a little bit. You've written quite a bit about the integration of hardware and software. You know, we've watched Oracle's move from, you know, buying Sun and then basically using that in a highly differentiated approach. Engineered systems. What's your take on all that? I know you also have some thoughts on the shift from CapEx to OPEX chime in on that. >> Sure. When you look at it, there are advantages to having one vendor who has the software and hardware. They can synergistically make them work together that you can't do in a commodity basis. If you own the software and somebody else has the hardware, I'll give you an example would be Oracle. As you talked about with their exit data platform, they literally are leveraging microcode in the Intel chips. And now in AMD chips and all the way down to Optane, they make basically AMD database servers work with Optane memory PMM in their storage systems, not MVME, SSD PMM. I'm talking about the cards itself. So there are advantages you can take advantage of if you own the stack, as you were putting out earlier, Dave, of both the software and the hardware. Okay, that's great. But on the other side of that, that tends to give you better performance, but it tends to cost a little more. On the commodity side it costs less but you get less performance. What Zeus had said earlier, it depends where you're running your application. How much performance do you need? What kind of performance do you need? One of the things about moving to the edge and I'll get to the OPEX CapEx in a second. One of the issues about moving to the edge is what kind of processing do you need? If you're running in a CCTV camera on top of a traffic light, how much power do you have? How much cooling do you have that you can run this? And more importantly, do you have to take the data you're getting and move it somewhere else and get processed and the information is sent back? I mean, there are companies out there like Brain Chip that have developed AI chips that can run on the sensor without a CPU. Without any additional memory. So, I mean, there's innovation going on to deal with this question of data movement. There's companies out there like Tachyon that are combining GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs in a single chip. Think of it as super composable architecture. They're looking at being able to do more in less. On the OPEX and CapEx issue. >> Hold that thought, hold that thought on the OPEX CapEx, 'cause we're running out of time and maybe you can wrap on that. I just wanted to pick up on something you said about the integrated hardware software. I mean, other than the fact that, you know, Michael Dell unlocked whatever $40 billion for himself and Silverlake, I was always a fan of a spin in with VMware basically become the Oracle of hardware. Now I know it would've been a nightmare for the ecosystem and culturally, they probably would've had a VMware brain drain, but what does anybody have any thoughts on that as a sort of a thought exercise? I was always a fan of that on paper. >> I got to eat a little crow. I did not like the Dale VMware acquisition for the industry in general. And I think it hurt the industry in general, HPE, Cisco walked away a little bit from that VMware relationship. But when I talked to customers, they loved it. You know, I got to be honest. They absolutely loved the integration. The VxRail, VxRack solution exploded. Nutanix became kind of a afterthought when it came to competing. So that spin in, when we talk about the ability to innovate and the ability to create solutions that you just simply can't create because you don't have the full stack. Dell was well positioned to do that with a potential span in of VMware. >> Yeah, we're going to be-- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, in fact, I think you're right, Keith, it was terrible for the industry. Great for Dell. And I remember talking to Chad Sakac when he was running, you know, VCE, which became Rack and Rail, their ability to stay in lockstep with what VMware was doing. What was the number one workload running on hyperconverged forever? It was VMware. So their ability to remain in lockstep with VMware gave them a huge competitive advantage. And Dell came out of nowhere in, you know, the hyper-converged market and just started taking share because of that relationship. So, you know, this sort I guess it's, you know, from a Dell perspective I thought it gave them a pretty big advantage that they didn't really exploit across their other properties, right? Networking and service and things like they could have given the dominance that VMware had. From an industry perspective though, I do think it's better to have them be coupled. So. >> I agree. I mean, they could. I think they could have dominated in super cloud and maybe they would become the next Oracle where everybody hates 'em, but they kick ass. But guys. We got to wrap up here. And so what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to go and reverse the order this time, you know, big takeaways from this conversation today, which guys by the way, I can't thank you enough phenomenal insights, but big takeaways, any final thoughts, any research that you're working on that you want highlight or you know, what you look for in the future? Try to keep it brief. We'll go in reverse order. Maybe Marc, you could start us off please. >> Sure, on the research front, I'm working on a total cost of ownership of an integrated database analytics machine learning versus separate services. On the other aspect that I would wanted to chat about real quickly, OPEX versus CapEx, the cloud changed the market perception of hardware in the sense that you can use hardware or buy hardware like you do software. As you use it, pay for what you use in arrears. The good thing about that is you're only paying for what you use, period. You're not for what you don't use. I mean, it's compute time, everything else. The bad side about that is you have no predictability in your bill. It's elastic, but every user I've talked to says every month it's different. And from a budgeting perspective, it's very hard to set up your budget year to year and it's causing a lot of nightmares. So it's just something to be aware of. From a CapEx perspective, you have no more CapEx if you're using that kind of base system but you lose a certain amount of control as well. So ultimately that's some of the issues. But my biggest point, my biggest takeaway from this is the biggest issue right now that everybody I talk to in some shape or form it comes down to data movement whether it be ETLs that you talked about Keith or other aspects moving it between hybrid locations, moving it within a system, moving it within a chip. All those are key issues. >> Great, thank you. Okay, CTO advisor, give us your final thoughts. >> All right. Really, really great commentary. Again, I'm going to point back to us taking the walk that our customers are taking, which is trying to do this conversion of all primary data center to a hybrid of which I have this hard earned philosophy that enterprise IT is additive. When we add a service, we rarely subtract a service. So the landscape and service area what we support has to grow. So our research focuses on taking that walk. We are taking a monolithic application, decomposing that to containers, and putting that in a public cloud, and connecting that back private data center and telling that story and walking that walk with our customers. This has been a super enlightening panel. >> Yeah, thank you. Real, real different world coming. David Nicholson, please. >> You know, it really hearkens back to the beginning of the conversation. You talked about momentum in the direction of cloud. I'm sort of spending my time under the hood, getting grease under my fingernails, focusing on where still the lions share of spend will be in coming years, which is OnPrem. And then of course, obviously data center infrastructure for cloud but really diving under the covers and helping folks understand the ramifications of movement between generations of CPU architecture. I know we all know Sapphire Rapids pushed into the future. When's the next Intel release coming? Who knows? We think, you know, in 2023. There have been a lot of people standing by from a practitioner's standpoint asking, well, what do I do between now and then? Does it make sense to upgrade bits and pieces of hardware or go from a last generation to a current generation when we know the next generation is coming? And so I've been very, very focused on looking at how these connectivity components like rate controllers and NICs. I know it's not as sexy as talking about cloud but just how these opponents completely change the game and actually can justify movement from say a 14th-generation architecture to a 15th-generation architecture today, even though gen 16 is coming, let's say 12 months from now. So that's where I am. Keep my phone number in the Rolodex. I literally reference Rolodex intentionally because like I said, I'm in there under the hood and it's not as sexy. But yeah, so that's what I'm focused on Dave. >> Well, you know, to paraphrase it, maybe derivative paraphrase of, you know, Larry Ellison's rant on what is cloud? It's operating systems and databases, et cetera. Rate controllers and NICs live inside of clouds. All right. You know, one of the reasons I love working with you guys is 'cause have such a wide observation space and Zeus Kerravala you, of all people, you know you have your fingers in a lot of pies. So give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm not a propeller heady as my chip counterparts here. (all laugh) So, you know, I look at the world a little differently and a lot of my research I'm doing now is the impact that distributed computing has on customer employee experiences, right? You talk to every business and how the experiences they deliver to their customers is really differentiating how they go to market. And so they're looking at these different ways of feeding up data and analytics and things like that in different places. And I think this is going to have a really profound impact on enterprise IT architecture. We're putting more data, more compute in more places all the way down to like little micro edges and retailers and things like that. And so we need the variety. Historically, if you think back to when I was in IT you know, pre-Y2K, we didn't have a lot of choice in things, right? We had a server that was rack mount or standup, right? And there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, differences in choice. But today we can deploy, you know, these really high-performance compute systems on little blades inside servers or inside, you know, autonomous vehicles and things. I think the world from here gets... You know, just the choice of what we have and the way hardware and software works together is really going to, I think, change the world the way we do things. We're already seeing that, like I said, in the consumer world, right? There's so many things you can do from, you know, smart home perspective, you know, natural language processing, stuff like that. And it's starting to hit businesses now. So just wait and watch the next five years. >> Yeah, totally. The computing power at the edge is just going to be mind blowing. >> It's unbelievable what you can do at the edge. >> Yeah, yeah. Hey Z, I just want to say that we know you're not a propeller head and I for one would like to thank you for having your master's thesis hanging on the wall behind you 'cause we know that you studied basket weaving. >> I was actually a physics math major, so. >> Good man. Another math major. All right, Bob O'Donnell, you're going to bring us home. I mean, we've seen the importance of semiconductors and silicon in our everyday lives, but your last thoughts please. >> Sure and just to clarify, by the way I was a great books major and this was actually for my final paper. And so I was like philosophy and all that kind of stuff and literature but I still somehow got into tech. Look, it's been a great conversation and I want to pick up a little bit on a comment Zeus made, which is this it's the combination of the hardware and the software and coming together and the manner with which that needs to happen, I think is critically important. And the other thing is because of the diversity of the chip architectures and all those different pieces and elements, it's going to be how software tools evolve to adapt to that new world. So I look at things like what Intel's trying to do with oneAPI. You know, what Nvidia has done with CUDA. What other platform companies are trying to create tools that allow them to leverage the hardware, but also embrace the variety of hardware that is there. And so as those software development environments and software development tools evolve to take advantage of these new capabilities, that's going to open up a lot of interesting opportunities that can leverage all these new chip architectures. That can leverage all these new interconnects. That can leverage all these new system architectures and figure out ways to make that all happen, I think is going to be critically important. And then finally, I'll mention the research I'm actually currently working on is on private 5g and how companies are thinking about deploying private 5g and the potential for edge applications for that. So I'm doing a survey of several hundred us companies as we speak and really looking forward to getting that done in the next couple of weeks. >> Yeah, look forward to that. Guys, again, thank you so much. Outstanding conversation. Anybody going to be at Dell tech world in a couple of weeks? Bob's going to be there. Dave Nicholson. Well drinks on me and guys I really can't thank you enough for the insights and your participation today. Really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching this special power panel episode of theCube Insights powered by ETR. Remember we publish each week on Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com. All these episodes they're available as podcasts. DM me or any of these guys. I'm at DVellante. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai for all the data. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante recent earnings reports from key enterprise software and infrastructure players underscore that tech spending remains robust in the post isolation economy especially for those companies that have figured out a cloud strategy now despite covert variant uncertainties and component shortages and hardware most leading tech names outperformed expectations this past week that said investors were not in the mood to reward all names and any variability in product mix or earnings outlook or other nuances were met with a tepid response from the street hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll provide you with commentary and data points on key tech companies that announced this past week including snowflake salesforce workday splunk elastic palo alto networks vmware dell pure storage hp inc and netapp let's start by rolling back a week or so and look at how stocks that are priced to perfection get impacted by any negative news back on august 20th we saw this headline hit snowflake stock falls as analyst says signings growth has slowed the analyst report was put out by a boutique firm cleveland research the stock took a double-digit hit as you can see here i immediately got several texts from investors who know i follow the company asking me what i thought now as a disclaimer i don't give stock picking advice please do your own research but between the cube wikibon and etr we do see a lot of data and i'm happy to share that which i did with this tweet it said lots of talk ahead of snowflake's earnings some analysts have said their data suggests a slowdown etr data looks pretty encouraging and i tagged merv adrian he's a sharp analyst over at gartner who follows data and database he responded i don't speculate about revenues but there's no discernible shift in our client conversations though interest still seems high okay cool but let's let's dig into the etr data a bit and see why we remained positive this is a larger and more detailed version of the chart in the tweet it's a candlestick that shows a time series of the spending data on snowflake using etr's net score methodology the stacked bars represent the percent of customers in the survey that are newly adding the snowflake platform the forest green indicates the number of customers reporting that their spending is increasing by six percent or more the gray is flat spend that's plus or minus five percent the pinkish stack that's decreasing spend by six percent or more and the bright red is where chucking the platform we're leaving now you subtract the reds from the greens and that yields a net score which for snowflake last survey was a very elevated 81.3 percent we've highlighted the spending velocity line that's net score at the top put a picture of that blue line for snowflake in your mind because we're going to come back to it the yellow line down below is market share which is a measure of the pervasiveness in the survey i.e mention share if you will so looking at this chart one might conclude that the lime green i.e new account acquisition is compressing however in further analyzing the data back in january 2019 snowflake's presence in the survey was much lower only 35 accounts in subsequent quarters that number has jumped to over between 120 and 140 snowflake accounts so big much bigger n so while the percentage of respondents may be shrinking the absolute number of new accounts is growing on the snowflake earnings call snowflake said that new customers increased this past quarter to 458 up from 397 in the same period last year what's also telling is the forest green on its very first earnings call as a public company snowflake cfo mike scarpelli said very clearly the company's revenue growth in the near term will come from existing customers and the forest green i.e existing customers spending more is expanding in the etr survey so very strong confirmation of that trend and note the red is virtually non-existent for snowflake so it's no surprise that snowflake handily beat its earnings on the 25th of august which prompted a flurry of texts to me saying you were right thanks don't thank me do your own research we're just one data source okay so here's a snapshot of some of the major players that announced earnings this past week this chart is our popular xy view with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the survey in the horizontal plane we talked about snowflake already but i'll emphasize they've held that roughly eighty percent net score for ten plus quarterly surveys now and they've continued to move steadily to the right on the horizontal axis let's make some comments on these other names and then dig in a bit more salesforce of course they're the big player amongst these names that we're showing and as we've said in previous breaking analysis segments they have become the next great software company showing 20 plus growth for five consecutive quarters which is quite impressive splunk as we've reported has struggled in the survey but you can see splunk has a great presence in the data set they have an awesome customer base and the acquisition of signal fx plotted on the left with an elevated next net score represents a really good opportunity to enter new markets like observability and pull signalfx to the right to the rest of splunk's customers and that can help accelerate splunk's move toward a subscription model then there's workday we're plotting the company's core hcm business as well as its emerging financial software suite the latter represents workday's tam expansion opportunity and the company appears to be back on track to show sustained growth now let's dig a little deeper into these names and we'll start with salesforce here's the etr spending profile for salesforce salesforce as we showed earlier has a huge and growing presence in the market and a consistently elevated net score in the etr data and while the chart shows much more green than red and a strong uptick in spending momentum from last october survey this doesn't really tell the whole story salesforce's stock price rocketed out of the march 2020 crash and ran up to a peak last august and is on its way back salesforce has made a number of strategic acquisitions including tableau slack mulesoft and several other billion dollar plus buys as well as a number of smaller acquisitions this past quarter saw 23 revenue growth relative to last year with 20 percent plus operating margins that's huge salesforce's acquisition strategy is beginning to demonstrate the company's promised operating leverage and slack in our view will only add to that benefit including continuous improvement and free cash flow sales force revenue will blow through 25 billion dollars this fiscal year it's a company with a 250 billion dollar market cap and appears to be one a name that has meaningful upside opportunity okay let's take a quick look at splunk we're finally seeing an uptick in splunk's spending momentum with within the etr data set eric bradley and i have discussed this in previous breaking analysis segments the key point as we've reported is we see splunk as a company that has been in transition from a traditional license to an arr subscription model and finally the company is showing clarity that there's light at the end of that tunnel investors don't like companies in transition and like salesforce splunk's stock price ran up to an all-time high last august but then came down hard and never fully recovered but it has come off its may lows and there were some real positives this past quarter cloud annual recurring revenue for splunk this past quarter grew 72 percent and its bookings grew 20 29 year on year the company was conservative in its guidance and there still seems to be some uncertainty around cash flow but more clear guidance by splunk on the top line is a welcome sign and now another name that we've been following that announced earnings this week is elastic and as you can see by the etr data that company has an elevated net score with very little red in the bars now note that blue line while it's slowly decelerating it remains very strong and elevated remember the comment earlier i made about freezing that snowflake blue line in your head the reason we said that is because for snowflake to hold its roughly 80 net score position firmly over the past 10 plus quarters is quite astounding and for the most part it's unprecedented in the etr data set in recent memory back to elastic the company grew its top line by 45 which is a healthy beat and that helped operating margins come in above expectations elastic has become the open source poster child for observability but customers often cite challenges related to complexity and scaling with the need often to seek professional services help which sometimes impacts adoption and cost obviously but overall very strong report especially in its cloud business which grew 89 relative to last year all right let's pivot to infrastructure we're going to do that with palo alto networks and then look at a broader more traditional hardware and software players in february of 2020 we reported the valuation of divergence between palo alto networks and fortinet and we cited the challenges that palo alto was having around its shift to cloud that was a clear headwind at the time especially with regard to some of its go to market challenges at the same time we said that we were confident that palo alto would work through these issues and the csos from the etr panels along with other anecdotal information from the cube community suggested that the company would power through these problems well it has palo alto has a huge presence in the market and consistently elevated net scores as you can see here palo alto stock is trading near all-time highs and it reacted very well to its uh to the earnings report this past week where revenue grew nicely at 20 28 year on year the company has consistently impressed despite some hiccups of the past and appears to be well positioned for the emerging hybrid work economy okay now let's take a look at some of the key infrastructure players that announced this past week this chart shows our popular xy view with netscore spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share and or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis we'll start with vmware it has the biggest presence in the market amongst these names vmware's revenue grew nine percent in the quarter which was in line with estimates the company had a solid quarter but only marginally beat expectations and the stock got hit hard it was down 8 percent midday on friday vmware cited stronger than expected perpetual license sales and somewhat softer sas subscription revenue now it's not surprising that we're going to see some lumpiness in those two lines as the company transitions to a subscription model but investors clearly want to see more growth in sas and subscriptions than they do in the traditional perpetual license model vmware cloud on aws grew 80 and that's confirmed in the data here compute was also strong one concern in the etr data is the vmware cloud which is the the core the vm vmr cloud foundation vcf which you can see here is well off its january net score highs now it's possible the etr is picking up some of the conservative clients that don't want to move to an ar or subscription model it's unclear but we'll continue to watch that trend overall vmware's business model is solid in our view and very very strong now let's talk about dell next dell in our view had a great quarter it grew top-line revenues by 15 year-on-year its client business grew 27 percent and you can see the elevated dell laptop net net scores in this chart the isg business was up three percent that comprises service and networking which was up six percent and storage which was off one percent the storage business contin continues to struggle but management reported that its mid-range storage revenue was up 17 now the challenge here is that high-end storage it's cyclical it's exposed sometimes you know somewhat to mainframe cycles but but but but the other thing is that a lot of the mid-range capability is eating away at the high end not the least which by the way is is pure storage competing at the higher end but also dell's own mid-range business so that continues to be a drag on revenue the the size of the traditional high-end business that that v-max power max business still is is is quite large and the the new is not growing fast enough to offset the decline in in the old but i mean i saw these numbers from dell i was surprised to see the stock down nearly five percent at midday on friday and i think what's happening is a couple things one is that hpq hp inc which we show here at a lower net score than dell's laptop business cited supply chain issues and component shortages now dell cited the same but maybe it's off on sympathy it's clear to us that dell is doing a much better job than hp with regard to managing component shortages the frustrating thing for these companies is it might be a 50 part holding up a server or in dell's case or a laptop in dell and hpq's case but demand is good which is a positive but the biggest factor in dell stock price we think is it's getting dragged down with vmware in a way if you think about it with vmware's value comprising so much of dell's market cap being down only four percent while vmware is down eight percent implies that the core dell business is viewed positively by the street but i thought with the vmware spin coming later this year investors might gravitate more aggressively toward dell but that didn't happen maybe over time now you see netapp on the chart netapp beat on top line revenue and earnings this past quarter however the company has not performed well in the etr surveys for several quarters and has a negative net score this is due when you tear apart the the math this is due to a low number of new adoptions and a fat middle very big fat middle of flat spending and a pretty high churn in the data set now the company claims they've picked up 1500 new customers in its cloud business so maybe maybe the etr survey is not picking that up or perhaps it's existing customers that are moving to netapp's cloud service that they're counting as new that's unclear but netapp claims that its public cloud business grew 155 in the quarter regardless the street likes netapp's story the stock has been acting very well this year out passing outpacing the s p 500. now you also see pure on the chart with a nicely elevated net score the company beat top and bottom