>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube. Dave Ilan Taste. My co host were at pure Accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas. One of our Cube alumni is back with us. We have probably the VP and chief architect at Pier Storage. Rob. Welcome back. >> Thanks for having. >> We're glad you have a voice. We know how challenging these events are with about 3000 partners, customers press everybody wanting to talk to one of the men that was on the keynote stage yesterday for announcements came out really enjoyed yesterday's keynote. But let's talk about one of those announcements in particular Piers Bridge to the hybrid cloud. >> 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, you know, as faras the building, the bridge of the hybrid cloud. This has been, you know, this has been I would say a long time coming, right? We've been working down this path for for a couple of 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 own prem products easier to manage, easier to use, easier to automate, you know. But what? Working with customers of the last couple of years, you know, we realized, is that, uh 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 public cloud environment, the same types of enterprise capabilities, the same type of features rich data service is 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. We wanted to make an environmental choice. We don't want it. We don't wanna put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location another because of lack of features, lack of capabilities. You know, our economics on DSO 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. >> But, you know, you mentioned economics and you were talking from a customer standpoint. I wanna flip it from a from a technology supplier standpoint, the economics of a vendor who traditionally cells on Prem. You would think would be better than one in the cloud. Because you gotta you pay an Amazon for all their service is or I guess, the customers paying for it. But you kind of saw your way through that. A lot of companies would be defensive on. I wonder if you could add any comment. Yeah. No, I mean so So, look, I think >> the >> hardware is only one piece of it, right? At the end of the day, you know, even our products on Prem are really they're really priced for value. Right? There were delivering value to customers in our capabilities are ease of use or simplicity. The types of applications and work close to being able. Um, and basically, everything I just said is pretty much driven by software features by bringing those same capabilities into the cloud, you know, naturally, we you know, naturally that most of that work is really in software, you know, And then, as faras comparing the economics directly of on Prem versus Cloud. You know, it's it's really no secret as the industry's gotten Maur. Understanding that, you know the cloud isn't isn't the low cost option in a lot of use cases, right? And so, rather than comparing apples to apples on premises cloud either on performance or economics, our goal is really to build the best products in either environment. So if a customer wants to run on Prem wanna build the best darn products in that environment, the customer wants to run in the public cloud. We want to build the best darn product for them in that environment on dhe. Increasingly, as customers want Thio use, both environments hand in hand, want to build the right capabilities to allow them. TOC mostly do that >> Well, I think it makes sense because, as you know, we're talking to some customers. Last night he asking what they have in their data center. And they got a lot of stuff in the data center. To the extent that a company like pure can say, OK, you've got simple, fast et cetera on prim. And we've now extended that to the cloud. Your choice. They're going to spend Maur with you than they are with the guys that fight that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think if you look at our approach and how we've built the products and how were, you know, taking them to market? We've taken a very different approach than some of the competitive set. You know, in some ways, we've really just extended the same way that we think about innovation and product engineering from our existing on prime portfolio into the cloud, which is we look for heart problems to solve way take the hard road, we build differentiated products. Even if it takes us a little bit longer, you can see that, you know, in the product offerings, right? We've really focused on enabling tier one mission critical applications. If you look at the competitive, said they haven't started their their reason why we did that. All right, is we knew that you know, we had customers telling us, like if if you're a customer and you want to use the cloud and you want to think about the cloud is a D R site well, when something goes wrong and you two fell over duty, our site, you you need to be sure that it works exactly the same way there as it did on problem. That's everything from data service is data path features to all of the work flows. An orchestration to go around it because when your primary site goes down is not the time when you want to be discovering that. Oh, there's a footnote on that future and it's that's not supported in the cloud version, that sort of thing on dso you know that, Like I said, you know, the focus that we've put on the product development we've done towards Cloud Block stores really been around creating the same level of enterprise grade features on enabling those applications in the cloud as we do in private. >> You know, we don't make the Amazon storage. We make the Amazon storage better. What's that commercial? Essentially what? That's essentially >> what we've