>> 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.