lines this quarter and its ceo charlie giancarlo promised roughly 20 percent revenue growth going forward the street sure liked that that story and the stock shot up nearly 20 percent on that news and you can see here a little drill down the etr spending data trends in the right direction for pure to support this momentum pure's messaging is all around a modern data platform and it's clear from customer conversations that its storage products are easier to use than traditional storage offerings and it has a leg up on the as a service trend which we've been reporting on which pure has been pursuing for a number of years but it's still a much smaller player a couple billion dollars than the dells and the netapps of the storage world but if it can continue on a strong growth trajectory it will of course become a larger custom company the question will be how to continue to expand its total available market now the obvious path has been share gains which over the years it has accomplished and has served them well but that won't be as easy as it was last decade when pure caught emc and netapp flat-footed without strong flash array strategies pure's port works acquisition is something to watch as well as it tries to transition the market to a true cloud-like program programmable infrastructure model infrastructure as code and we'll leave you with this thought about the infrastructure space generally in storage specifically while cloud storage has exploded over the past several years on-prem storage has been extremely soft this in our view has been due to the double whammy that we've reported the combination of cloud stealing share from on-prem and the big flash injection in other words the latter suppressed the need to buy more spinning spindles and controllers for better performance and it hurt demand you don't need to do that when you have all this flash headroom but as we predicted last year we believe that there's pent up demand as people go back to work and headquarters need refresh there's only so much blood that it managers can squeeze from the stone moving storage around optimizing servers and and improving things like utilization while at the same time maintaining adequate performance and doing so within some kind of reasonable window of a day storage is no longer monolithic there are emerging use cases especially ones that are data intensive different storage types are emerging as satya nadella said recently we've reached peak centralization and as such that will create tailwinds for storage offerings that can accommodate cloud and on-prem because it pros understand that moving data is expensive and risky it's best to keep data where it belongs for reasons of performance and of course compliance so it looks like there's a decent chance that the long storage winter is over and the market could return to solid growth even the face of a continued cloud explosion now to circle back quickly to the enterprise software business there seems to be no end in sight to the shift to cloud-based offerings both sas and snowflake-like consumption models of which we're big believers digital transformation initiatives are real they're meaningful and software spending we believe is going to be robust and power these transformations for quite some time okay that's it for today remember these episodes are all available as podcasts all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcast we publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can reach me at divalante on twitter or my linkedin posts or email me at david.vellante siliconangle.com please do check check out the etr website at etr.plus and see their new data packages and offerings for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr thanks for watching everybody be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

one thing i'd point out is well flashblade one of our products is scale out flasharray our first product is not scale out um you know scale out isn't a capability for a customer it's an architecture in how you build the product uh you know 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 at 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 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 would scale out from day one the tam expansion really is following where solid state takes us you know we've gone from um a world that was where believe it or not most computers still had mechanical systems operating them it's sort of like having a mechanical calculator rather than an electronic calculator right we had mechanical disks in our computers literally spinning rust right and it's only been in the last decade where a semiconductor you know where solid state has taken uh the place of that called flash right well as that continues to get less expensive we now can bring not only flash performance into disk economics but more importantly now we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for having greater flexibility with our data as data grows it now we say it has gravity that is it gets heavy it gets hard to manage hard hard to move uh between different environments and now a lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data center environment we want to eliminate all that we want to automate all of that you know on the theme of decades two decades ago every application had its own individual communication stack there were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company one decade ago ago every application had its own um custom hardware stack and and custom operating systems stack well today there's one network it's called the internet uh today everything every application every server is virtualized allowing mobility and yet storage is still static we we want this decade a bit to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment sure so it's a it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels it starts with the executive alignment you think about charlie giancarlo from cisco we've got a lot of just common cross-pollination there but now it extends certainly the field level tom and i are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases but now it extends to engineering as well we had a ucs director plug-in that we've had for some time now uh but but pure is now first in terms of having integration into cisco intersight so we are first and only to have storage integration at the cisco intersight so that cisco and pure customers can really manage their uh environment from from one console so a lot of simplicity uh the single sas interface for managing everything tom why pure why first with that well you know nathan he articulated it well you can look at the executive level we talked about charlie but even you know all of our cisco executives but also to the engineering this the we started really strong uh with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides use cases we churn them out um with pure as uh you know our top ecosystem partner more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done our customers see that and it's really helped drive you know our go to market together it's really a very strong strategy and what is the type of data that's going to be the best fit for it there are a lot of common patterns for consumption in a.i uh speech recognition image recognition places where you have a lot of unstructured data or it's unstructured to a computer it's not unstructured to you when you look at a picture you see a lot of things in it that a computer can't see right because you recognize what the patterns are and the whole point about ai is it's going to help us get structure out of these unstructured data sets so the computer can recognize more things you know the speech and emotions that that we as humans just take for granted it's about having computers being able to process and respond to that in a way that they're not really capable of doing today absolutely absolutely yeah no i mean i think it's been a really exciting conference for us so far like you said a lot of payload coming out um you know as far as the building the bridge of the hybrid cloud this has been you know we this has been i would say a long time coming right we've been working down this path for uh for a couple years we started by bringing some of the cloud-like capabilities that customers really wanted and were able to achieve into the cloud back into the data center right so you saw us do this in terms of making our on-prem products easier to manage easier to use easier to automate you know but what working with customers over the last couple of years you know we realized is that as the cloud hype kind of subsided and people were taking a more measured view of where the cloud fits into their strategies what tools it brings you know we realized that we could add value in the in the public cloud environment the same types of enterprise capabilities the same type of features rich data services uh feature sets things like that that we do on premise in the cloud and so what we're looking to achieve is actually quite simple all right we want to give customers the choice whether whether customers want to run on premise or in the cloud that's just a choice of we wanted to we wanted to make an environmental choice we don't want to we don't want to put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location or another because of lack of features lack of capabilities um you know or or economics and so the way that we do that is by building the same types of capabilities that we do on-prem in the cloud giving customers the freedom and flexibility to be agile sure well we're a two-year-old uh startup uh headquartered out of bellevue washington and we really focus on two primary uh businesses we have a blockchain business and we have an ai business uh in blockchain we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in north america uh we've got uh you know facilities uh uh four facilities in north carolina south carolina georgia and kentucky and you know really the the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for uh the future you know um and then on the ai side of our business uh really you know we we operate that in two ways one is we can also co-locate and host people uh just like we do on the blockchain side but primarily we're focused on uh creating a public cloud focused on gpu-centric computing and artificial intelligence and we're there to help you know really usher in the new age of ai how does pure actually take that word simple from a marketing concept into reality for your customers yeah you know i i think i think simple is um the most underappreciated but biggest differentiator that pure has um i was recalling for someone you talked to cause earlier today i had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of pure excuse me with cause 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 i will be you know the flash people or high performance or whatever he's like no no we're going to be simple we are going to deliver a culture that drives some plus into our products and that will be game changing and i thought he was a little crazy at the time um but he's absolutely turned out to be right and if you if you look over the years that started with just an appliance experience a tent card install you know just a really easy environment but that's manifested itself into every product we create and it's really hard to reverse engineer that you know it's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build in the dna of the company so how do you see the partnership with splunk just in terms of supporting that tam expansion the next 10 years so analytics particularly log analytics have really taken off for us in the last year as we put more focus on it um we want to double down on our investments as we go through the end of this year and in the next year with with a focus on splunk um as well as other alliances um we think we are in a unique position because the uh rollout of smart store right customers are always on a different scale in terms of when they want to adopt a new architecture right it is a significant uh decision that they have to make and so we believe between the combination of flash array for the hot tier and flashblade for the cold is a nice way for customers with classic splunk architecture to modernize their platform leverage the benefits of data reduction to drive down some of the cost leverage the benefits of flash to increase the rate at which they can ask questions and get answers is a nice stepping stone and when customers are ready because flashblade is one of the few storage platforms in the market that is scale out bandwidth optimized for both nfs and object they can go through a rolling non-disruptive upgrade to smart store have you know investment protection and and if they can't repurpose that flash rate they can use pure as a service to have the flash raise the hots here today and drop it back off to us when they're done

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage day to appear. Storage your accelerate 2019. I'm Lisa Martin Day. Volante is my co host, and we're very pleased to welcome for the first time to the Cube. Kathy Southwark. This C I O at pure Cathy. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. You have a great story. This is not only your fear. Your first your accelerate. You been at the company less than a year. You were not only a pure customer before, but in a completely different industry. So your first your accelerate. Here we are in Delhi Technologies backyard. Give us your perspective on appears business from your previous customer role. >> Yes. So I spent. I've been here just under a year, she said, and I spent the almost 22 years 18 t and coming into a company. It's completely different. Different size company, different size technology issues. Everything we do is looks very different. But there's a lot of similarities that, you know, you're trying to as any company trying to innovate and trying to stay on the cutting edge and you're trying to make sure you have the right teams in place and all that, so it's a lot of fun. It's great to see the energy and the excitement here, so that's been a lot of fun to come in and to see orange everywhere painted or so it's been a lot of fun coming on >> and you're complying with your orders. >> I got the memo. I said, You know, it's hard because orange is not one of my better colors toe where but no happy toe, happy to wear orange and proud to be part of such a company who's really looking at? How do we take care of the customer? >> Right. So you were sold on pure as a customer when you were with age and T. What was it about the technology that when you were in that prayer roll that really differentiated it from its competition? It was really >> interesting. I was sharing folks earlier today that here was very different, smaller company coming into a very large organization. We started working with them back in 18 t in 2013 so they were a very small company, very early on, but they were so bullish they had this completely different attitude about storage. And it wasn't really necessarily about this storage. It's about what we're gonna do to help you change your business. So for us, you know, I really looked at when you're in a very large company, you tend to not look so much at the particular like storage or computer or what you're really looking at, How many enabling my business and with the limited dollars that you have. And resource is etcetera, you're always trying to balance and prioritize. So for us when they came in, they made this proposition and said, Hey, we can show you this in two weeks and it'll, um And you know, when you're also big enterprise, you don't have time. Thio look a technology for weeks and months on end and then have to test it. And so we brought pure end. They they were tested out the products within two weeks, and we saw more than what we're expecting. And I think that was what changed for us is it wasn't just about we could do, you know, compression. We could do the deed if we could do. It was that all of a sudden was all these other capabilities been planned for So it really was. It was pretty pretty dramatic for us because we hadn't seen other providers to come in with a story that sounded different and not just the technology. Like I'm gonna save you a dollar. It's about now I'm going to enable your business to do something different faster. And we saw it firsthand. >> I was the role of C i o at a technology company. Different from you were in a c i o N a t. But you you had kind of an engineering roll. If I think it's a solution Engineering, how is the role different in terms of how you spend your time and what you care about? >> Yeah. So, you know, in 18 t, the CEOs were focused on the application delivery sites of specific applications at pure and so an 82. My role is centered around all the infrastructure for I t. As well as our network engineering. So what we did for the Service Writer network coming into pure, you have, you know, the whole spectrum. But we're a different kind of company. and that really 10 years old. Our technical debt looks very different. We use a lot of sass products, so we use a lot of hosted solutions from our partners and providers, and we do someone premise well. But it's a very different kind of landscape, so the opportunity is you don't have as much technical debt. You also have the ability to to try things because you are smaller and you can try things much quicker and be able to say, Well, this working isn't good enough and not have to have maybe things as gold plated. As you know, a regulated telecom would have versus a product technology product company that it's trying to be very agile to produce things and change for their customers. >> So essentially you were. I'll call you the C i o of of infrastructure at AT and T with infrastructure that had to support, like you said, highly regulated in a very diverse I'm sure application portfolio. Extremely there. Thousands of systems, probably >> thousands of applications and very complex business models. They, you know, they're ah, it's not a one. So the interesting is 80. >> She's >> not a one entity business, you know they've got their media business. They've got there mobility business. We've got their wireline business. So when you have people often think of 18 t as a company, But there's actually it's a very complex business model supporting multiple products. So it's just that those air, you know, multi $1,000,000,000 product portfolios versus coming into pure where you know we're still, you know, 1,000,000,000 have company building and growing our product portfolio. >> So what's your technology strategy of pure and how are you enabling business outcomes for the company? >> That's a great, great question. So, you know, really, a business strategy here has been that I t has to really evolve and scale differently than it had in the past. The organization before was really centered around Some of the end user capabilities wasn't as centered around business outcomes, and we've taken on a different role. So as I've come on to the organization, our opportunity and our challenge is that we now have different responsibilities, were taking on things like, How do we want to think about data across the enterprise, not just within each individual domain, and so as a start up company, you often are very focused on your R and D investments in your sales and marketing investments, and you do a lot of things to get it done. And that means that individual teams will do work. But you tend to not think about what the full life cycle is of, you know, of something that you're working on. So for our opportunity now this is take a step back, be able to look across and say it worked great for that period of time. Now we have the opportunity to rethink how we want to think about the customer experience from the time product is developed all the way through and, you know, a quote to a customer through its life cycle through delivery and then the support for that customer >> so so technology, the support that sort of workflow >> the ecosystem instead of within individual areas. And so that's really there are focuses. How do we help our business to become even faster? How do we get more focused on the customer from ah whole ecosystem? And that we think about the customer from the whole ecosystem instead of each individual area? >> Sounds like that horizontal view that Charlie Giancarlo talks about you know, with storage being so vertical in the past and cures wanting to revolutionize that and make that horizontal, ensuring that any type of business, whether we're talking about yours, business or ah retailer or our airline, every function in an organization has access to share. That data exactly struck business value to lower costs to find new revenue streams, new routes to market, et cetera. >> And we're no different as a business. We need to do those same things to make sure that we can. We can deliver those for business, so that's a big part of a lot of >> times we'll talk to C. I ose that technology companies and their large established technology companies that I think Cisco S A P. They've been around a long time. They have a lot of technical debt. They look a lot like your customers, frankly, many of your customers yours ever. But my question is a lot of these c I ose that I've just mentioned, sort of generically there come wine tasters, right? You know, they used to be dog food or his drink your own champagne, but But they they are like the first line of defense verse beta customer, and they give feedback to the product groups. Do you play that role as well? >> Way do we not probably to the extent, because we're a smaller company. So we tend Thio, as with our product announcements we've made will go out to a wide set of our customers, you know? So I think we had 16 1 of the bait is that was just done. What we do with an I T. Is because we have a smaller footprint just the size we do have flash ray with a flash blade with you do use pure one. We do it Maur of ah, from how would a a smaller customer look at it, Think about it and use it. And so that's tends to be the I'll say, the lens that we look through. I think that the role I've played coming in is the bringing a perspective from a larger enterprise on how does a larger enterprise an I t. Think about it and it's again. It's not just your helping me with storage. You're actually helping me to solve a business problem. So there's s oh, there's some other and some of the leaders that we've brought in. They also come from outside industry. Some have used pure, some have not, and so have that different kind of lens of what you know we would expect to see from our product seems, but they're also extremely open. Thio. What do you think? What is I t thinking about how you were thinking about these product ideas? What what's the input from I T. So there's a lot of what we're very small from a nightie organization. I think that the two way communication is what it's gonna you know, what will help, >> what are some of the innovations? And I know you've only had a short tenure there, but one of the things I read in the Q two earnings but that we're just released last month in August was seven. That new customers added per business safer pierce of 450 or so, plus customers at it in that quarter but also a 50% increase in multimillion dollar deals. So, enterprise, any innovations that you can share since you've been on board that your team has helped cure, understood to be able to go after those large enterprise multimillion dollar deals directly. >> Well, certainly from, um, you know, from a you know, a personal understanding of the product and what here could do it scale is, you know, I certainly have that perspective to share with our customers and bringing that confidence and credibility that, you know, if you are looking at a large enterprise customer in the opportunity, they have a lot of questions about. So how exactly did 18 t do it? It's not like they run a few arrays. They run hundreds and hundreds of rays and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes. So there's It's not like it's a proof of concept or a pilot. And it's been years of doing upgrades, non disruptive Lee over the years, with all the pure upgrades that have come into play. So I can certainly bring that to the table with helping the customers to get it, you know, a little bit of confidence, but also just an understanding about how pure is approaching it with these other large customers. So and as you've talked to other customers, there's there's enough customers out there that are, you know, very, >> very eager to >> share because they're so excited about what it's done for their business. We've >> heard. Sorry, David, I was going to say on the customer front we've, what 6600 plus customers pure now has in its 1st 10 years. And the customers we've spoken to the last two days, Dave and I have noticed that a common theme is they're talking about their overall experience with the technology. They're not talking about boxes and array names, and all these specifics are talking about how they are able to one customer from, ah, legal firm, I think in Florida didn't even do a PC had appear. That was a pure customer. And from that piers advice. I got it right on board and was really talking about the experience and all of the things to your point on the business side that they're able to to influence with the technology, not talking about speeds and feeds and arrange drives and things like that. So it's very, very different conversation. >> It's S O. It's interesting because and the role that I had, I had the teams that did the architecture, planning, design and through implementation. So the operation teams one of the most unique things I've said I share with customers is when you are in a technology and you're in a large enterprise, you tend to have a challenge with introducing new technology because you don't want more technical debt. It doesn't matter what you just don't want more technical debt. So typically your operation teams are >> doing a little >> bit of pushback on you. No, no, we don't need something new. No, we don't need unless they're having significant outages or incidents that they're trying to solve for what I found. And even to this day, there is some of the folks there actually around the floor here. The folks that were in operations, they were literally coming and saying, We want more pure And so when you're in a technology organisation that typically doesn't happen. It's S o it wasn't And it wasn't like we want more of like you said the array, it was we just want we don't wanna have to worry about. And I just took a reduction of my head count. So I want I find you have to take on more data and I am. You take on more support for the business. I don't have to worry about it. And so to have that. That's a very different. And we had the same experience of their application team saying, Hey, I just got lower latents. So they didn't actually know why. They just knew that when I was trying to do my work on the application side, working within a database, all the sudden I had all this improvement and, um and so what? We allowed them to sit. Okay, well, we'll give you more capabilities, more future functionality. And that doesn't happen. Before, those were things were like, really like operations and application teams are gonna work as a team together. Very different. I'm experience. >> So if I were a pure sales rep, I would say, >> Kathy, can you come tell my customers my prospect that >> story to the sales reps have access to your calendar? How much of your time? How much time you spend, you know, sales folks wanting you to tell stories like I got >> so the I have no the company that long. So I have I have spent a fair amount of my time talking to customers. But, you know, we also have a lot of work with an I t. And so are you know it's there just is incentive to have me work with an i. T. Because I can understand what we need to do to help our field as well. And that's one of our objectives is what are we gonna do an I t. To make it that much easier and better for not just our sales teams but the manufacturing teams. The support teams are hardware, teams, all the teams that takes a deliver. And so, you know, in fairness, I have joked with some that have stopped me and said, Hey, we need to I said, Remember, we also want to deliver for you so that to make your jobs easier So there's a balance >> that it's different. A technology company writes kind of encouraged that the C I. O goes out and evangelize is >> Yeah, it's actually a lot of fun. I, uh I I do joke that when I go out to talkto the other CEOs, I mean, they're my people there, too. I know it's It's the challenges that we have to deal with. The you know, you're