done You know, the great thing about that is that we've done it in close partnership with Amazon, right? You know, we had Amazon on stage yesterday on day, were talking a little bit about that partnership process. And ultimately, I think why that partnership has been so successful is we're both ultimately driven by the same thing, which is customer success. All right. In the early days of working with Amazon as we started coming up with the concept of club block store and consulting them on, we're thinking about building it this way. What do you think? What service is should be, You know, should we leverage and m in eight of us to make this happen? It became pretty clear to them that we were setting out to build a differentiated product and not just tick off check boxes on dhe. That's when they their eyes really okay, way. We really would like you to do a differentiated product here. >> Hey, if this takes off, we're gonna sell all the C two at three. >> What are some of the things Sorry day that you've been with here about six years? What are some of the things that have surprised you pleasantly that the customers have catalysed from an architecture perspective that customer feedback coming back t your team and the and the guys and girls engineering the product. Customers are demanding a certain thing that maybe wasn't something that was an internal idea but really was catalyzed by customers anything that just really I think it's very cool. Very surprising. >> Yeah. No, I mean, I think I think a >> couple of things. I think personally one of the things that surprised me was, you know, when I joined Pure in 2013 you know, we're all we're all about simplicity, right? You talk to cause who I think you had on the show earlier. You know, in the early days who tell you our differentiators gonna be simplicity and I got to say when I first joined the company is a little skeptical is like All right, I get it. Simplicity is a thing. Is it really a differentiator? I very quickly was surprised based on customer feedback that no, it really is very, very meaningful on. And that's something that we take all the way through Engineering. Write everything down, Thio how we design features and put them in the user interfaces. If there's, you know, there's an engineer that wants to put a configuration hook or a knob or ah on option in the user interface way kind of stop and say, Well, G, how would you document that? How would you suggest the user make a decision? Tea set that value will describe and say, Okay, well, g, we can make that decision, can't we? Right? Like, why don't we just want we just make it simpler And so that's been That's been a big surprise, I think, from a customer catalyzed, uh, point of view. What I'd say is we've been really surprised at a lot of the use cases that the flash blade product has been put into play for. And, you know, I think a I was one of them when we when we first set out, we had really targeted Flash played at addressing a segment of the commercial HPC Chip Design Hardware Design software development market. Andi is actually a set of customers, very large Web property customer that came to us with an A I use case. They said, Hey, you know, we've got a ton of data video images, uh, text postings. And we want to do a lot of analysis of this. All right, I want to do a facial recognition. We want to do content and sentiment analysis. We've got the Jeep use. We think you guys have the right storage product for that, and that's really that's really taken off. And that was very much a customer driven area. We >> talked a little bit about that within video yesterday. About some of the customer catalyzed innovation where a is concerned. >> Absolutely. What do you see is the critical technical skills that pure needs in the next decade. I mean, you're five. Correct? Remember, you can't have a networking background. Internal networking, I guess of you got guys from Veritas, right? Obviously strong software file system. What do you What do you see is the critical skill. Yeah, that's >> a good question. You know, we have a very diverse team, all right? We we in engineering typically higher and look for people with strong systems, backgrounds that are willing to learn and want to solve her problems. We, you know, typically haven't hired very specific domain areas myself, my doctor, and is in language run times and compilers, Oh, distributed systems so a bit all over the map, You know, What I'd say is that the first phase of pure the first kind of decade was really about reinventing the storage experience on for me. I look at it as taking lessons from the consumer experience, bringing him into the storage on Enterprise World. Three iPhones, example. That's used a lot. There's a couple of examples you can think of. I think the next phase of what we're trying to do and you heard Charlie talk about this on stage with a modern date experience is take some lessons from the cloud experience and bring them into the enterprise. Right? So the first phase is about consumer simplicity for a human think the next phase is really about bring in some more of the cloud experience for enabling automation and dev ops and management orchestration. >> So what kind of work? A long, long, lot of work to do to get we envisioned this massively scalable distributed system where you have that cloud experience no matter where your data lives, that's not there today, Um, and you don't want to ship your date around, it'd be too much data. So you're on a ship metadata and have the intelligence tow. Bring the compute to that. That data. >> What do you >> got to do? What's the work that you have to do to actually make that seamless? That there's that over word overuse word again. It's not seamless today. Yeah, >> so? So, look, I