>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here in San Francisco at the really cool historic Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. We've been here all day talking with lots of great folks, and we're happy to welcome back another Pure customer, Patrick Welch, the network services manager for the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Welcome Patrick. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Tell us a little bit about the Department of Revenue. What do you guys do? What kind of information do you collect? >> Okay, we bring in all tax revenue for the state of Mississippi, including vehicle services. We register all the car tags in Mississippi. Income tax, corporate tax, any revenue that's generated in Mississippi comes through us. >> Tax refunds too? Or do you just take, you give? >> We take and give. I have to do it too. (laughing) >> So talk to us about some of the challenges that you had in your environment. I was reading your case study and what you guys are taking in is totalling $7.8 billion a year. As we just identified, some of it's being given back, but what were some of the, what was the infrastructure like to support that before you became a Pure Storage customer? >> We used an internal Mississippi, they're called ITS, they handle all internal infrastructure, that kind of thing. They were using a mixture of Dell, EMC, Compel that type of thing. We use a third party vendor who has an office shelf software package. And they have about 50 to 60 customers in different states and municipalities and countries around the world. In that environment of Dell, EMC, Compel we were about 47th on their list of productive sites. So we were way far down. We were not performing, latency across the board was horrible. The user experience was the worst. If you've ever been on a website and click the button and seen the spinning wheel, we had that in droves. And not just tax payers, but our internal people that worked DOR were not able to work efficiently. We came in and evaluated, and I looked at the infrastructure, and I said my team can do it better. Then when they said, we'll do it better I was like okay now I have to go out and actually do it better. I started researching other companies, and Pure kind of rose to the top of the list. We talked with other customers and partners, kind of how they tackle those type of challenges. We went through a lot of POC process talked with a lot of vendors, things like that. We ended up buying Pure. We are now number three. We went from almost 50 to three. Out of 50, to three. The only two sites that are ahead of us are smaller sites, their transactions aren't nearly as high as ours. >> Okay hang on, how much of that effect could be attributed to the storage infrastructure? Do you have a sense of that? >> 99% >> Really? >> Yeah because before we had, to be fair Pure is all-flash storage, right? And with Compel and EMC or hybrid arrays, at the end of the day, the latency that we saw was due to read and write input being very low. We implemented Pure, through the roof. Storage is not something we would ever look at if we had a problem. We know that that is performing well above capacity. >> Okay I got another follow up. I asked this earlier to another customer, so you're basically comparing an all-flash array to a sort of previous generation hybrid. So it could have been three, four, five, six years old, it could have been 10 years old, so, you had the option obviously of bringing in an all-flash array from the competition. >> We did. >> And you had processes and procedures tied to that, your data protection and you know those products well, but you chose to switch vendors. Why, you could have gotten comparable all-flash, but you chose Pure. Why did you choose that switch and that disruption? What business benefit did that bring you? >> There were several things that led to that. One of the things that we really liked was the proactive support, in terms of every three years they swap out your controller as part of your support and maintenance agreement. Which is huge for us because we don't have a lot of money, our budget is very small for IT, so I can't afford to replace equipment as often as some people can. Their proactive support model, not just in terms of swapping out equipment, but personnel, our sales team that we deal with, our engineering team that we deal with, we're on a personal basis with these people. I have cellphone numbers, I know who to call. We found that out through talking to other customers that, hey you call these guys, they're going to be there for you. Coming from not having that before, we knew that the people we had before, were not going to perform that same level of service. Even if we went to their all-flash product, we were going to have the same support, that we had had before, which was not good. >> And you didn't have that previously because, why? You weren't like a big bank or you just didn't spend enough? >> Because you're a number and in our business, we didn't spend near enough money to be considered. That's a theory of mine, I'm not sure exactly what the actual issue was, but it felt like we were not big enough to get that kind of attention. >> You're the little guy. Pure makes you feel like you're the big guy. >> We think we're doing okay. We have six arrays now, so were not tiny tiny, but we're not also we're not Citibank. But I've never felt any different than a Citibank type customer with Pure Accelerate. >> You're in two years you said? >> A little over two years, yeah. >> You've had enough experience to, you know when you first buy something, you go on Amazon you see the reviews this is great, you wonder if it's still great two years in. >> Patrick: Oh absolutely. >> You would still give a five star rating? >> Oh absolutely, I've done a case study, customers call me and I'm happy to talk about Pure to anybody. I have a lot of friends in state government, I try to head them off from making bad decisions. I'm like if you like your job, you want to keep your job, buy this. >> It's interesting to me, now one of the things that the customers tell us is they love a lot about Pure, but they really like the simplicity. You mentioned Compellent before, Compellent, in its day, was known for simplicity, compared to the old main frame storage. It's interesting to note how technology has changed in whatever 10, 12 years, comments? >> Yeah Compellent was a great product. Back in the day when it came time to evaluate products, they had not performed along the same track as a company like Pure, which consistently innovates its products. If this is again about feeling like the big guy, even though you're a small guy, they keep us in the loop of what they're bringing down the pipe, and it really makes us feel like we're invested in that ecosystem, and we know exactly how they're transforming, how they're going to develop their business going forward. It helps keep us as a happy partner. >> So it's, from what I'm hearing, Patrick, better experience all around, very happy. Did it save you any time? Are you able to now do things differently, add more value to your organization as a result of bringing in Pure? I wonder if you can talk about that. >> Oh absolutely, we spent a good chunk of time troubleshooting issues directly related to storage before whether it was storage creep where we had too much data versus the capacity of the array, or the input output problems in terms of IO, latency those types of issues. We don't see any of that anymore. So that frees our engineers up to work on other problems in the environment. >> What workloads are you running on Flashdeck? >> Mostly production sequel, high sequel workloads mostly. >> You mentioned the dreaded spinning color wheel or whatever kind of computer we're running, and that was affecting not just employees, but also Mississippi citizens. Problem gone? >> The problem is gone from the aspect of our side of things, now this is Mississippi so you still got a lot of rural customers who are still on some dial up internet, so we can't solve that problem for them, but in terms of our side of the fence, we know they're not going to see any latency because of us. We're delivering the application as best you can. Like I said, we're number three in the list of their sites, and we came 44 spots down. >> How quickly in the last couple of years alone? >> Patrick: Immediately, yeah. >> You have to wear a neck brace from the whiplash. >> Yeah we put it in and I'm just crossing my fingers, 'cause if I told them I could do this, and we're 45th, what did we really solve? We didn't solve the problem really, but we came from that high up to all the way down to three, it like felt my team had accomplished something really great. >> And pretty dramatic improvements to your database. I was reading the case study, within the context of your IT transformation, that you improved database transaction performance by as much as 20X. Big, also data reduction rates. So I want to get your perspective on the impact of TCO, and why that's so important for a public agency. >> A lot of things go into TCO. I think user experience is one of those things, downtime for the state. The biggest cost we had was not really something you could see before because our system went down all the time due to not being able to meet the requirements of the taxpayers and the people that work at the Department of Revenue. We don't have that problem anymore. We would spend days of downtime before, that's revenue lost for us. So TCO in that instance is kind of hard to calculate, but I know that the number is big. I know we've saved a lot of time and money. >> Why not just forget all this IT stuff, and throw everything into the cloud. I know as an IT pro, them might be fighting words, but it's talked about in the industry all the time. Why the decision to stay on Pram, and was that discussed? >> We definitely look at the cloud, we definitely have Azure workloads that are in testing right now. Unfortunately it's not just as simple as us saying okay let's go to the cloud, 'cause if it was up to me, with limited funding and that type of thing, I would love to move workloads into the cloud. Where it was applicable. The problem for us is IRS. We have a lot of IRS regulations around cloud. So the core infrastructure that we have, has to remain on premise. There's some things that we can do, but the regulations are a mile long. So we have to make sure that we always stay in compliance with the IRS. That limits our mobility a little bit in the cloud, but we're getting there slowly but surely. I feel like in the next 60 years we'll be there. I joke, but everything we do, we have to go through compliance measures, and we have to make sure we're checking all the boxes. There's one thing you don't want to have, and that's the IRS to write you up for non-compliance. If you're attacked or hit by some vector afterwards, then you're on the hook. You weren't in compliance that's why you were vulnerable. We just have to be very careful, but we're definitely interested. And we'll look into the future with the cloud. >> A lot of talk at this show every show we go to about artificial intelligence, machine intelligence. What do you make of it? How does it apply to your organization? Can you use it? Do you plan on using machine intelligence, whether it's fraud detection or tax evasion, et cetera? What's the state of AI in your world? >> I'd say infancy, but we know that due to the fact that the state hasn't kept up in terms of pay and that type of thing with the private industry. We're going to have to rely on artificial intelligence and automation and things like that to remain ahead of the curve in terms of compliance, performance all the metrics we've talked about. You have to have either a very talented and well paid staff or you're going to have to leverage these types of technologies to stay ahead of the game. >> So you have made some big impacts from an IT transformation perspective we talked about a minute ago. Where are you on this journey of digital transformation? What does that digital transformation mean to the Mississippi Department of Revenue? And what stage would you say you're at? >> We're getting there. Like I said before some of Mississippi is still very rural, for the first time ever, we had more online returns processed than mail. Believe it or not, Mississippians still like to mail their returns in. A lot of that is rural location, internet access that type of thing. We're getting there slowly but surely. I feel like in the next five years, we'll be probably 75% to 80% online refund based. I hope anyway, I hope we're still not at 50%. It's a slow crawl, but we're getting there. We do things a little slower than most people, but we get there eventually. >> You're friendlier down in Mississippi. >> We are definitely, you got to have something. >> You do, so in terms of next steps, you've solved the performance challenges, you're kind of on this road to digital transformation. How have you improved the efficiency of your IT team? >> Say that one more time. >> How have you improved the efficiency within network services? >> I think most of it comes down to not having to worry about the equipment and the environment. We have more time to focus on each other, the tasks we have in front of us. Before it was tackling issues that we knew were related to either vendor or product or storage or server. And now we're focused on expanding the skill set of the current staff. It allows us to leverage things like cloud and automation. We didn't have time to look at that stuff before. So when you ask me where we at with automation, we're still in the infancy because before all we did was fight issues related to previous vendors, previous products, that kind of thing. And this, while it's not a magic bullet, we still have, you're always going to have challenges it frees us up to be able to work on those types of-- >> Dave: Close to firefighting and whack-a-mole. >> That's all we did before. This guy is fighting this problem, he's fighting this one, then they don't get time to learn and grow as employees and as people. >> So automation is big priority, what kind of other fun projects you working on? Or techs that you're researching that get you excited? >> So right now we've deployed both of our major applications using Pure. Our big projects are kind of done. Now we're leveraging towards disaster recovery, modern day DR, BCDR, business continuity that type of thing. How do we recover in case of a disaster? That's kind of where my focus lays right now, to make sure the Department of Revenue, if we are affected by some type of disaster, that we're ready for the taxpayers of Mississippi to come up and running in a sister site and be ready to go. >> Okay that's a combination of infrastructure, probably going to use snapshots, remote replication, but there's also got to be a software component as well. What are you thinking about whether if you don't have a specific vendor product, but just architecturally what are you thinking about? >> So we absolutely right now leverage Zerto with Pure. Which is a very good combination, they work very well together and we have a co-low facility, it's about 200 miles north of us. We'd like to get more geographically diverse as budget frees up and that kind of thing, maybe move out into the Colorados or something like that. But our sister site, all of our data is replicated using Zerto. We're on, I believe, every 15 seconds we're tracking journal history. In the event of a disaster, and we've test fail overs. 'Cause you've got RPO and RTO. Real time objective and recovery point objective. It's important for us to be under 10 minutes, in terms of how quickly we can recover the environment. It's a real time objective. The last time we did a test fail over, we were about four minutes. So our business has completely transformed. Before if we had a disaster, we would be lucky to have data available to us number one and within three to five days. Now we are being able to turn around and operate in another location within minutes. >> And your RPO you said was 15 minutes, did I hear that right? >> Recovery point objectives, that is 15 seconds. Recovery points are every 15 seconds. Our recovery times, the total time it takes us to come back up and running, we hope to be under 10 and we got it around four. Now that depends on a lot of different things. Every situation is not the same. >> Very tight RPO. >> Patrick: Oh yeah, absolutely. >> 'Cause you're moving money, I guess. >> We're moving money. And it's very important that we stay up at all times. Obviously there is going to be a little bit of downtime, but we want to minimize that as much as we can. >> Patrick last question before we wrap here, this is your first time at Pure Storage Accelerate. A whole bunch of announcements this morning, anything that you've heard that excites you for expanding this foundation that you have with Flashtech? >> A lot of the stuff we talked about around automation and that kind of thing. We're definitely interested in how Pure is going to evolve to the cloud because we know you all we be ahead of us I say you all, so you all will be ahead of us whenever we do get ready, and that's another big benefit for us. We know that when we get ready to transition to the cloud, you guys are going to have your ducks in a row, and be ready for us to do that. >> You all as in Pure? We all aren't Pure. >> You know what I meant. >> We're the blue guys. >> It's real exciting to hear about automation, And where they're going with the cloud, and storage as a service and that type of thing is very neat. I love reading about and hearing about that stuff, we can't always be there like I said because of compliance issues, but as we can, we will if it makes sense for us. >> How important is it to you, I was asking a couple of the Pure execs what their thoughts were on staying independent. You see a lot of storage companies get bought, they get consolidated. EMC, 20 plus billion they got acquired. How important is it to you as a customer to have a company like Pure be an independent storage company? >> I mean, it's enormous. I can give you an example. We were a SimpliVity customer so HP bought SimpliVity, our experience before the merger, fantastic. We would give them very high marks in every category. After the merger, not so much. Support dropped off for us after SimpliVity was bought by HP. For us it's huge that Pure is, now that's not to say, we know that this is a business, and that things may happen, but we hope that if they don't stay independent, somebody that has the same level of focus and effort and determination and support keeps that going. >> We hope so too, we love the competition on theCUBE. We love the growth that drives innovation. Pure seems to be leading the way. We talked about this earlier, what they're doing with NVME a lot of good marketing, but still they're throwing down the gauntlet. What they've done with Evergreen. Obviously first with AllFlash or at least early on with AllFlash, so got a leader. >> That's what you worry about too, the Evergreen type things are the things you worry about going away. If they get bought by somebody, is that the first casualty? That's the kind of things that happen to companies when they get bought. We do love the fact that they are independent, but we know it's a business at the end of the day. But hopefully that remains the same. >> Keep that feedback coming, I'm sure they appreciate that. And Patrick thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing the impact that you guys are making at the Mississippi Department of Revenue. >> Sure, thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around we'll be right back with our next guest.

>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here all day with Dave Vellante. We're joined by David Floyer now. Guys, really interesting, very informative day. We got to talk to a lot of puritans, but also a breadth of customers, from Mercedes Formula One, to Simpson Strong-Tie to UCLA's School of Medicine. Lot of impact that data is making in a diverse set of industries. Dave, you've been sitting here, with me, all day. What are some of the key takeaways that you have from today? >> Well, Pure's winning in the marketplace. I mean, Pure said, "We're not going to bump along. "We're going to go for it. "We're going to drive growth. "We don't care if we lose money, early on." They bet that the street would reward that model, it has. Kind of a little mini Amazon, version of Amazon model. Grow, grow, grow, worry about profits down the road. They're eking out a slight, little positive free cashflow, on a non-gap basis, so that's good. And they were first with All-Flash, really kind of early on. They kind of won that game. You heard David, today. The NVMe, the first with NVMe. No uplifts on pricing for NVMe. So everybody's going to follow that. They can do the Evergreen model. The can do these things and claim these things as we were first. Of course, we know, David Floyer, you were first to make the call, back in 2008, (laughs) on Flash and the All-Flash data center, but Pure was right there with you. So they're winning in that respect. Their ecosystem is growing. But, you know, storage companies never really have this massive ecosystem that follow them. They really have to do integration. So that's, that's a good thing. So, you know, we're watching growth, we're watching continued execution. It seems like they are betting that their product portfolio, their platform, can serve a lot of different workloads. And it's going to be interesting to see if they can get to two billion, the kind of, the next milestone. They hit a billion. Can they get to two billion with the existing sort of product portfolio and roadmap, or do they have to do M&A? >> David: You're right. >> That's one thing to watch. The other is, can Pure remain independent? David, you know well, we used to have this conversation, all the time, with the likes of David Scott, at 3PAR, and the guys at Compellent, Phil Soran and company. They weren't able, Frank Slootman at Data Domain, they weren't able to stay independent. They got taken out. They weren't pricey enough for the market not to buy them. They got bought out. You know, Pure, five billion dollar market cap, that's kind of rich for somebody to absorb. So it was kind of like NetApp. NetApp got too expensive to get acquired. So, can they achieve that next milestone, two billion. Can they get to five billion. The big difference-- >> Or is there any hiccup, on the way, which will-- >> Yeah, right, exactly. Well the other thing, too, is that, you know, NetApp's market was growing, pretty substantially, at the time, even though they got hit in the dot-com boom. The overall market for Pure isn't really growing. So they have to gain share in order to get to that two billion, three billion, five billion dollar mark. >> If you break the market into the flash and non flash, then they're in the much better half of the market. That one is still growing, from that perspective. >> Well, I kind of like to look at the service end piece of it. I mean, they use this term, by Gartner, today, the something, accelerated, it's a new Gartner term, in 2018-- >> Shared Accelerated Storage >> Shared Accelerated Storage. Gartner finally came up with a category that we called service end. I've been joking all day. Gartner has a better V.P. of naming than we do. (chuckles) We're looking' at service end. I mean, I started, first talking about it, in 2009, thanks to your guidance. But that chart that you have that shows the sort of service end, which is essentially Pure, right? It's the, it's not-- >> Yes. It's a little more software than Pure is. But Pure is an awful lot of software, yes. And showing it growing, at the expense of the other segments, you know. >> David: Particularly sad. >> Particularly sad. Very particularly sad. >> So they're really well positioned, from that standpoint. And, you know, the other thing, Lisa, that was really interesting, we heard from customers today, that they switched for simplicity. Okay, not a surprise. But they were relatively unhappy with some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> They got kind of crummy service from some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> Now these are, maybe, smaller companies. One customer called out SimpliVity, specifically. He said, "I loved 'em when they were an independent company, "now they're part of HPE, meh, "I don't get service like the way I used to." So, that's a sort of a warning sign and a concern. Maybe their, you know, HPE's prioritizing the bigger customers, maybe the more profitable customers, but that can come back to bite you. >> Lisa: Right. >> So Pure, the point is, Pure has the luxury of being able to lose money, service, like crazy, those customers that might not be as profitable, and grow from it's position of a smaller company, on up. >> Yeah, besides the Evergreen model and the simplicity being, resoundingly, drivers and benefits, that customers across, you know, from Formula One to medical schools, are having, you're right. The independence that Pure has currently is a selling factor for them. And it's also probably a big factor in retention. I mean, they've got a Net Promoter Score of over 83, which is extremely high. >> It's fantastic, isn't it? I think there would be VMI, that I know of, has even higher one, but it's a very, very high score. >> It's very high. They added 300 new customers, last quarter alone, bringing their global customer count to over 4800. And that was a resounding benefit that we were hearing. They, no matter how small, if it's Mercedes Formula One or the Department of Revenue in Mississippi, they all feel important. They feel like they're supported. And that's really key for driving something like a Net Promoter Score. >> Pure had definitely benefited from, it's taken share from EMC. It did early on with VMAX and Symmetrix and VNX. We've seen Dell EMC storage business, you know, decline. It probably has hit bottom, maybe it starts to grow again. When it starts to grow again, I think, even last quarter, it's growth, in dollars, was probably the size of Pure. (chuckles) You know, so, but Pure has definitely benefited from stealing share. The flip side of all this, is when you talk to you know, the CxOs, the big customers, they're doing these big digital transformations. They're not buying products, you know, they're buying transformations. They're buying sets of services. They're buying relationships, and big companies like Dell and IBM and HPE, who have large services arms, can vie for certain business that Pure, necessarily, can't. So, they've got the advantage of being smaller, nimbler, best of breed product, but they don't have this huge portfolio of capabilities that gives them a seat at the CxO table. And you saw that, today. Charlie Giancarlo, his talk, he's a techie. The guys here, Kicks, Hat, they're techies. They're hardcore storage guys. They love storage. It reminds me of the early days of EMC, you know, it's-- >> David: Or NetApp. Yeah. Yeah, or NetApp, right. They're really focused on that. So there's plenty of market for them, right now. But I wonder, David, if you could talk about, sort of architecturally, people used to criticize the two controller, you know, approach. It obviously seems to be doing very well. People take shots at their, the Evergreen model, saying "Oh, we can do that too." But, again, Pure was first. Architecturally, what's your assessment of Pure? >> So, the Evergreen, I think, is excellent. They've gone about that, well. I think, from a straighforward architecture, they kept it very simple. They made a couple of slightly, odd decisions. They went with their own NAND chips, putting them into their own stuff, which made them much smaller, much more compact, completely in charge of the storage stack. And that was a very important choice they made, and it's come out well for them. I have a feeling. My own view is that M.2 is actually going to be the form factor of the future, not the SSD. The Ssd just fitted into a hard disk slot. That was it's only benefit. So, when that comes along, and the NAND vendors want to increase the value that they get from these stacks, etc., I'm a little bit nervous about that. But, having said that, they can convert back. >> Yeah, I mean, that seems like something they could respond to, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was at the Micron financial analysts' meeting, this week. And a lot of people were expecting that, you know, the memory business has always been very cyclical, it's like the disk drive business. But, it looks like, because of the huge capital expenses required, it looks like supply, looks like they've got a good handle on supply. Micron made a good strong case to the street that, you know, the pricing is probably going to stay pretty favorable for them. So, I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that could be a little bit of a head wind for some of the systems suppliers. >> I take that with a pinch of salt. They always want to have the market saying it's not going to go down. >> Of course, yeah. And then it crashes. (chuckles) >> The normal market place is, for any of that, is go through this series of S-curves, as you reach a certain point of volume, and 3D NAND has reached that point, that it will go down, inevitably, and then cue comes in,and then that there will go down, again, through that curve. So, I don't see the marketplace changes. I also think that there's plenty of room in the marketplace for enterprise, because the biggest majority of NAND production is for consumer, 80% goes to consumer. So there's plenty of space, in the marketplace, for enterprise to grow. >> But clearly, the prices have not come down as fast as expected because of supply constraints And the way in which companies like Pure have competed with spinning disks, go through excellent data reduction algorithms, right? >> Yes. >> So, at one point, you had predicted there would be a crossover between the cost per bit of flash and spinning disk. Has that crossover occurred, or-- >> Well, I added in the concept of sharing. >> Raw. >> Yeah, raw. But, added in the cost of sharing, the cost-benefit of sharing, and one of the things that really impresses me is their focus on sharing, which is to be able to share that data, for multiple workloads, in one place. And that's excellent technology, they have. And they're extending that from snapshots to cloud snaps, as well. >> Right. >> And I understand that benefit, but from a pure cost per bit standpoint, the crossover hasn't occurred? >> Oh no. No, they're never going to. I don't think they'll ever get to that. The second that happens, disks will just disappear, completely. >> Gosh, guys, I wish we had more time to wrap things up, but thanks, so much, Dave, for joining me all day-- >> Pleasure, Lisa. >> And sporting The Who to my Prince symbol. >> Awesome. >> David, thanks for joining us in the wrap. We appreciate you watching theCUBE, from Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, for Dave and David, thanks for watching.