dealing with the technology, those very specific items, then you're dealing with that. How do we help my business and then you're dealing with. I want to make sure I'm doing the right things for people development and all those so and you have a lens across the entire enterprise. So it's not like you're just looking at sales or you're just looking at ops for your You're kind of looking at everything to say, Well, how do I help all the teams to be that much better? Because the better we are, you know, be cliche. You know, collectively, that just got is gonna enable pure toe to do more fun. >> So what's on the minds of your peers in these days? >> You know, I feel so fortunate to be in the Bay Area, and there are amazing CEOs that get together, talk very openly, share strategies, actually eagerly and openly reach out to say, How can I help you? Um, and that's I think that's a unique as part of the CIA, a community that there's this willingness to say, Look, we're all in this together from a technology perspective. I mean, look, we all want to do well for our companies, but you're also trying to figure out how to make technology team stronger and you know it's a lot of the the same issues. It's how do I change the focus of and the perception of where I t fits into a business that it's not just a back office? It's not these systems, but it's actually becoming a very strategic, you know, Enabler, advisor, participant Helping to help, you know, can provide input. You can be that one of the first you know, Betas for your company if you're in a technology area and that's a change. There's a lot of companies who have always fascinated where it's like if you're a product and you have an I T. You're selling to those people, so pitch to them. If you can't sell to them, you're not gonna be successful. So I think it's just changing, evolving. You know some of those relationships and and that's a big deal and and you know, that's from the how you run your organization. There's that, you know, how do we make sure that the technologies were were all investing in our somewhat future proof and that they can evolve with us, not become inhibitors or, you know, box you into something that you can't kind of navigate through >> well, actually deliver on future proof. It's one of those marketing terms that is used by so many organizations delivering whatever kind of product. Same is with simple and seamless says We talk about this all the time. We did hear from customers wherever Green is concerned. You know, I said, non disruptive is how much of that goes from a marketing to reality and consistently heard about Piers ability to deliver their. But it's interesting and it's a refreshing, I think, to hear that you've experienced the changing role of the CEO to be collaborative versus he knows a lot of competition. And in tech, that's a refreshing The deer And I have an idea for you since you're so you're in such a habit to D'oh, it's good. What? You're gonna like this. I have an idea. Hash tag. Help Cathy Scale. Give them this video. Just so many pure customers all across the globe. >> Thank you. I will do that. I would. That's great advice. >> That's it. Easy to d'oh! D'oh! Well, Cathy's been great having you on the Cube. Thank you for sharing your perspective as there newish. See Io and how you went from here customer to running their i t. And congratulations on being part of the next decade of pure success. Thank you. Thank you for having our pleasure for day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube covering your storage Accelerate 2019 Brought to you by pure storage. >> How do y'all welcome back Thio, the Cube leader In live coverage we're covering day to a pure accelerate 19 Lisa Martin With Day Volonte Welcoming to the cue for the first time from SG Mark Peters principal analyst and practice >> Oh, my apologies. So young. >> I wish I wish that was true. >> In fact, one of the first analysts I think that's true if not the first analyst ever on the Q. But, >> well, I'll say Welcome back. Thank you. We're glad to have you here. So you've been with Ishii for quite a while, You know, the storage industry inside and out, I'm sure pure. Just about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. Yesterday we heard lots of news, which is always nice for us to have father to talk about. But I'd love to get your take on this disruptive company. What they've been able to achieve in their 1st 10 years going directly through is Dave's been saying the last two days driving a truck there am sees, install, base, back of the day, your thoughts on how they've been able to achieve what they have. >> That'll last me to talk about something I really want to talk about. And I think it addresses your question. How have they been able to do it? It's by being different. Andi, I don't know. I mean, obviously you do a stack of into sheer and maybe other people have talked about that. But that is the end. When I say different, I don't necessarily mean technology. I have a kind of standard riff in this business that we get so embroiled in the technology. Do not for one second think it's not important, but we get so embroiled in that that we missed the human element or the emotional element on dhe. I think that's important. So they were very different. They created, you know, these thes armies of fans who just bought into what they did. Now, of course, that was based on initially bringing flash to the market making flasher Fordham. Well, they've extended that here with the sea announcement and other things as well, so I don't want to just focus on that, but you know, they continue to do things differently with the technology, But I think what really made them an attractive company and why they've survived 10 years on her now big sizable is because they were a different sort of company to deal with. >> Are you at all surprised that the fourth accelerate is in Austin, Texas? Dell's backyard? Yes. Well, they're disruptive. They're different. They're bold. We're okay, >> you see, But But also, did you go to the other three? >> Uh, the last two. I was trying to remind >> myself where they were. I know one was kind of on a pier in a ballpark in San Francisco. One words. You remember the one that was in that you Worf, But that was a a rusting, so cool it was. But it was a metaphor in a rusting spinning desk, right. But it was also such a different sort of place on, So I probably was also a few it D m c. But I agree. And then the last one was in some sort of constantly. Yes, So >> they were all >> different. And so I Yes, I know this is Dell's backyard. Probably literally, because I'm sure Michael owns a lot of the place. It's also kind of very normal place and so there's a little bit of me that I don't want to use the world worry. But as you grow up and of course, we've got the 10 year anniversary, we're in Austin. What's the tagline of Austin? >> I don't know. No. Keep Austin weird. Okay, >> I >> don't want to suggest appears weird, but they were always a little different, I said. That's why I think they were attracted as much as anything. Yes, that's why I had the hordes of admiring fans, all wearing their orange socks and T shirts and cheering on DDE as they get older as they get more mature as they expand their portfolio. Charlie was on stage talking not so much about scale the problem when he was asked, but more about complexity. As you get more complex, you actually get more normal on, So I don't know that weird is the word, but a bit like Austin pure needs to keep your interesting. >> I like that >> Very interesting. So >> you and I, >> we've been around a while. We were kind of students of the industry. I was commenting earlier that it's just to me very impressive that this company has achieved a new definition of escape velocity receiving a billion dollars show. First company since Nana to do it, I gotta listed three. Park couldn't do it. Compelling data domain isolani ecological left hand. Really good cos all very successful companies. Uh, >> what do you think? It's >> all coming out of >> the dot com crash. Maybe that pay part of it. Pure kind of came out of the, you know, the recession. Why >> do you >> think Pure has been able to achieve that? That you know, four x three par, for example in terms of revenues. And it's got a ways to go. They probably do 1.7 this year. I think they have aspirations for five on enough there. Publicly stated that they probably have, right? Of course. Why wouldn't they thoughts on why they were able to achieve that? What were the sort of factors genuinely know? Having no idea what you were gonna ask me. And now actually, listening to question let me You've just made me think of something that I had not really thought. So I took so long to ask the question formulated. And you are so, um, you used the word escape velocity. Let's think about planes. I mean, you know, I think it's a V one, isn't it to take off, Mitch? Maybe not the same as escape, which is in the skies. But you get the point. How long to really take off? Be independently airborne? They gave themselves. I don't know how much was by design default how it really happened? I don't know. They had an immensely long runway. You think the whole conversation about pure for years and years was Oh, yeah, yeah, they're making loads of revenue, but they lose 80 cents every time they get 50. That was the conversation for years and years. I know they've now turned that corner, and I think the difference. Actually, the more I think about it, yes. You can talk about product. Yes, you can talk about the experience. I think those things are both part of it. But the other companies you named had cool things too. They all had cool products you had. What was it? The autopilot thing with compelling. And they had lots of people cheering. Actually, in this building, I think three part was yellow and kind of cool in a different part of the market. and disruptive. But they were both trying to get to the exit fast. Whether the exit was being bought or whether it was going under. I don't know it was gonna be one or the other, and for both of them, they got bought. I don't think pure had that same intention, and it's certainly got funding and backers that allowed it to take longer. So that's a really good point. I think there's a There's a new Silicon Valley playbook. You saw it with service. Now, with Frank's limits like the Silicon Valley Mafia's Sweetman Dietzen, Bush re at Work Day, they all raised a boatload of cash and a sacrifice profits for for growth. I mean, I remember Dave Scott telling me, you know, when he came on, the board was saying, Hey, we're ready to you know, we're prepared to raise 30 million. He said, I need 80 eighties chump change today compared to what these guys were raising. Well, I mean, I think I mean, they pretty quickly raised hundreds of millions, didn't they? They weren't scraping by on 50 or 80 million, which which is what you see. You sort of want one more thought just this escape velocity idea, I think is interesting because the other thing about escape velocity is partly how long you take runway orbit, whatever. But it's the payload on, you know, The more the payload, the longer it takes the take off the ground or the more thrust you need thrust in this case, his money again. But if you think about it, this is another thing where he and I gotta say, we've been doing this a long time. The storage industry over decades has been one of the easiest industries to enter on one of the hardest to actually do well. Why is that? Because the payload is heavy. It's easy to make a box that works fast, big whatever you want in your garage. Two men on one application working for a day. It's really hard to be interoperable with every app, every other system, operational needs and so on and so forth. And so the payload to be successful. I think they understood that, too. So, you know, they didn't let ourselves get distracted by like the initial shiny, glittery we need to get out of this business. >> I love the parallels with payloads and Rockets. Because, of course, we had Leland Melvin inner keynote this morning. I'm a former NASA geek. Talk to us about your thoughts on their cloud strategy, the evolution of the partnership with a W s. We talked about that yesterday. Sort of this customers bringing this forcing function together, but being able to sort of simplify and give customers this pure management playing the software layer wherever their data is your thoughts on how their position themselves for multi cloud hybrid world. >> Okay, two thoughts, one cloud. Then you also used the word simplicity. So I want to talk about both of those things if I can, Um I don't know. I'm sorry. This is not a very good answer. I think it's the truth. I mean, you can't exist in this world if you haven't got a cloud story, and it better be hybrid or pub. Oh, are multi, whichever you prefer. I think those have very distinct meanings, by the way, but we would be here for an hour and 1/2. It'll be a cube special to really get into that. However, So you've got to do this. I mean, there is just, you know, none of the clients they're dealing with. Almost none. That's not research. I'll talk research in a second but glib statement. Everyone's got a cloud strategy. It doesn't matter which analyst company you put up the data, we'll do it. I want to talk about a cup, some research we've done in a second. But everyone will tell you a high number of people who have a cloud first strategy, whether that's overall or just the new applications or whatever. So they've got to do it. What's crucial to whether or not they succeed is not the AWS branding, because everyone's got a W s branding me people that they don't work with or will not work within the next year or two. I mean, I'm sure there's one God you look like you're anxious, you're on a roll. But simplicity is really important. So David knows we do a lot of research early yesterday, one of our cornerstone piece of researchers think all the spending intentions we do every year. One of the questions this year's Bean for a couple of years now is basically saying simple question Excuse. The overuse of the word is how much more complex is I t you know, in your experience, more or less complex. And it was two years ago. I t broadly and you know that I love this question. You know the answer on dhe. 66% of people say it is more complex now than it was two years ago. People don't want complexity. We all know that there's not enough skills around the research to back that up. A swell on dso Simplicity is really important cause who was sitting in this seat before May I think I will say that the company here was founded on simplicity. That was the point. They were to be the apple of storage. I think that's why people love them. They were just very easy to use on dso coming finally back to your question. If they can do this and keep it simple, then they have a better chance of success than others. But how do you define successful them isn't keeping their customers are getting new ones. That's a challenge. >> They do have a very high retention rate. I want to say like 140% but things like we have our dinner for two U percent attention. Yes. How did >> you do? So? So this is is interesting. It's actually 100 and 50% renewal rate. Oh, by the Mike Scarpelli CFO Math of renewal rates on a dollar value on net dollar value renewal rate subscriptions. Mike Scarpelli was the CFO of service. Now invented this model and service now had, like, 100 and whatever 1500 whatever 27. And so it's a revenue based renewal. Makes sense. Sorry for one second you're retaining more people than you >> go. 101 100 >> 50% is insane. 105 >> percent is great. Yeah, 150% is interrupted. Your question. >> Well, I'm just saying >> it's good. Good nuance, >> Yes, Thanks for clarifying its. You know, companies can say whether it's one. Appears customers are pure themselves or competitors. We are cloud. First, we have a cloud for strategy, and a company like pure can say we deliver simplicity, those air marketing terms until they're actually put in the field and delivered. So in your perspective, how does pure take what I T professionals are saying? Things are so much more complex these days? How does a pure commit and say simple, seamless, sustainable, like Charlie, Giancarlo said yesterday. And actually make that a reality. Well, I >> mean, obviously, that's their challenge, and that's what they have work to do to some degree. And this comes back to what I was saying that to some degree it becomes self fulfilling because your that's why your customers come back with more money because they bought into this on. So as long as they're kept happy, they're probably not going to go and look at 20 other people. I'm not saying they never had any of that simplicity to start off with, but it's very interesting if you go to a pure event, their customers and this might be sacrilege sitting in this environment don't talk about the product. They talk about the company, >> right? >> The experience There's that word again, off being appear customer yes on So they're into it. They brought into whatever this is, and as long as the product, please do not strike me down is good enough. I'm not saying that's all it is. I think it's a lot better that, but as long as it's good enough, but you're really well looked after a few minutes ago, when I'm saying that's why I think this market is about so much more than just how fast can you make the box? How big can you make the box? How smart can you make the box? All of those are interesting, But ultimately, I'm only looking at Dave because he's so old. Ultimately, technology is a leapfrog game. Yeah, branding is not >> Beaver >> s O. So that's a good point. But we've not seen the competitors be able to leap frog pure or be able to neutralize them the way, for example, that DMC was able to somewhat neutralize three par by saying, Oh, yeah, we have virtual ization, too, you know, are thin provisioning. Rather. Yeah. And even though they had a thin provisioning bolt on, it was it was good enough. Yes, they did the check box. You haven't seen the competitors be able to do that here? I'm not saying they won't, but are they? I think, um, I was going to say basically this on my MBA, but I don't have one, so I can't say that, but, you know, I've read that. Read the books. If you look at Harvard Business School cases, I think the mistake made by the competition was to assume that Pierre would go away, that they would each try it or that it would fail on will make fun of the fact they don't make any money for the first few years on dhe. You know, the people going to them, we're gonna be sadly mistaken when they can't handle these features, whether that be cloud or whether that be analytics or fresh blades or whatever else again to add on. They thought they would just go away that there are great parallels in history when you let competition in and you just keep thinking at each point they're going to go away. Spot the accent. British motorcycle industry. When the Japanese came in, they literally said, Well, let them. There are records. We'll let them have the 50 cc market because we don't really care about that. But we'll make the big bikes Well, Okay, well, let them have 152 100 cc because really, that doesn't matter. And 10 years later, there was no industry well, and I think what happened with the emcee in particular because, let's face it, pure hired a bunch of DMC wraps. They took your product and, as I've said before, they drove a truck to the the symmetric V n X install base Emcee responded by buying X extreme io and they said, You know what? We're sick of losing the pure. We're gonna go really aggressive into our own accounts and we're gonna keep them with flash. And then what happened is their accounts. It Hey, we're good. We don't actually really need more stores because the emcee tried to keep it is trying to keep both lines alive. And now they're conflicted, pure. You know, I had a what? We're mission. >> You thought not up a great point. Sorry. Just just because I think >> thing about that is if you look at how e. M. C using my words accurately usedto act, I think you said that, too. So I'm not criticizing Adele is they were exceptional organized marketing organization. We go that way. And if you're not going that way, you got a big problem both as a custom, Miranda's UN employees. But the problem with that is also is that way would sometimes become that way, and then it become that way on the product depending what was doing well. So, for example, they had, you know, tens of thousands of feet, all marching to the extreme. I owe beat for a few quarters, and then they would go off on to the next product pure. Just carried on, marching to its beat down that runway escape velocity question >> appoint you brought up a minute ago before we wrap her. That I think is really interesting is that you write your customers talk about the experience. I think we were talking with a customer yesterday. Dave was asking, Well, what technologies are you think he started talking about workloads? So when we're at other events, you hear other names of boxes brought up here to your point. It is all about the experience so interesting and how they're Can you continuing to just be different, but to wrap things up since they're in my ear, we're almost that time. I just wanna take a minute to ask you kind of upcoming research. What are some of the things that you're working on? Their really intriguing you and SG land. I think right >> now, from my perspective, I mean, as a company would continue to do 27,000 different things because there's so much going on in the market. So whether that's security is massive area of focus right now, even improvements in networking. So it's not just the regular run of the mill, you know, Bigger, faster, cheaper. Which is always there s o A. I, of course, in all these again, you may both know you will now doesn't mean we're always looking at buying intentions rather than counting boxes. So it's really where people are moving over the next few years. That said to May. I think what's really interesting is to other things. Number one is to what extent can. I don't think we can really measure this easily. But to what extent can we get people talking about pure again to acknowledge that emotions, attitudes, experiences are an important part of this business? I'm old enough that I'm not scared of saying it, and I think pure is a company is not scared of saying it, you know, I think a lot of companies don't want to admit that Andi all know that they have different corporate cultures and mantras and views on their customers reflect that two on The other thing just generally is the future of I t. As a whole. I know that. So, I mean, I'm doing this because none of us really know what that is, but, you know, clearly way gotta stop talking about the cloud At some point. It's just part of I t. It's not a thing as such. It's just another resource that you bring to bear. I don't know that we're yet at that point, but that's >> got to happen. >> Interesting. Thanks for looking. I'm imagine this was a crystal ball. But Mark, I wish we had more time because I know we could keep talking. But it's been a pleasure to have you >> got the whole multi cloud hybrid cloud for an hour and 1/2. >> We come back, we'll have that discussion. Like what I'll means and yeah, back anytime. >> Excellent. Thank you for joining David. Me. Thank you for David. Dante. I'm Lisa Martin. You were watching the Cube from pure accelerate 19

>> 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)

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome to Austin, Texas. This is the Cube. Live at the fourth annual pure accelerate. I'm Lisa Martin with David, Dante, Dave or in Texas, >> Texas again. >> Austin, Texas. Very interesting venue for this fourth annual hear stories. >> A lot of construction, >> music, a >> lot of music. >> So we just came from the keynote and news announcements, customers on stage. But the first thing to point out is, this is here is about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. Charlie Giancarlo, CEO and chairman who's coming on the program with us, and just a few minutes talking about what they have innovated and delivered these 10 X improvements and 10 years kind of this overnight success in 10 years and what's coming? What was with the things that really stuck out at you, Nicky Note. >> Well, first of all, ironically, this is the 10th year of the Cube, not our 10th anniversary, but it's the 10th year of doing the Cube. And so our fourth year, I think it's pure accelerate about what 3000 people here, >> you know, the keynotes >> pure was laying out what their vision is of the modern data experience and that I felt like the keynotes least there were sort of, ah, speed date of what's coming. There was a couple of major announcements that we'll talk about, >> Uh, but >> they really are trying to differentiate as the modern storage company turn a deep position. The competition, as the old guard is to use this term that Andy Jassy uses pure, didn't use that term. But they really talked about it's time to go Modern. And so they were an overnight success. It took him 10 years, was one of the comments that was on stage. So I think this is worth pointing out. A couple of things. I mean, let me lay out. Sort of my thoughts on Pure is a company. They were the only storage company Ah, in the past. Let's call a decade to reach what I'll call escape velocity. They achieved a billion dollars a couple years ago. They're doing their due about a billion and 1/2 on a trailing 12 month basis. They'll do 1.7 billion this year and evaluations about 4.5 billion. So they got a a three ex valuation in that fluctuates. That's pretty good for a storage company. Billy on Lee major storage company. That's really growing rapidly. They got 28% growth. I did a breaking analysis on Lincoln, and I'll just share with you some of the numbers. Dallas flat at 0%. So Del is actually gaining share with no growth has got a scary NetApp minus 16% in the quarter H P E minus 3% IBM minus 21%. And so it is pure A 28%. So they're really crushing it in terms of growth. They've also got a 69% gross gross margin, even if it's in its heyday. E emcees gross margins weren't that high, you know. They were in the sort of mid sixties, and so, and they've also got a good balance sheet. About a billion dollars in cash A little. A little more than that, they got some debt. They're shifting their model to a deferred revenue model. Now the only thing is, you know they're growing much, much faster than the competition. But they're throwing off a lot less cash because they're much smaller. Just as an example, they probably throw off 5 to 6% of their revenues in cash. Netapp probably throws about 23% of its revenues, often catch the big Delta there, so the point is long winded. But but pure storage is in growth mode. And until the market rewards more consistent with a cash flow, they're gonna, I think, stay in huge growth mode. >> There was a great analysis. Dave and I saw an analysis that you did with some spends data, just a couple of your reverence. A little bit of that. There's there seems to be a tailwind behind here you mention the 28% wrote that they announced in Q two, and some of the things that also they talked about were there. Adding about in Q two of F Y 2020 about seven net new customers every business day, adding about 450 new customers just in that quarter. Like you said, 3000 folks expected here today. The momentum is behind them, but they're also a company of firsts. You talked about this a number of times. The first, with all flashed the first with envy me on the back and a couple of additional firsts announced today. Talk about the as a service model and how that youth, in your opinion, you think might continue that trajectory that they're on. >> Yes, so basically pure laid out today, said that vast majority are Pouliot Portfolio is gonna be available as a service. That's the cloud consumption mall is important because pure has about $600 million in deferred revenue, largely coming from their evergreen service. But there they are, slowly shifting their model to a subscription model. It's gonna be very interesting to see how that plays out. Um, we've seen a number of companies do a tableau in Adobe kind of pulled the band Aid off and did it Splunk has taken years to do. It will be interesting to see how how pure goes. For that. I'll >> bring it >> back to the cloud up yours largely an on Prem storage company. That's where most of the revenues come from. But we heard the gentleman from Amazon today. I think it was E ethan whiner, not Ethan, anyway, Mr Whiner, he said. That gardener did A survey last year showed 88% of customers said they have a cloud for a strategy, but 86% of those customers continue to spend on prim. So here you have the cloud. Amazon gorilla wants everybody to go to the cloud pure would much rather they make much more money on Prem? But they realize customers air pulling them in. So they have to move to that as a service model. One of the interesting things that pure is done, which, you know, that's not really a first. But it certainly is for the large storage companies they've announced. Ah, block storage on AWS. So basically what they're doing is they're taking the pure experience. It all looks like pure software, and they're front ending cheap s3 storage from Amazon with E. C. To compute instances, and they've architected using Amazon service. Is this basically a block storage array in the cloud so Amazon gets paid, pure, gets paid? It's a little bit of a premium, but you get higher availability. You get great right performance and you get the pure cloud experience pretty interesting strategy, >> and they're talking about it really as this. This positioning it rather as a bridge, a bridge to hybrid cloud. This numbers that the Amazon gentlemen, share that you mentioned Gardner were really interesting both sides recognizing there's a forcing function there and that forcing function is the customers from the enterprise to the small business who need to have data available immediately wherever it is people to extract this insights from it quickly so that those companies, whether it's a capital one or a Delta Airlines or a smaller organization, can act on it quickly to Dr Competitive Advantage. Same kind of challenge that your storage has. But really that forcing function of the customer, clearly bringing the giant AWS together with yet another story >> so pure as they say reached escape velocity. They and Nutanix were the only on a new entrance that reached a billion dollars Nutanix. I really don't consider a storage company. They're kind of hyper converged. And the way they did that as they drove a truck through E emcees install base with flash. So they were the first within all flash array. Maybe maybe they weren't the first, but they were the first to really drive it. They hired a bunch of DMC sales reps. They knew where all the skeletons were buried and they really took out a lot of old Symmetric Se's and Claire eons and V. Max is and all the old sort of GMC install base, and that helped them catapult their way there 1st 10 years. Now they got to do that again. They got to get to get They're on their way to two billion. But how did they get to five billion? Um, and and so the way they do that is they have to expand their tam. I mean, we'll talk to Charlie Jean Carlo about this. My feeling is a big job of the CEO is to expand the Tamil. How do they do that? They go after new workloads like a i. They go for cloud. They go from multi cloud. These are all very large markets in which they don't participate. Data protection. They'll partner with Lex, Kohi City and Rubric and Beam to to have data protection software running on their flash. A raise with very, very fast restores. That's something that's taking off. It's gonna be really interested in seeing as they say, they've got this subscription model that's coming in. They've got all this deferred revenue that in a way, it's going to slow him down a little bit just from an accounting standpoint, cause when you recognize deferred revenue, you recognize that, you know over 12 months over 36 months, so that's a little bit of a transition. The other thing that pure is facing in a tactical basis is Nande pricing. It's like this countervailing effects nan pricing is coming down, which means lower prices, lower costs but also lower revenue. But at the same time, it becomes more competitive with spinning disk. This is something else. We'll talk to Charlie Jean. Cholera right about it opens up new markets. So this tam expansion is critical for pure in terms of driving this modern data experience into these new workloads and fighting the competition, the competition is not sitting still. All those companies that I mentioned the H P ease, the the Delhi emcees, et cetera, are basically taking a page out of your swords narrative, talking about the cloud experience, talking about, you know, flexible pricing models, building cloud products on prime and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. So it's hard sometimes for customers to squint through that. And really, no, I guess the bottom line, the last thing I'll say is pure. Doesn't have as many feet on the street is these other guys. So it's gotta leverage the channel increasingly, and that's how it gets beyond two billion on its way to five billion. >> And that was one of the factors that they attributed the second quarter. 28% year on year growth is to not just innovation, but also to the channel. So they've done a good job of really pivoting. There's large enterprise deals to be covered, direct and then bringing in the channel for those smaller mid size business customers. Adding a lot of momentum in cute to you mentioned the nan pricing that in some of the political climate with the start of China, most of their businesses in the Americas so they're not facing as many of those challenges. So they did lower guidance for the rest of it is >> the second time they've >> lowered 20. However, they kind of attributed that thio the nan supply oversupply and they say happy Matt to flatten out quickly, say they're >> not worried about the macro. I mean, look, if if the economy is good and is booming and people are spending money on cap ex. That's good for even a high growth company. They're basically positioning to the street that if if the economy does turn down and there's a softness at the macro, they'll actually gain share more rapidly. Which, by the way, is probably true. But look at the rising tide lifts all boats. Nobody wants to see Ah recession. Having said that, well, it's interesting. When you saw Pure Lower, its guidance stock took a hit, and then net app, I'd be him. All these other company you have to see a deli emcee they announced in the market said, Wow, pure must be doing really well compared to these other guys. So it's come back in a big way. My opinion pure is going to in the e. T. Our data shows this from a spending intentions Pure is going to continue to gain share at a much, much more rapid pace of the other. The other guys, from a product standpoint, delicacies consolidating its product portfolio, trying to lower its cost. H. P E is really focused on limbo. IBM needs a mainframe product cycle to get back going, Ned APS facing its challenges and its kind of tweaking its go to market model. So all these other companies air dealing with sort of some structural changes. Where is pure is like put the put the foot on the gas and accelerate no pun intended. And so I think they're gonna continue to gain share for quite quite a number of quarters. >> I want to talk about sustainability before we break. And one of the things that Charlie talked about on his keynote is in terms of the modern data experience, he said. It was three things. It was simple, seamless and sustainable, an inch sustainable. You really started talking about the evergreen model that they launched a while ago that seems to be really sticky with organizations. He also talked about sustainability is a lot of other organization I need to adjust in terms of, you know, waste and carbon emissions and things like that. But I'm just curious, since Pierre is much smaller than the competitors that you mentioned and a lot more focus, obviously all in on flash. Where does the evergreen model, in your opinion, give them that tail winter? That advantage? >> Well, the Evergreen model was first of all brilliant marketing strategy and a business strategy Because if you think about the traditional storage vendors, they make so much money on maintenance, they would never have done this unless pure force them to do it. Because they're making so much cash on the maintenance. You know, it's it's you. You put the storage array in and we're just gonna charge you maintenance. And if you're not on the maintenance contract, sorry. You don't get all the software upgrades, everything else. So it's just this, you know, this lock in strategy, which is work brilliantly for two decades pure, comes along and says, Hey, where? Software driven. We're gonna allow you to get all the modern software. As long as you're got a subscription with us, we'll swap out your controller for free. You know, the competitors hate that. There's all kinds of nuances and stuff, but it worked, and customers love it. And so it's very strong, and it's a fundamental as they said, they got $600 million in deferred revenue, largely from that evergreen model. So they, you know, Charlie mentioned first for non disruptive upgrades. First for cloud management, first for a I ops first for always on que Os first with always on encryption, and if they're really the first, we're probably the first big company. They got a lot of attention there. Last thing, it's it's a four big announcements today. There's a I ready infrastructure, airy. They're doing some stuff they were first to announce with video. You know, a year or so ago, they got cloud offerings. Ah, block storage for AWS. And they've got clout Snap for Azure, which is actually pretty hot. It's backup on Azure, and they got product extensions. They got cheaper flash with a flash or a C for capacity. And then they have extended their all flashy raise their flash played etcetera with storage class, memory and and storage memory. And in this, this as a service model. Those are really the four big announcements that were gonna dig into all this week. >> We are, and we're gonna be talking with This is a great event. Two days. The cube is going to be here. We have seven pure customers to talk to you that I think kind of a record, at least in my cube experience of the last >> AWS always puts a lot of customers up too. You know. All >> right, well, there's no better validation than the success of a brand, whether we're talking about Evergreen or their first or the reaction of the market to bringing flash down to satya prices. So excited to dig into customer stories with you, Dave. Course we'll talk to some partners who got c'mon slung Cisco somebody else and probably forgetting. And, of course, some of the pure, exactly gonna be exciting two days with you and looking for two days >> looking forward to at least a great >> all right stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our first guest, Charlie Giancarlo, chairman and CEO of Pier Storage. Stick around, come back Mawston in just a minute.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to Austin. I'm Lisa Martin. With Day Volante were a pure accelerate 2019 the fourth annual event. Getting bigger and bigger and more customers on the Cube. Very excited to welcome the C I. O of Kensington Swan. Nigel Stevenson. Nigel. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Thanks for coming all the way up here or down here, Up here from New Zealand. Give us our audience. A little bit of an overview of Kensington Swan and specifically about your role is CEO. >> Sure again, Just once a top tier law firm in New Zealand. We've got a bit of an announcement from last month Were about to combine with sentence, which you might know more familiar from a brain kind of perspective. Slightly larger than what we are at the moment. We're, ah, a few 100 staffs, but between the officers and opened and Wellington with the focus spawn corporate commercial legal practice is so top tier or high in law expertise. >> So you've been there about three years. Give us a little bit of a picture of Kensington's I T department applications workloads. What's going on? There >> must be a pretty similar Thio emotional films or proficient service. Is firms actually a similar with the coming firms to smell the the most common tools we use around the PR, the practice management systems that we have on in production of documents for the work that we provide to our clients, maintaining those keeping them, searching for them, Actually, in all the emails and everything else that goes along every single matter that we do from a compliance perspective, we need to keep all of that and make sure it's safe and sound and easily searchable. >> So big drivers you got, you got the clients, you got the lawyers, you got the paralegals. It's this machine running you got, you know, to say confidentiality compliance. What are the big drivers in the business that are affecting I t. Strategy? I >> think, especially in the provision service is sick. Just continue to modernize. We've hit systems, and after the last decision, things tighten up a bit for a while, and then we fed a large push over the last few years to really bring things up. Today, bring it Bring it, Making more current on relevant to what's out there. With that, we can then bring on other applications. And I and other tools that would really help us Thio drive the business and different directions >> is the first time your accelerator Yeah, let's talk infrastructure. So it s so paint a picture. What's, uh what's it look like? You know you're here. Obviously you're pure customer, right? So what's the storage infrastructure look like? And >> we've had to guess what you would be a pretty typical infrastructure for many, many years with the two data center model. VM were storage observers and sewn on, then replicated across from a d R perspective to the other data center. They know we've gone through a big decision around. Where do we go with it? Do we take that out to the cloud? Do we keep it on Prem? Do we keep the $2 centers one way? We've ended up deciding this to go with the single Production Data center based in Auckland were we've got some d our capability. They want an office, but then plane to scale up to the cloud. So we've got enough compute to keep us going. The systems that we've got a cz we grow, we'll move. >> So you had to replicated data centers. Essentially. Is that right? You know, expensive. And then you've essentially now got a main data center. You've got some a little bit of lightweight infrastructure for D R purposes. Is that right? Way? >> Previously since he had two of everything. Well, more than two of everything but everything we head of the production, we head of the second read absent a lot of set there a semi idle for quite a lot of