mean, I think there's there's a lot of angles to it right on. And we're gonna We're gonna work our way there to your point. You know, it's not there today, but, you know, you're you're starting to see us lay the groundwork with all the announcements that came out today, right under the umbrella of Hey, we want to end up creating more portable, more seamless, more agile experience for customers. You can see where, as we bring Maur storage media's into play different classes of service, different balances of performance and cost, bringing those together in a way so that an application can use them income in the right combinations, you know, bring a I into play to help customers do that seamlessly and transparently eyes a big part of it. You can see multiple location kind of agility that we're bringing into play with Claude Block >> store >> enabled, like loud snap and snap shot mobility. Things like that on Dhe. Then you know, I think, as we move beyond the block world and way look att, what we can able with applications that sit on top of file on object protocols. There's a lot of, ah, a lot of greenfield there, right? So you know, we think object storage is very attractive, and we're starting to see that as the application vendors, right, as the applications that sit on top of the storage layer are really embracing object storage as the cloud native storage interface, if you will, that's creating a lot of, ah, a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of ways to share data, right? We're starting to see it, even within the data center, where multiple applications now are able to share data because object storage is being used. And so, like I said, there's a lot of angles to this right. There's there's bringing multiple discreet A raise together under the same management plane. There's bringing multiple different types of storage media a little bit closer together from a seamless application mobility perspective. There's bring multiple locations, data centers, clouds together from a migration a d R perspective. And then there's, you know, there's bringing a global name space type of capability to the table, so it's a long journey. But you know, we think it's the right one. And you know what we ultimately want to do is, you know, have customers be able to think about, be ableto provisioned, be able to manage to not just an array, but really more of like an A Z, right. I want a pool. I want it to be about a fast. But you know, I'm willing to pay about yea much for it, and I need this types of data protection policies for it. Please make it happen >> and anywhere do you So you see, it is technically feasible to be able to run any app, any workload on any cloud or on Prem without having a re compile the application, make changes to the application. That's what I really kind of meant by Seamus that you see that as technically feasible in the next called 5 to 10 years, I'll give you I think >> I think it'll take a long wait a long time we'll get there. And I think, you know, I think it'll depend on the application. All right. I think there are gonna be some combinations that look. I mean, if if you have a high, high frequency, low latent see trading database, there's physical limitations, you're not going to run the application here and put the storage in the cloud. But if we if we step back from it, right, the concept, Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of a lot of things are becoming possible to make this happen, right? Fastener networking is everywhere. It's getting faster application architectures and making it more feasible. You know, the media costs and what we're able to drive out of the media are bringing a lot a lot more than work leads to flash A eyes is coming into play. So, like I said, it's gonna be different on the on the application. But, you know, I think we're entering a phase where, you know, the modern software developer doesn't wanna have to think too hard about where is you know where physically what six sides of sheet metal is. My dad is sitting on. They want to think about what I need from it. What do we need from in terms of capacity, what we need from it in terms of performance, what we need from it in terms of data service capabilities. All right, ends, you know, And I need to be able to control that elastic Lee. I need to be able to control that through my application through software, and that's kind of what we're building towards. >> Last question, Rob, as we wrap up here, feedback that you've heard the last day and 1/2 on some of the news that came out yesterday from customers, analysts, partners. >> Yeah, you know, I'd say if I were to net it out. I think the one piece of you, Doc, we've gotten this. Wow, you guys have a lot of stuff on. It's really nice to see you guys talking about stuff. It's available today, right? That >> that's a >> lot of eyes on that screen. And, you know, I think I had a KN analysts say to me, You know, this is it's really refreshing. Thio kind of See you guys take a both you know, the viewpoint of the customer. What you're delivering the customer, what you're enabling on then be, You know, I got a lot of tech conferences and I hear a lot about, like, way off in the future. Envisioned Andi feedback we got was you guys had a really good balance of reality today. What, You're helping customers today? What's available today to do that? And enough of the hay. And here's where we're headed. So >> we actually heard the same thing. So good stuff, right? Well, congrats on the 10th anniversary, and we appreciate you joining us on the Cube. We look forward to next year already in whatever city. You're gonna take us to >> two. Thanks a lot. >> All right. For day, Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching.