(upbeat jazzy music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE conversation. Here where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm Donald Klein, today I'm here with Tom Stepien, CEO of Primus Power. We're going to talk about the state of clean tech. Tom, welcome to the show. >> Great to be here, thank you very much, Don. >> Okay, great, well look, we're going to kind of get into the state of climate change, and what's happening and why the solutions that you provide are kind of important, but first just why don't you just give a quick overview of Primus Power and what you guys do. >> Sure, so Primus Power is a stationary energy storage company. Our flow batteries work on both sides of the meter, the utility side, the guys who are supplying electricity, and the behind the meter side, the folks who use electricity, like this studio. And what we do is offer a solution that allows that allows you to optimize your electricity use. You charge the batteries typically when the price of electricity is low, and the usage is low, and then you pull from those batteries, instead of the grid, when the grid prices are high, and the cost is high. >> Donald: Okay. >> And that allows our customers to save money on both sides. >> Excellent, and so just quickly, who's the you, who's the customers here, who are the primary focus that you're selling to? >> Sure, sure, so the utilities are PG&E, the utility that's putting electrons to this studio, to smaller utilities, there's several thousand utilities in the US and then worldwide, of course. Folks who are supplying electricity. Also think about renewable plants, right, Solar-Plus storage, wind farms have curtailment problems because wind is gusty, tends to show up at the wrong time sometimes. You can save wind when it's extra, and then dispatch it when timers low. So renewables projects are customers. And then homeowners are customers. I lost power on the way here this morning, if I had a battery in my garage or by the side of my house I would have been able to keep the lights on and the garage door open. >> Okay, excellent, okay, all right. Well, lets, lets talk about kind of clean tech, right? So everybody's interested in what's happening with climate change, it's kind of front and center in the news cycle these days. California's actually been a real leader in implementing legislation to accelerate the adoption of Grid-tied storage solutions to make better use of renewable energy, correct? >> They sure have, absolutely. The California Energy Commission has been a leader in this space, the CPUC that governs the three investor owned utilities in California, initially 8-10 years ago put out a very important law that Nancy Skinner lead, relative to using storage and mandating storage in chunks for the three IOU's over the next 10 years. >> Interesting. >> We have exceeded those goals, I think it has helped drive down the cost of storage. It's helped companies like Primus blossom because it's created a market. Other states have jumped on that bandwagon, New York has, you know, done that, Oregon has storage goals, and many other states also, and it's helped improve the technology for sure. >> Interest, but so California's really been leading the charge since 2010 in this area? >> Yes, yes, I travel a lot, I've been to China, and Europe, and Kazakhstan, and all places. Everyone asks me, "What's happening in California?" If you look at Bloomberg numbers about energy storage, California is broken out and often the leader. South Korea did a lot last year, but within the US, California leads for sure, and will continue to do so. >> Interesting, and then they doubled up on those numbers again back in 2016, is that right? >> They are, they're continuing to up the goals, right? As a state we now have a carbon free goal. Wisconsin just this morning I read is also moving to carbon free goals under Energy Mix. So California has led for sure, but other cities, Chicago has a goal, other states are following, but it all has started here, for sure. >> And just talk about this connection between, kind of, a carbon free energy solution and grid-tied battery solutions, what is the connection? How do the batteries help with making states carbon free? >> Yeah, for sure, so solar is the least expensive way of generating electricity, full stop, right? What Germany did years ago with Feed-in Tariff and has driven down the cost is actually somewhat similar to what California did and helped drive down the cost and improve the technology. It is now at a point where it is the cheapest form, it is less expensive to put in a new solar plant than to run some of these gas plants. >> Interesting. >> California has no coal, got rid of that years ago, but has a lot of gas. Point in fact, in earlier this year in the Southern California Edison district the California Public Utility Commission, the guys who rule the utilities, said, "No, no, no, lets not put a couple hundred million dollars "to update and refurbish some of these gas plants, stop, "instead lets move that toward energy storage." >> Interesting. >> So here's how it's going to look in the future, you have solar, right? And we all know the low, low cost of that, right? Next Era Energy, using some of their numbers, because their the largest, one of the largest developers in the US, has the 20 year power purchase agreement price of solar by itself, is $25 to $35 a megawatt hour, right? Really low, so two and a half cents a kilowatt hour, right? I pay 10, 12, 18 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity at my home, depending on the uses. So, wow, right, it's an order of magnitude less than that. And then we all know what solar looks like, right? It's great during the day, but there's two dynamics that are important with solar. One are clouds, right? If you lose power because clouds go over, that intermittency is a problem. Quick acting batteries can take that out. The second one that everyone knows is the solar parabola tends to fall down when the sun sets, well what do you do for the other, either 12 or 18 hours of the day? And that's where batteries of a different type come in that gets charged in the middle of the day with that extra electricity from the peak and dissipated at night. >> Okay. >> That is the grid of the future, for sure. >> And you can do this both at a residential level, right? But also at a distribution center, replacing an older, kind of, you know, peak generation plant? >> Absolutely, right, and if you look at the refurbishments that are happening up and down the coast here in California, that's exactly what they're moving towards, and here in California we have a utility that got into a bit of trouble because of some of the wildfires and not maintaining some of the lines as we all have read about. Now they are publishing and turning off parts of the grid, if there are wildfire concerns. That is going to drive the use of storage at home, and the tariffs also are going to encourage that, right? Where you are encouraged economically to save extra electricity if you have panels on your roof, and then use that at night. So it's helping drive that market, and it's the right way to go. >> Interesting, so both in terms of houses that are in, sort of, forested areas, right, they're going to need this type of local energy storage solution. You've also got replacing the, kind of, peaker plants with using grid-tied storage to be able to push out energy over the grid, right? So these are going to be increasing use cases, so we're going to see battery installations both at plants and also in homes, but all of these battery solutions they're all tied to the cloud, correct? They're all tied to the internet, they're effectively functioning as IOT devices at the edge. Maybe talk a little bit about how that works and how, what the benefits are from a leveraging those types of technologies. >> Sure, yeah, so yes you're absolutely right, they are at all points of the grid, and different types of batteries for different functions. And it's fascinating, there is a whole class of companies that, of course, are emerging on the battery scene, right? Lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries like Primus, etc., and other types, really long thermal batteries are going to be coming, but then there's the class of the software companies that are helping manage these assets because you need to smartly charge and discharge. Sometimes driven by weather signals. Okay, it's going to be really windy tonight so I want to enter tonight with an empty battery if I'm a wind farm down in Palm Springs so I can take that extra wind and put it into the battery. Sometimes they're driven by economic signals, right? Because it's a really hot day and the prices of producing electricity are going to be high, so therefore I can take a different type of action. >> Interesting. >> And they will control those assets, batteries, on either side of the grid and make intelligent choices, driven by economics to provide the best outcome for, again, either the utility or the homeowner, maybe even the neighbors, right? At some point we're going to be able to share electricity. Why can't I use my neighbors panels if they're out of town for two weeks, and they can do the same when I'm out of town? So that will all come here over time. >> And that's all being enabled by a new class of software companies that are really treating these energy solutions as, kind of, you know, IOT devices. >> Absolutely, and they, it's a great model because it's just another IP address, right, and there's some attributes that it has and you understand the batteries and you can make economic decision. So think of it like a trading platform if you will. So those are emerging, you know, there's some really fascinating companies that are young and starting but off to a great start on those tasks. >> Excellent, okay, so why don't we just talk a little bit about Primus Power itself for a second. So you're in particular type of energy solution. Why don't you talk about that, and how you differ from some of the other providers that are out there? >> Sure, so there's lots of different types of batteries, right, and one thing to mention, that there's no perfect battery. There's always trade offs on batteries, right?. You always, of course, get less out than you put in, because you can't create energy. So there's efficiency differences. We're probably all familiar, the audience here is, with lithium ion batteries, with the Powerwall and Sonin and some, you know famous companies. SolarEdge has done a great job putting batteries with solar, or just having batteries by themselves. Those batteries today, most of the market is lithium ion. Lithium ion is 20-30 years old, first showed up on the Sony Handycam, very bankable, very proven, but like all batteries, have trade offs. We know the fade that we've experienced with our laptops and our cell phones-- >> Absolutely. >> Which is lithium ion. That's okay, because you can buy a new iPhone every three years, but if you have that on the grid, not so good, you don't want to go out to the substation every three years with a new set of batteries. Well, there's also fire concerns. There were 30-40 fires in South Korea last year, lithium ion based, and there was a big one earlier this year in Surprise, Arizona, bit of a Surprise down there, it sent some firefighters to the hospital. So that's some of the strengths and weaknesses of lithium ion. A flow battery, like ours, gets its name because we flow a liquid electrolyte, and a typical flow battery has two tanks and you're moving liquid from one tank to the other take through a reaction chamber, that's a stack of electrodes, and you plate a metal, we plate Zinc, other people plate iron, or you're playing tennis with electrons. This is high school chemistry coming back to haunt all of us, you're changing valance states of Vanadium, for example, Primus, if I talk about that difference, is unique in that it only has a single tank because we exploit the density differences in our electrolyte, kind of got a oil and vinegar separation going on, and we don't have a membrane in our stack of electrodes, so it's about half the cost, half of the price compared to other batteries. It's earlier, right? That's our biggest detriment is that we're not quite at bankable scale yet, we'll get there, right? As a young company you have to earn your stripes and get the UL certification and get enough things out there to do that. But there will be a number of winners in this space. Lithium ion is really good for certain applications, flow generally is good for daily discharges, think solar plus storage, deep discharge, multiple hour 4, 5, 6, 8 hour storage, and then there's going to be week long batteries that might be thermal based. There's a company that's moving, got a nice round of funding last week that's blocks of concrete around because you can, just like the pumped hydro you can move water up and down depending on the price of electricity and the use, you can move concrete blocks up and down. Spend energy moving it up, and then use gravity as your friend when you need electricity from the concrete battery. >> So, so in terms of future battery economy, like with multiple types of solutions for different sort of use cases right? >> Exactly. >> Whether sort of transportation or handheld, right, to residential, to grid-tied, etc.-- >> Absolutely, sure, and it will be drive by economics and then, you can't have a concrete battery in downtown San Francisco but you could in the middle of the Mojave-- >> Understood. >> So it would be-- >> Understood-- >> Absolutely-- >> Okay, so in order to kind of let you go here why don't you just talk a little bit about Primus, how you, where you guys are at in terms of your own evolution. How much deploy battery pods do you have out there in the world today? >> Sure, so Primus is at a stage now where we are growing. We're trying to grow at the right rate, because you don't want to get too far ahead of yourselves. We have systems up and down California, at some projects that have been put at waste water treatment centers, right, where we can help optimize the economics of the waste water treatment centers. They have components that are spending electricity they have solar, okay, batteries can help improve those economics. We have them at utilities that are testing them to see, "Okay, how well do these work?" Many of these new battery companies are where we are, where our customers are a try before you buy or a test before you invest type of a situation. We have a battery in China at one of China's largest wind turbine provider. Wind curtailment is acute in certain provinces in China. In fact in one of the provinces, Qinghai, in northwest China they passed a law a couple years ago that said "every new wind turbine has to have "a battery with it," so that's created a market there. >> Okay. >> There's also, we will be coming out with a residential version for some of the same reasons we mentioned about the wildfire concerns. >> Excellent, and so just give a sense how big, you talked about your pipeline and how many kind of quoted sales you've got out there. Just give us, the audience, a rough idea of what kind of pipeline you're looking at. >> Sure, so as a company we're moving from single digit million type of revenue that we did last year, to double digit million that we want to do next year. That translates into roughly 200-300 of our systems. Our systems, by the way, are think of a large washing machine, two meters, by two meters, by two meters. We have, in our pipeline of projects that we've quoted, more than a billion dollars worth of projects, a lot of solar-plus storage, a couple years from now. We won't get them all, for sure, but it shows the really strong interest in solutions like ours. >> Excellent, well exciting stuff Tom. Thank you for coming into TheCUBE and having a conversation with us. Appreciate you taking the time. >> Don, thank you very much, it was wonderful, really appreciate it! >> Donald Klein, thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation, we'll see you next time. (upbeat jazzy music)

>> we'LL run. Welcome to this special. Keep conversation. We're here in Mountain View, California. The pure storage headquarters here in Castro Tree, one of the many buildings they have here as they continue to grow as a public company. Our next guest is Kicks Vice President of strategy Employee number six Pure. Great to see you. Thanks for spending time. Thanks for having me. So cloud is the big wave that's coming around the future itself here. Now, people really impacted by it operationally coming to the reality that they got to actually use the cloud of benefits for many, many multiple benefits. But you guys have major bones in storage, flash arrays continuing to take take territory. So as you guys do that, what's the cloud play? How to customers who were using pure. And we've heard some good testimonials Yet a lot of happy customers. We've seen great performance, Easy to get in reliability performances. They're in the storage side on premise. Right? Okay. Now Operations says, Hey, I build faster. Cloud is certainly path there. Certainly. Good one. Your thoughts on strategy for the cloud? >> Absolutely. So look for about ten years into the journey here, a pure. And a lot of what we did in the first ten years was helped bring flash onto the scene. Um, and you know what a vision when we started the company of the All Flash Data Center and I'd like to first of all, remind people that look, we ain't there yet. If you look at the analyst numbers, about a third of the storage sold this year will be flashed two thirds disk. So we still have a long way to go in the old flash data center and a lot of work to do there. But of course, increasingly customers are wanting to move, were close to the cloud. And I think the last couple of years have almost seen a pendulum swing a little bit more back to reality. You know, when I met with CEOs to three years ago, you often heard we're going all cloud. We're going to cloud first and, you know, now there a few years into it. And they've realized that that cloud is a very powerful weapon in their in their arsenal for agility, for flexibility. But it's not necessarily cheaper on DH. So I think the swing back to really believe in in hybrid is the model of the day, and I think that I think people have realised in that journey is that the club early works best when you build a nap for the cloud natively. But what if you have a bunch of on prime maps that are in traditional architecture? How do I get in the cloud? And so one of the things we really focused on is how we can help customers take their mission critical applications and move them seamlessly to the cloud without re architecture. Because for most customers, that's really going to start. I mean, they could build some new stuff in the cloud, but the bulk of their business, if they want to move substantial portions of the cloud, they've got to figure out how to move what they've got. And we think we really had value in that. >> And the economics of the cloud is undeniable. People who are born in the cloud will testify that certainly as you guys have been successful on premise with the cloud, how do you make those economics, he seem, was as well as the operations. This seems to be the number one goal when you talk about how important that is and how hard it is, because it sounds easy just to say it. But it's actually really difficult to have seamless operations on Prime because, you know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they all got computing storage in the cloud and you got story. John Premise. This equation is a really important one to figure out what the importance and how hard is it to some of things that you guys are doing to solve that. >> Yeah, So I heard two things that question one around costs and one around operations on. You know, the first thing I think that has been nice to see over the last couple of years as people realizing that both the cloud and on from our cost effective in different ways, and I think a little bit about the way that I think about owning a car. Owning a car is relatively cost effective for me, and there's times and taken uber is relatively cost effective. I think they're both cheap when you look it on one metric, though, about what I pay per mile, it's way more expensive to own a car to take a number look about acquisition cost. It's way more expensive. Car, right? And so I think both of them provide value of my lives in the way that hybrid does today. But once you start to use both than the operational, part of your question comes in. How do I think about these two different worlds? And I think we believe that that storage is actually one of the areas where these two worlds are totally different on dso a couple things we've done to find a bridge together. First off on the cost side, one of the things we realised was that people that are going to run large amounts of on prime infrastructure increasingly want to do it in the cloud model. And so we introduced a new pricing model that we call the S to evergreen storage service, which will essentially allows you to subscribe to our storage even in your own data center. And so you can have an optics experience in the cloud. You gotta monoprix experience on Prem and when you buy and yes, to those licenses are transferrable so you can start on Prem, Move your stories to the cloud with pure go back and forth tons of flexibility. From the operational point of view, I think we're trying to get to the same experience as well such that you have a single storage experience for a manageability and automation point of view across both. And I think that last word of automation is key, because if you look at people who are really invested in cloud, it's all about automation. In one of the nice things I think that's made pure, so successful in on Prime Claude environments is this combination of simplicity and automation. You can't we automate what isn't simple to begin with on DH. So we started with simplicity. But as we've added rich FBI's, we're really seeing that become the dominant way that people administrated our storage. And so as we've gone to the cloud because it's the same software on both sides, literally the same integrations, the same AP calls everything works transparently across both places. >> That's a great point. We've been reporting on silicon ng on the Cube for years. Automation grave. You have to couple of manual taxes and automated, but the values and shifting and you guys in the storage business you know this data's data data is very valuable. You mentioned the car and Alice just take uber uber is an app. It's got Web services in the back end. So when you start thinking about cloud, you think you hear ap eyes You hear micro services as more and more applications going to need the data, they're going to need to have that in real time, some cases not near real time, either real time. And they're gonna need to have at the right time. So the role of data becomes important, which makes storage more important. So you automate the story, Okay, Take away that mundane tasks. Now the value shifts to making sure data is being presented properly. This is the renaissance of application development. Right now we're seeing this. How do you guys attack that market? How do you guys enable that? Mark, how do you satisfy that market? Because this is where the AP eyes could be connectors. This is where the data can be valuable. Whether it's analytic, score an app like uber. That's just, you know, slinging AP eyes together for a service that is now going to go public. Yeah, >> I think the mindset around data is one of the biggest differences between the old world in the New World. And if you think about the old world of applications. Yeah, monolithic databases that kind of privately owned their own data stores and the whole name of the game was delivering that as reliably as possible, kind of locking it down, making it super reliable. If you look at the idea of the Web scale application, the idea of an application is broken up into lots of little micro services, and those maker services somehow have to work together on data. And so what does it mean that the data level, it's not this kind of monolithic database anymore? It's got to be this open shared environment and, you know, as a result, if you look in the Web in Amazon's case, for example, the vast majority of applications are written on history object storage that's inherently shared. And so I think one of the bigger interesting challenges right now is how you get data constructs to actually go both ways. You know, if you want to take a non prime map that kind of is built around the database, you've got to figure out a way to move it to the cloud and ronit reliably on the flipside of the coin. If you want to build on Web skill tools and then be hybrid and run some of those things on Prem, well, you need an object store on prim and most people don't have that. And so you know, this whole kind of compatibility to make hybrid reality. It's forcing people on both sides of the weir to understand the other architecture er, and make sure they're compatible both ways >> and throw more complex into that equation. Is that skills, gaps? I know I know that cloud needed. But now men on premise so different skill got you guys had an announcement that's come out. So I want to ask you about your product announcement and your acquisitions. Go back to past six months. What's the most notable product announcements inequities that you guys have done? And what does that mean for pure and your customers? Yeah, >> absolutely. So I'll just kind of walk through it, So the first thing we announced was our new set of Cloud data services, and this was in essence, bringing our core software that runs on our purity. Operating environment right into the cloud. And so we call that cloud block store. And again, this is a lot of what I've been talking about, how you can take a tier one block storage application on Prem and seamlessly move it to the cloud along that same timeline. We also introduce something called P S O, which is the pure service orchestrator. And this was a tool set that we built specifically for the containers world for communities so that basically, in a container environment, our storage could be completely automated. It's been really fun watching customers use and just see how different that storage is in a container environment. You know, we look at our call home data with an R P. R. One application, and in our traditional on prime environment, the average array has about one administrative tasks per day. Make a volume. Delete something, Whatever. If you look in a container environment, that's tens of thousands, and so it's just a much more fluid environment, which there's no way a storage at Ben's going to do something ten thousand times a day they've got on, >> and that's where automation comes in. But what does that mean? the continuous station. That means the clients are using containers to be more flexible, they deploying more. What's the What's the inside of this container trend? >> You know, I think ultimately it's just a farm or fluid environment. It's totally automated, Andi. It's built on a world of share data. And so you need a shared, reliable data service that can power these containers, Um and then, you know, back to original question about about kind of product expansion. The next thing that we haven't announced last year was acquisition of a company called Story Juice, and we've subsequently brought out as a product that we call Object Engine. And this is all about a new type of data moving into the club, which is backup data and facilitating in this backup process. You know, in the past, people moved from tape back up to the space back up and, you know, we saw kind of two new inflection points here. Number one the opportunity Use flash on Prem. So the people have really fast recoveries on prep because in most environments now, space recovery just aren't fast enough, and then using low cost object storage in the cloud for retention. So the combination of flash on Prem and Object Storage in the Cloud can completely replace both disc and tape in the back of process >> case. I won the competition because you guys came in really with the vision of all Flash Data Center. You now have a cloud software that runs on Amazon and others with words. No hardware, he just the blocks are great solution. How have the competition fallen behind you guys really kind of catapulted into the lead, took share certainly from other vendors. In my public, someone predicted that pure would never make it to escape velocity. Some other pundits and other CEOs of tech company said that you guys achieve that, but their success now You guys go the next level. What is the importance of that ability you have? And what's the inability of the competition? So, you know, I like >> to joke with folks. When we started the company, I think flashes. It's an excuse, you know, We just tried to build a better storage company and we went out and I talkto many, many, many customers, and I found in general they didn't just not like their stories products they didn't like the companies that sold it to them, and so we tried to look at that overall experience. And, you know, we, of course, innovated around flash use. Consumer fresh brought the price down so I could actually afford to use it with the duplication. But we also just looked at that ownership experience. And when I talk to folks in the history, I think now we might even be better known for are evergreen approach that even for Flash. And it's been neat to watch customers now that even the earliest your customers or two or three cycles of refreshing they've seen a dramatic difference in just the storage experience that you can essentially subscribe to. A known over time through many generations of technology. Turn as opposed to that cycle of replacing a raise >> share a story of a custom that's been through that's reached fresh cycles from their first experience to what they're experienced. Now what what? Some of the experiences like any share some some insight. >> Yeah, so, you know, one of one of the first customers that really turn us on to this. That scale was a large telco provider, and they were interesting they run, you know, hundreds of here wanna raise from from competitors and you know, they do a three year cycle. But as they really like, looked at the cost of that three or cycle. They realized that it was eighteen months of usable life in those three years because it took him nine months to get the dirt on the array. And then when they knew the end was coming, it took him nine months to get the data off the array. And so parade it was cost him a million dollars just in data migration costs alone. Then you've wasted half of your life of the array, and so add that up over hundreds of raising your environment. You can quickly get the math. >> It's just it's a total cost of ownership, gets out of control, right? And >> so as we brought in Evergreen, there's just an immediate roo. I mean, it was accost equation. It was, you know, on parity with flash disk anyway. But if you look at all those operational savings, itjust is completed. And so I think what we started with Evergreen, we realised it was much more of a subscription model where people subscribe to a service with us. We updated. Refresh the hardware over time and it just keeps getting better over time. Sounds >> a lot like the cloud, right? And so we really your strategies bring common set of tools in there and read them again. That kind of service that been Kia. >> Yeah, I think you know another thing that we did from Day one was like, We're never gonna build a piece of on prime management software. So are on print. Our management experience from Day one was pure one, which is our SAS base management platform. You know, it started out as a call home application, but now is a very full featured south space management experience. And that's also served us well as you go to the cloud, because when you want to manage on permanent cloud together, we're about to do it from then the cloud itself >> tell about the application environment you mentioned earlier hybrid on multi class here. Ah, a lot of pressure and I t to get top line revenue, not just cost reduction was a good benefits you mentioned certainly gets their attention. But changing the organization's value proposition to their customers is about the experience either app driven or some other tech. This is now an imperative. It's happening very fast. Modernisation Renaissance. People call it all these things. How you guys helping that piece of the >> puzzle? Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, for most customers, as they start toe really getting their mindset, that technology is there. Differentiation speed into Julia there, developers becomes key. And so you know, modern CEO is much less about being a cost cutting CEO today, and much more about that empower in Seo and how you can actually build the tools and bring them there for the ordination. Run faster. And a lot of that is about unlocking consumption. And so it's been it's been fun to see some of the lessons of the cloud in terms of instant consumption, agility growth actually come to the mindset of how people think about on Primus. Well, and so a lot of what we've done is tried Teo armed people on prom with those same capabilities so that they can easily deliver storage of service to their customers so folks can consume the FBI without having to call somebody to ask for storage. So things could take seconds, not weeks of procurement, right? And then now, as we bridge those models between on permanent cloud, it becomes a single spot where you can basically have that same experience to request storage wherever it may be. In the organization, >> the infrastructures code is really just, you know, pushing code not from local host or the machine, but to cloud or on prim and just kind of trickle all the way through. This is one of the focuses we're hearing in cloud native conversations, as you know, words like containers We talked briefly about you mentioned in the activities. Hi, Cooper Netease is really hot right now. Service meshes Micro services state ful Data's stateless data. These air like really hyped up areas, but a lot of traction force people take a look at it. How do you guys speak to the customers when they say, hey, kicks? We love all the pure stuff. We're on our third enter federation or anything about being a customer. I got this looming, you know, trend. I gotto understand, and either operationalize or not around. Cooper Netease service mesh these kinds of club native tools. How do you guys talk to that customer. What's the pitch? That's the value proposition. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, your your new Kupres environment is the last place you should consider a legacy Storage, You know, all all joking aside, we've We've been really, I think possibly impressed around how fast the adoption it started around containers in general. And Cooper, that is, You know, it started out as a developer thing. And, you know, we first saw it in our environment. When we started to build our second product up your flash blade four, five years ago, the engineering team started with honors from Day one. It was like, That's interesting. And so we started to >> see their useful. We have containers and communities worker straight, pretty nights. And >> so, you know, we just started to see that grow way also started to see it more within analytics and a I, you know, as we got into a I would area and are broader push around going after Big Gate and analytics. Those tool chains in particular, were very well set up to take advantage of containers because they're much more modern. That's much more about, you know, fluidly creating this data pipeline. And so it started in these key use cases. But I think you know, it's at a point right now where every enterprises considering it, there's certainly an opportunity in the development environment. And, you know, despite all of that, the folks who tend to use these containers, they don't think about storage. You know that if they go to the cloud and they start to build applications, they're not thinking many layers down in the organization. What the story is that supports me looks like. And so if you look at a storage team's job or never structure seems job is to provide the same experience to your container centric consumers, right? They should just be able Teo, orchestrate and build, and then stories should just happen underneath. >> I told Agree that I think that success milestone. If you could have that conversation that he had, you know you're winning what they do care about. We're hearing more of what you mentioned earlier about data pipeline data they care about because applications will be needing data. But it's a retail app or whatever. I might need to have access to multiple data, not some siloed or you know, data warehouse that might have little, you know. Hi, Leighton. See, they need data in the AP at the right moment. This has been a key discussion. Real time. I mean, this is the date. It's It's been a hard problem. Yeah. How do you guys look at that solution opportunity for your customers? I >> think one of the insights we had was that fundamentally folks needed infrastructure that cannot just run one tool or another tool, but a whole bunch of them. And, you know, you look at people building a data pipeline there, stitching together six, eight, ten tools that exist today and another twenty that don't exist tomorrow. And that flexibility is key, right? A lot of the original thought in that space was going to pick the right storage for this piece of the write stories for that piece. But as we introduced our flash blade product, we really position it as a data hub for these modern applications. And each of them requires something a little different. But the flexibility and scale of flash played was able to provide everything those applications needed. We're now seeing another opportunity in that space with Daz and the traditional architecture. You know, as we came out with envy me over fabrics within our flash ray product line. We see this is a way to really take Web scale architecture on Prem. You know, you look Quinn's within Google and Amazon and whatnot, right? They're not using hyper converge there, not using Daz disc inside of the same chassis that happens. We're on applications. They have dedicated in frustration for storage. That's simply design for dedicated servers. And they're connected with fast Internet, you know, networking on demand. And so we're basically trying to bring that same architecture to the on prime environment with nd me over fabric because they need me over fabric can make local disc feel like you know as fun. >> But this is the shift that's really going on here. This is a complete re architecture of computing and storage. Resource is >> absolutely, you know, and I think the thing that's changing it is that need for consolidation. In the early days, I might have said, Okay, I'm gonna deploy. I don't know, two hundred nodes of the Duke and all just design a server for her dupe with the right amount of discontent and put him over in those racks, and that will be like this. Then I'LL design something else for something else. Right now, people are looking for defining Iraq. They can print out, over and over and over and over again, and that rack needs to be flexible enough to deliver the right amount of storage to every application on demand over and >> over. You know, one trend I want get your reaction to a surveillance because this kind of points that value proposition functions have been very popular. It's still early days on what functions are, but is a tell sign a little bit on where this is going to your point around thinking, rethinking on Prem not in the radical wholesale business model change, but just more of operating change. I was deployed and how it works with the cloud because those two things, if working together, make server Lis very interesting. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just a further form of abstraction, ultimately from the underlying hardware. And so you know, if you think about functions on demand or that kind of thing, that's absolute, something that just needs a big shared pool of storage and not to have any persistent findings to anything you know, Bill, to get to the storage needs, do its task, right? What it needs to and get out of the way. Right? >> Well, VP of strategy. A big roll. You guys did a good job. So congratulations being the number six employees of pure. How's the journey been? You guys have gone public, Still growing. Been around for it on those ten years. You're not really small little couple anymore. So you're getting into bigger accounts growing. How's that journey been for you? >> It's so it's been an amazing right. That's why I'm still here, coming in every day, excited to come to work. I think they think that we're the proudest of is it still feels like a small company. It still feels with, like we have a much aggression and much excitement to go out for the market everyday, as we always have the oranges very, very strong. But on the flip side, it's now fun that we get to solve customer problems at a scale that we probably could have even imagined in the early days. And I would also say right now it really feels like there's this next chapter opening up. You know, the first chapter was delivering the all flashes, and we're not even done with that yet. But as we bring our software to the cloud and really poured it natively be optimized for each of the clouds. It kind of opens up. Our engineers tto be creative in different ways. >> Generational shift happening. Seeing it, you know again. Application, modernization, hybrid multi clouded. Just some key pillars. But there's so much more opportunity to go. I want your thoughts. You've had the luxury of being working under two CEOs that have been very senior veterans Scott Dietzen and Charlie. What's it like working with both of them? And what's it like with Charlie? Now it's What's the big mandate? What what's the Hill you guys are trying to climb? Share some of the vision around Charlene's? Well, >> I'd say the thing that binds both Scott and truly together in DNA is that they're fundamentally both innovators. And, you know, if you look at pure, we're never going to be the low cost leader. We're not going to be. The company tells you everything, so we have to be the company that's most innovative in the spaces we playing. And so you know, that's job number one. It pure after reliability. So let's say that you remember, too. But that's key. And I think both of both of our CEOs have shared that common DNA, which is their fundamentally product innovators. And I think that's the fun thing about working for Charlie is he's really thoughtful about how you run a company of very large scale. How you how you manage the custom relationship to never sacrifice that experience because that's been great for pure but ultimately how you also, unlike people to run faster and a big organization, >> check every John Chambers, who Charlie worked with Cisco. With the back on the day, he said, One of the key things about a CEO is picking the right wave the right time. What is that way for pure. What do you guys riding that takes advantage of? The work still got to do in the data center on the story side. What's the big wave? >> So, you know, look, the first way was flash. That was a great way to be on and before its not over. But we really see a and an enormous opportunity where cloud infrastructure mentality comes on. And, you know, we think that's going to finally be the thing that gets people out of the mindset of doing things the old way. You know, you fundamentally could take the lessons we learned over here and apply it to the other side of my hybrid cloud. Every talks about hybrid cloud and all the thought processes what happens over the cloud half of the hybrid. Well, Ian from half of the hybrid is just as important. And getting that to be truly Cloudera is a key focus of >> Arya. And then again, micro Services only helped accelerate. And you want modern story, your point to make that work absolutely kicks. Thanks for spending time in sparing the insides. I really appreciate it. It's the Cube conversation here of Pure stores. Headquarters were in the arcade room. Get the insights and share in the data with you. I'm job for your Thanks for watching this cube conversation