time. And as you say, that's quite expensive to have Ah, lot of equipment sitting there not really been used. So moving Maur to single data Seena Mol replicating some of the infrastructure, but not not the full sit. It's moving. >> So the decision to stay on Prem versus Go all in the cloud talk to us about some of the business drivers that led you to say we're going to stay on from and within that what elevated cure storage to the obvious choice >> sure is a little bit if it's old cloud model and I think that's really helped you guess influence were the on prim had we has gone as well, and we'll get that. Get that sick and weird things like the scalability off the simplicity, not having to have very experience experienced stories technicians on and so on. I think back to my days fishing nightie and putting together other brains of storage unit was a multi month process. Certifications after certifications just to be out a plug it together and then configure and coat. The story's all right. You know what the cloud and what we found with pure is. It's just become really simple. Within a couple of hours of the array arriving that was wrecked, it was turned on. It was cut into the pool and presented through TV anyway, so I'm just really, really simple. >> All the bit twiddling of the past really didn't do much for your business, obviously, but then you it shows you chose toe stay on Prem. Many law firms d'oh! Just because of the privacy and confidentiality And yeah, they had some color to that. This is a couple >> of ingles thio. If there's one being performance, wait. I need to make sure that the lawyers get the performance that they need they charging six minute increments like like most. If they can't work, then the building they're not working up providing to the clients and the clients. Also that work done at a at a good speed and returned to them as quickly as possible. And as the world has moved more to that client centric approach, you know, delivering to the client's becomes ultimate impairment to what we do. So performance was definitely key economic self. When we looked at cloud in on a price per gig per month with pure, it worked out very competitive. It wasn't quite there. Toe move into the cloud. New Zealand. We don't have the AWS or is your database data centers based on his own. They're all in Australia, So there's Ah Leighton see aspect of going many thousands of miles across the under the undersea cables to get to that data on payments. Right there, it's fast, is connected waken different, >> so you have essentially replaced your you're spinning disc with flash. Is that correct? >> Yes, that was on the other parts of it. No, you wanted to get something that was definitely modern and set us for the future. For quite a number of years Way didn't look a spinning disc. It'll weigh. Just win. Looked at what flesh rays were available. Way have head spinning this, but I definitely wanted to get your flesh. >> How >> important was the Evergreen model to you? Is it is it how much of it is marketing and how much is it? Is it Is it big business impact for you? >> Quite a few other places of work We've hit that three year or five year support moral challenge where all of a sudden the support can hockey stick up on become really, really expensive to carry on the arrays. So one of the other drivers was from an environmental environmental perspective of if you're gonna throw their equipment out after five years, but it's still working fine. Yeah, that's not really great on the environment. So with the fresh perspective as well as you have a green be able to maintain and keep their equipment running and going for longer than five years without a shop up left on the cost was really, really important. >> Sustainability was important to you guys. So you before we might live, you mentioned that you guys have been pure customers since about December of 2018. So about 10 months or so. So those lawyers that are billing every few minutes I have to get access to data because the clients are demanding kit. What's it been? Their reaction? Thio, the performance that you're delivering to them and a new correlation with revenue that business has made because of the decision to stay on from? >> I'll tell you what the best thing about it is. I don't complain that things are slow anymore, you know? So they say, Nighty, if you're not hearing any issues, that you're doing a good job and I would definitely in that camp The system's running significantly faster than what they were previously on. That was on a five year old array that was reasonable. Let's start as well. So the league Ford has been really recognizable from a performance perspective, so >> you don't get the Atta boy, but you just don't get the grief. >> Yeah, yeah, it's not very often that people come and say that you know, with regulations, and that since a nightie, >> but it sounds like it also simplified your management you described it used to take a long time Thio provisioning array before now it's sort of same day or a part of a portion of what have you done with that additional resource? Did you did your rift people? Did you redeploy them? >> You take the same style of if you do move things to the cloud. You know, with any type of outsourcing model messages freeing up time on the staff have got now work on other things. You know, we're slowly moving up the stack on a valu ed perspective of what we deliver, doubling more into automation integration, digital contract processing, the area that I think we should be working in rather than tweaking the nuts and bolts. Well, that that's where I started. So, yeah, it was good career passing the time >> being able to get to that value at is something that we talked with a lot of customers about that absolutely critical about not spending so much time at managing something. I want to get my job done. So a number of announcements came out today. I'm just curious to get your take on, for example, this kind of customer force that Dave and I were talking about with Charlie Giancarlo their CEO. Just a minute ago about this bridge to hybrid club, you mentioned an acquisition or a merger coming with Denton's. How would something like this hybrid bridge that here announced with AWS How might that be a facilitator of the merger? Or maybe even it's the IittIe foundation that you've established with Pierre. That's going to be a great facilitator of that pending merger. >> I think one of the slides and the Maquis know this morning talked about the on Priam in the cloud world being quite separate and we found that it is We've we've looked Whenever we go out to market, we'll look at both options and take your best of breed approach. Thio what, within a cure or subscribed way got into some cloud solutions. I'm not sure if Aladdin mention brains at all, but s so we have got cloudy >> from our standpoint, but your corporate standpoint, >> So we've got a bit of both, but it has been a bit hard to bridge the two, even even from a backup d R perspective on then also from scaling the the on cream applications into the cloud. Some some things just work better in the cloud or a better architect in the clouds. Fishy, some remote excess solutions were. If we've got issues, we want that separate, Will they dear? Yet between what else? Systems and the excess for staff on this kind of space that we've we've built in two for that be Never join those worlds a lot more seamlessly and through the same management consoles and just gonna make life a lot easier will be out of scale back and forward so we can move the data. I remember years and years ago talking to storage vendors and saying, Well, where can we can't replicate? No, Dad are up to a different brand or a different service In this case with the adoption or on sort of cloud, that's still very prevalent. >> Yes, So I mean, I deal. You'd like a common management framework control playing data plane, Back up framework. Is that right? Is that an objective between cloud and on Prem? I mean, it definitely helps, >> but the other things was mentioned in the keynote is around the availability of skilled people you think with my generation and I started often stopped supporting, then work my way through infrastructure and project management, team management and son. The people coming out of university now don't really have that same career path there from a slot in somewhere up the scared, the stick on >> very started python. And we're working on >> them or in the development of spice rather than the infrastructure space. The ability to find staff that have the knowledge off the system is getting hotter and hotter. Eso so the cloud moral, the almost storage is a service on the on prime since you cut through that and it means that you don't need those staff with the commonality of the tools that also helps us. Well, you don't have to serve someone who's years and years training and a new solution to be out of them have the confidence to move into it. >> What do >> you actually installing from frump? Yours? It is a vile storage block storage combination. We've got the X series of race. Okay, they're going for performance, obviously. And, um, because I was thinking in the cloud, you might you might be more interested in object store because of, you know, your document heaviness. But it depends on the merger, I guess. Where you guys go? >> Yeah, the you mentioned before on this some data sovereignty concerns around. We're that Donald stays. And that's why I think a lot of the law firms it probably are keeping some of their infrastructure on from so for sovereignty, we expect in performance. If it is the air, it's it is performing. The cloud can form in different ways, but having a bit of both gives you really good choice, that best of breed model >> with pure storage. You got the foundation as this acquisition, and this merger comes forward that everything's in place. Feel pretty confident about that. Yeah, we've >> got a lot of work to dio over the next few months while we adjust. What? We've got a software perspective to align with the intense global software suite. But I'm pretty confident that it can be delivered really well. >> So what's in the C I ose mind these days? You know, security cloud hybrid strategies, alignment with the business. What do your top three? >> I think like a mission before I'm really trying to kind of lift what we do to deliver value to the business. It's been John what type of business it is, but it can be seen as a cost center way. Really want to be out? Be more involved in in what, in our case, the lawyers are doing. The main project that we've got on the moment is automating legal processes not to replace any people but to augment what they do on to provide them better tools, more efficient tools. Talks that the younger lawyers, when they come in, can follow their way through and learn what their process is. Also overlaying the legal aspects around there as well. So it's not just online form. It's a it's a training guide. It's It's everything for each of those processes that >> you're deploying any machine learning, artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and in that regard yet is that we haven't quite got >> there. It's definitely on the list. Some of the things that would liketo look at those things, like machine readable software to go through documents, pullout snippets. A lot of time lawyers will spend have to read through a lot of material fine key bits of information and extract that to the news within the documents that we produce, even in simple process, is still doing that they loaned from the rial complex 56 page construction contracts. There's a There's a lot that we could potentially help to find that information for them when it comes into things like he discovery for litigation in the old days. Know that wheel in a truckload of >> paper file boxes? Guys must have loved that building at six minute increments >> way. Get your hard drive with terabytes of data. It gonna troll through all of that and that there's some real space that good I toes can help cut through that significantly faster than your standard kind of funnel based such fools. If >> you think you think software robots have a place like robotic process automation are, I think >> way we're going with it is Thea Pair. You can fit in between the human process. We're mapping out more from a business process. Perspective were there's gonna be some educational steps some human steps mopey a steps on eventually get through an outcome of delivering what the lawyers need for the clients. >> So last question is that I have is, you know, what way do all these shows we do like 100 events a year, everybody you know, the vendors tell you how great they are and what we always like to ask the practitioners your experience with pure relative toe other, you know, stories. And you know, the name names. But just is it substantively different? How much? I guess I ask you again. How much is marketing versus substantive business value for you as a practitioner? >> Yeah. So we've only had the array since December. One of things. I did a case study for Pure just recently in one of things that highlighted and there was the support. When you go on to a new vendor or choose any any different path, you're taking that kind of risk in the step into the unknown way did have an issue a few weeks after we put the first Korean on they came in during Christmas break were we were all off in our case at the beach, which is bit different in the Southern Hemisphere. But they came in flawlessly sort of the issue out gotta back working. Yeah, without necessarily having to do anything apart from let them in the building on, and that really gives the confidence and what they do, how they can deliver going forward. >> I think there's a lot of value and sharing that these things don't always go very smoothly. But you need to have established that relationship with that partner that can be rapidly deployed to help. Ultimately, I'm sure those lawyers either want to start building every three minutes. They want to be able to build more every six minutes. So never a dull moment, Nigel. In your world. But we thank you so much for joining David me on the Cuban. Maybe next year we'll be talking about how a I is helping. Hopefully clients achieve better results. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, per day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube?