>> Thank you, sir. All right, you ready to roll? >> Ready. >> All right, we'll go ahead and go in five, four, three, two. >> Okay, let's summarize the convergence of file and object. First, I want to thank our guests, Matt Burr, Scott Sinclair, Garrett Belsner, and CB Bonne. I'm your host, Dave Vellante, and please allow me to briefly share some of the key takeaways from today's program. So first, as Scott Sinclair of ESG stated surprise, surprise, data's growing. And Matt Burr, he helped us understand the growth of unstructured data. I mean, estimates indicate that the vast majority of data will be considered unstructured by mid decade, 80% or so. And obviously, unstructured data is growing very, very rapidly. Now, of course, your definition of unstructured data, now that may vary across a wide spectrum. I mean, there's video, there's audio, there's documents, there's spreadsheets, there's chat. I mean, these are generally considered unstructured data but of course they all have some type of structure to them. You know, perhaps it's not as strict as a relational database, but there's certainly metadata and certain structure to these types of use cases that I just mentioned. Now, the key to what Pure is promoting is this idea of unified fast file and object, U-F-F-O. Look, object is great, it's inexpensive, it's simple, but historically, it's been less performant, so good for archiving, or cheap and deep types of examples. Organizations often use file for higher performance workloads and let's face it, most of the world's data lives in file formats. What Pure is doing is bringing together file and object by, for example, supporting multiple protocols, ie, NFS, SMB, and S3. S3, of course, has really given a new life to object over the past decade. Now, the key here is to essentially enable customers to have the best of both worlds, not having to trade off performance for object simplicity. And a key discussion point that we've had in the program has been the impact of Flash on the long, slow, death of spinning disk. Look, hard disk drives, they had a great run, but HDD volumes, they peaked in 2010, and Flash, as you well know, has seen tremendous volume growth thanks to the consumption of Flash in mobile devices and then of course, its application into the enterprise. And as volume is just going to keep growing and growing, and growing. the price declines of Flash are coming down faster than those of HDD. So it's, the writing's on the wall. It's just a matter of time. So Flash is riding down that cost curve very, very aggressively and HDD has essentially become a managed decline business. Now, by bringing Flash to object as part of the FlashBlade portfolio and allowing for multiple protocols, Pure hopes to eliminate the dissonance between file and object and simplify the choice. In other words, let the workload decide. If you have data in a file format, no problem. Pure can still bring the benefits of simplicity of object at scale to the table. So again, let the workload inform what the right strategy is not the technical infrastructure. Now Pure, of course, is not alone. There are others supporting this multi-protocol strategy. And so we asked Matt Burr why Pure, what's so special about you? And not surprisingly, in addition to the product innovation, he went right to Pure's business model advantages. I mean, for example, with its Evergreen support model which was very disruptive in the marketplace. You know, frankly, Pure's entire business disrupted the traditional disk array model which was, fundamentally, it was flawed. Pure forced the industry to respond. And when it achieved escape velocity and Pure went public, the entire industry had to react. And a big part of the Pure value prop in addition to this business model innovation that we just discussed is simplicity. Pure's keep it simple approach coincided perfectly with the ascendancy of cloud where technology organizations needed cloud-like simplicity for certain workloads that were never going to move into the cloud. They were going to stay on-prem. Now I'm going to come back to this but allow me to bring in another concept that Garrett and CB really highlighted, and that is the complexity of the data pipeline. And what do I mean, what do I mean by that, and why is this important? So Scott Sinclair articulated or he implied that the big challenge is organizations, they're data full, but insights are scarce; a lot of data, not as much insights, and it takes time, too much time to get to those insights. So we heard from our guests that the complexity of the data pipeline was a barrier to getting to faster insights. Now, CB Bonne shared how he streamlined his data architecture using Vertica's Eon Mode which allowed him to scale, compute, independently of storage, so that brought critical flexibility and improved economics at scale. And FlashBlade, of course, was the backend storage for his data warehouse efforts. Now, the reason I think this is so important is that organizations are struggling to get insights from data and the complexity associated with the data pipeline and data lifecycles, let's face it, it's overwhelming organizations. And there, the answer to this problem is a much longer and different discussion than unifying object and file. That's, you know, I could spend all day talking about that, but let's focus narrowly on the part of the issue that is related to file and object. So the situation here is the technology has not been serving the business the way it should. Rather, the formula is twisted in the world of data and big data, and data architectures. The data team is mired in complex technical issues that impact the time to insights. Now, part of the answer is to abstract the underlying infrastructure complexity and create a layer with which the business can interact that accelerates instead of impedes innovation. And unifying file and object is a simple example of this where the business team is not blocked by infrastructure nuance, like does this data reside in the file or object format? Can I get to it quickly and inexpensively in a logical way or is the infrastructure in a stovepipe and blocking me? So if you think about the prevailing sentiment of how the cloud is evolving to incorporate on premises, workloads that are hybrid, and configurations that are working across clouds, and now out to the edge, this idea of an abstraction layer that essentially hides the underlying infrastructure is a trend we're going to see evolve this decade. Now, is UFFO the be-all end-all answer to solving all of our data pipeline challenges? No, no, of course not. But by bringing the simplicity and economics of object together with the ubiquity and performance of file, UFFO makes it a lot easier. It simplifies a life organizations that are evolving into digital businesses, which by the way, is every business. So, we see this as an evolutionary trend that further simplifies the underlying technology infrastructure and does a better job supporting the data flows for organizations so they didn't have to spend so much time worrying about the technology details that add little value to the business. Okay, so thanks for watching the convergence of file and object and thanks to Pure Storage for making this program possible. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So, very interesting at pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple, is also really sustainable and the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you see despite so many people saying sustainability huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that, that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that it, of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those CO was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a tip the, to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. And wanna dig in a little bit to peers, ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, I, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as peer storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time. >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right in, in your entire IT port portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability, your cost, et cetera. And really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and it left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had, demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the, the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable it. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> We're back talking about the path to sustainable IT and now we're going to get the perspective from Mattia Ballerio who is with Elmec Informatica, an IT services firm in the beautiful Lombardi region, of Italy, north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >> All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elmec Informatica. What's your focus? Talk about your unique value add to customers. >> Yeah! So basically Elmec Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy. And is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay, so the, the main focus area of Elmec is, rich digital transformation, and innovation to our clients with the focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services, okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and innovation through technology and sustainability. >> Yeah, obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries, particularly acute right now in, in Europe, with the, you know, the energy challenges. You've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term, you know, speak to, and, and what can others learn from it? >> Yeah, at Elmec, our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values. And also in a customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care, relationship with the local supplier, and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators, to monitor and setting medium to long term goals. >> Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? 'Cause this was, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today, and, and is it a competitive advantage for you? >> Yeah, yeah. For, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for Elmec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And, regarding our business proposition, Elmec's attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach, as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from, back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to Elmec sustainability are increasingly frequent, and in depth. And which is why we monitor our performance, and invest in certification, such as, EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay? >> Got it! So in a previous life, I actually did some work with, with power companies, and there were two big factors in IT, that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage, and that was all we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disk and it was a big impact. So, you want to talk about, your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array, and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about your experience there? Why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >> Yeah! It was basically, an easy, an easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay, because you said before that, in Elmec, we manage a lot of data, okay. And in the past we, we, we see, we see that, the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And, when, when Pure came to us and share our, their products, their vision, to the data management journey for Elmec Informatica, it was very easy to choose Pure, why? With values and the numbers, we, we create a business case and, we said, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay? And so of course you have to manage a gradual deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology, and monitor, monitoring also the power consumption, and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems, and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that, we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing Pure technology storage. You mentioned the evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, a game challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, it allows us to improve the facility, of the facilities of using technology from our technical side, okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure Storage Technologies, okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say, it allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >> So, you talked about how you've seen, 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you on the spot. Because I, I, I was on Pure's website, and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor. I'm presuming that competitor was not, you know 2010 spinning disk system. But, but, so I'm curious, as to the results that you're seeing with Pure, in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and Ajay earlier in the program. Do you think, again I'm going to put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture, and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms, that you've seen? >> Yeah, of course. Is more competitor, more competitive. Because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay, so the customer is always at the center of a proposition of service provider. And the trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that Pure as inside, by design in the technology is, is for us very, very important and very, very strategic. Because, because, with like a glass, we can ourself transfer, try to transfer the values of Pure, Pure technologies to our service provider client. >> Okay Mattia, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term. It looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates, that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for Elmec, in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have for sustainability leaders that want to make a meaningful impact on the environment but also on the bottom line? >> Okay. So, sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet, and capable of expressing our inclination, and the particularities. Elmec sustainability goals in the near future, I can say that are will be basically free. One define sustainability plan, okay. It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the, its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint, okay. And list, button list, produce a certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report, with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay, so I can say that, this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay? >> Yeah, so I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You got to monitor and measure. You can't improve what you can't measure. So you going to set a baseline, you're going to report on that. You're going to analyze the data and you're going to make continuous improvement. >> Yep. >> Mattia, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >> Yep. Thank you for having me on board. Thank you very much. >> It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm going to be back to wrap up the program, and share some resources , that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hello, fellow hardware nerds and welcome back to Dallas Texas where we're reporting live from Supercomputing 2022. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with the John Furrier on my left. >> Looking good today. >> Thank you, John, so are you. It's been a great show so far. >> We've had more hosts, more guests coming than ever before. >> I know. >> Amazing, super- >> We've got a whole thing going on. >> It's been a super computing performance. >> It, wow. And, we'll see how many times we can say super on this segment. Speaking of super things, I am in a very unique position right now. I am a flanked on both sides by people who have been doing content on theCUBE for 12 years. Yes, you heard me right, our next guest was on theCUBE 12 years ago, the third event, was that right, John? >> Man: First ever VM World. >> Yeah, the first ever VM World, third event theCUBE ever did. We are about to have a lot of fun. Please join me in welcoming Justin Emerson of Pure Storage. Justin, welcome back. >> It's a pleasure to be here. It's been too long, you never call, you don't write. (Savannah laughs) >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, likewise. >> How fun is this? Has the set evolved? Is everything looking good? >> I mean, I can barely remember what happened last week, so. (everyone laughs) >> Well, I remember lot's changed that VM world. You know, Paul Moritz was the CEO if you remember at that time. His actual vision actually happened but not the way, for VMware, but the industry, the cloud, he called the software mainframe. We were kind of riffing- >> It was quite the decade. >> Unbelievable where we are now, how we got here, but not where we're going to be. And you're with Pure Storage now which we've been, as you know, covering as well. Where's the connection into the supercomputing? Obviously storage performance, big part of this show. >> Right, right. >> What's the take? >> Well, I think, first of all it's great to be back at events in person. We were talking before we went on, and it's been so great to be back at live events now. It's been such a drought over the last several years, but yeah, yeah. So I'm very glad that we're doing in person events again. For Pure, this is an incredibly important show. You know, the product that I work with, with FlashBlade is you know, one of our key areas is specifically in this high performance computing, AI machine learning kind of space. And so we're really glad to be here. We've met a lot of customers, met a lot of other folks, had a lot of really great conversations. So it's been a really great show for me. And also just seeing all the really amazing stuff that's around here, I mean, if you want to find, you know, see what all the most cutting edge data center stuff that's going to be coming down the pipe, this is the place to do it. >> So one of the big themes of the show for us and probably, well, big theme of your life, is balancing power efficiency. You have a product in this category, Direct Flash. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> Yeah, so Pure as a storage company, right, what do we do differently from everybody else? And if I had to pick one thing, right, I would talk about, it's, you know, as the name implies, we're an all, we're purely flash, we're an all flash company. We've always been, don't plan to be anything else. And part of that innovation with Direct Flash is the idea of rather than treating a solid state disc as like a hard drive, right? Treat it as it actually is, treat it like who it really is and that's a very different kind of thing. And so Direct Flash is all about bringing native Flash interfaces to our product portfolio. And what's really exciting for me as a FlashBlade person, is now that's also part of our FlashBlade S portfolio, which just launched in June. And so the benefits of that are our myriad. But, you know, talking about efficiency, the biggest difference is that, you know, we can use like 90% less DRAM in our drives, which you know, everything uses, everything that you put in a drive uses power, it adds cost and all those things and so that really gives us an efficiency edge over everybody else and at a show like this, where, I mean, you walk the aisles and there's there's people doing liquid cooling and so much immersion stuff, and the reason they're doing that is because power is just increasing everywhere, right? So if you can figure out how do we use less power in some areas means you can shift that budget to other places. So if you can talk to a customer and say, well, if I could shrink your power budget for storage by two thirds or even, save you two-thirds of power, how many more accelerators, how many more CPUs, how much more work could you actually get done? So really exciting. >> I mean, less power consumption, more power and compute. >> Right. >> Kind of power center. So talk about the AI implications, where the use cases are. What are you seeing here? A lot of simulations, a lot of students, again, dorm room to the boardroom we've been saying here on theCUBE this is a great broad area, where's the action in the ML and the AI for you guys? >> So I think, not necessarily storage related but I think that right now there's this enormous explosion of custom silicon around AI machine learning which I as a, you said welcome hardware nerds at the beginning and I was like, ah, my people. >> We're all here, we're all here in Dallas. >> So wonderful. You know, as a hardware nerd we're talking about conferences, right? Who has ever attended hot chips and there's so much really amazing engineering work going on in the silicon space. It's probably the most exciting time for, CPU and accelerator, just innovation in, since the days before X 86 was the defacto standard, right? And you could go out and buy a different workstation with 16 different ISAs. That's really the most exciting thing, I walked past so many different places where you know, our booth is right next to Havana Labs with their gout accelerator, and they're doing this cute thing with one of the AI image generators in their booth, which is really cute. >> Woman: We're going to have to go check that out. >> Yeah, but that to me is like one of the more exciting things around like innovation at a, especially at a show like this where it's all about how do we move forward, the state of the art. >> What's different now than just a few years ago in terms of what's opening up the creativity for people to look at things that they could do with some of the scale that's different now. >> Yeah well, I mean, every time the state of the art moves forward what it means is, is that the entry level gets better, right? So if the high end is going faster, that means that the mid-range is going faster, and that means the entry level is going faster. So every time it pushes the boundary forward, it's a rising tide that floats all boats. And so now, the kind of stuff that's possible to do, if you're a student in a dorm room or if you're an enterprise, the world, the possible just keeps expanding dramatically and expanding almost, you know, geometrically like the amount of data that we are, that we have, as a storage guy, I was coming back to data but the amount of data that we have and the amount of of compute that we have, and it's not just about the raw compute, but also the advances in all sorts of other things in terms of algorithms and transfer learning and all these other things. There's so much amazing work going on in this area and it's just kind of this Kay Green explosion of innovation in the area. >> I love that you touched on the user experience for the community, no matter the level that you're at. >> Yeah. >> And I, it's been something that's come up a lot here. Everyone wants to do more faster, always, but it's not just that, it's about making the experience and the point of entry into this industry more approachable and digestible for folks who may not be familiar, I mean we have every end of the ecosystem here, on the show floor, where does Pure Storage sit in the whole game? >> Right, so as a storage company, right? What AI is all about deriving insights from data, right? And so everyone remembers that magazine cover data's the new oil, right? And it's kind of like, okay, so what do you do with it? Well, how do you derive value from all of that data? And AI machine learning and all of this supercomputing stuff is about how do we take all this data? How do we innovate with it? And so if you want data to innovate with, you need storage. And so, you know, our philosophy is that how do we make the best storage platforms that we can using the best technology for our customers that enable them to do really amazing things with AI machine learning and we've got different products, but, you know at the show here, what we're specifically showing off is our new flashlight S product, which, you know, I know we've had Pure folks on theCUBE before talking about FlashBlade, but for viewers out there, FlashBlade is our our scale out unstructured data platform and AI and machine learning and supercomputing is all about unstructured data. It's about sensor data, it's about imaging, it's about, you know, photogrammetry, all this other kinds of amazing stuff. But, you got to land all that somewhere. You got to process that all somewhere. And so really high performance, high throughput, highly scalable storage solutions are really essential. It's an enabler for all of the amazing other kinds of engineering work that goes on at a place like Supercomputing. >> It's interesting you mentioned data's oil. Remember in 2010, that year, our first year of theCUBE, Hadoop World, Hadoop just started to come on the scene, which became, you know kind of went away and, but now you got, Spark and Databricks and Snowflake- >> Justin: And it didn't go away, it just changed, right? >> It just got refactored and right size, I think for what the people wanted it to be easy to use but there's more data coming. How is data driving innovation as you bring, as people see clearly the more data's coming? How is data driving innovation as you guys look at your products, your roadmap and your customer base? How is data driving innovation for your customers? >> Well, I think every customer who has been, you know collecting all of this data, right? Is trying to figure out, now what do I do with it? And a lot of times people collect data and then it will end up on, you know, lower slower tiers and then suddenly they want to do something with it. And it's like, well now what do I do, right? And so there's all these people that are reevaluating you know, we, when we developed FlashBlade we sort of made this bet that unstructured data was going to become the new tier one data. It used to be that we thought unstructured data, it was emails and home directories and all that stuff the kind of stuff that you didn't really need a really good DR plan on. It's like, ah, we could, now of course, as soon as email goes down, you realize how important email is. But, the perspectives that people had on- >> Yeah, exactly. (all laughing) >> The perspectives that people had on unstructured data and it's value to the business was very different and so now- >> Good bet, by the way. >> Yeah, thank you. So now unstructured data is considered, you know, where companies are going to derive their value from. So it's whether they use the data that they have to build better products whether it's they use the data they have to develop you know, improvements in processes. All those kinds of things are data driven. And so all of the new big advancements in industry and in business are all about how do I derive insights from data? And so machine learning and AI has something to do with that, but also, you know, it all comes back to having data that's available. And so, we're working very hard on building platforms that customers can use to enable all of this really- >> Yeah, it's interesting, Savannah, you know, the top three areas we're covering for reinventing all the hyperscale events is data. How does it drive innovation and then specialized solutions to make customers lives easier? >> Yeah. >> It's become a big category. How do you compose stuff and then obviously compute, more and more compute and services to make the performance goes. So those seem to be the three hot areas. So, okay, data's the new oil refineries. You've got good solutions. What specialized solutions do you see coming out because once people have all this data, they might have either large scale, maybe some edge use cases. Do you see specialized solutions emerging? I mean, obviously it's got DPU emerging which is great, but like, do you see anything else coming out at that people are- >> Like from a hardware standpoint. >> Or from a customer standpoint, making the customer's lives easier? So, I got a lot of data flowing in. >> Yeah. >> It's never stopping, it keeps powering in. >> Yeah. >> Are there things coming out that makes their life easier? Have you seen anything coming out? >> Yeah, I think where we are as an industry right now with all of this new technology is, we're really in this phase of the standards aren't quite there yet. Everybody is sort of like figuring out what works and what doesn't. You know, there was this big revolution in sort of software development, right? Where moving towards agile development and all that kind of stuff, right? The way people build software change fundamentally this is kind of like another wave like that. I like to tell people that AI and machine learning is just a different way of writing software. What is the output of a training scenario, right? It's a model and a model is just code. And so I think that as all of these different, parts of the business figure out how do we leverage these technologies, what it is, is it's a different way of writing software and it's not necessarily going to replace traditional software development, but it's going to augment it, it's going to let you do other interesting things and so, where are things going? I think we're going to continue to start coalescing around what are the right ways to do things. Right now we talk about, you know, ML Ops and how development and the frameworks and all of this innovation. There's so much innovation, which means that the industry is moving so quickly that it's hard to settle on things like standards and, or at least best practices you know, at the very least. And that the best practices are changing every three months. Are they really best practices right? So I think, right, I think that as we progress and coalesce around kind of what are the right ways to do things that's really going to make customers' lives easier. Because, you know, today, if you're a software developer you know, we build a lot of software at Pure Storage right? And if you have people and developers who are familiar with how the process, how the factory functions, then their skills become portable and it becomes easier to onboard people and AI is still nothing like that right now. It's just so, so fast moving and it's so- >> Wild West kind of. >> It's not standardized. It's not industrialized, right? And so the next big frontier in all of this amazing stuff is how do we industrialize this and really make it easy to implement for organizations? >> Oil refineries, industrial Revolution. I mean, it's on that same trajectory. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Or industrial revolution. (John laughs) >> Well, we've talked a lot about the chaos and sort of we are very much at this early stage stepping way back and this can be your personal not Pure Storage opinion if you want. >> Okay. >> What in HPC or AIML I guess it all falls under the same umbrella, has you most excited? >> Ooh. >> So I feel like you're someone who sees a lot of different things. You've got a lot of customers, you're out talking to people. >> I think that there is a lot of advancement in the area of natural language processing and I think that, you know, we're starting to take things just like natural language processing and then turning them into vision processing and all these other, you know, I think the, the most exciting thing for me about AI is that there are a lot of people who are, you are looking to use these kinds of technologies to make technology more inclusive. And so- >> I love it. >> You know the ability for us to do things like automate captioning or the ability to automate descriptive, audio descriptions of video streams or things like that. I think that those are really,, I think they're really great in terms of bringing the benefits of technology to more people in an automated way because the challenge has always been bandwidth of how much a human can do. And because they were so difficult to automate and what AI's really allowing us to do is build systems whether that's text to speech or whether that's translation, or whether that's captioning or all these other things. I think the way that AI interfaces with humans is really the most interesting part. And I think the benefits that it can bring there because there's a lot of talk about all of the things that it does that people don't like or that they, that people are concerned about. But I think it's important to think about all the really great things that maybe don't necessarily personally impact you, but to the person who's not cited or to the person who you know is hearing impaired. You know, that's an enormously valuable thing. And the fact that those are becoming easier to do they're becoming better, the quality is getting better. I think those are really important for everybody. >> I love that you brought that up. I think it's a really important note to close on and you know, there's always the kind of terminator, dark side that we obsess over but that's actually not the truth. I mean, when we think about even just captioning it's a tool we use on theCUBE. It's, you know, we see it on our Instagram stories and everything else that opens the door for so many more people to be able to learn. >> Right? >> And the more we all learn, like you said the water level rises together and everything is magical. Justin, it has been a pleasure to have you on board. Last question, any more bourbon tasting today? >> Not that I'm aware of, but if you want to come by I'm sure we can find something somewhere. (all laughing) >> That's the spirit, that is the spirit of an innovator right there. Justin, thank you so much for joining us from Pure Storage. John Furrier, always a pleasure to interview with you. >> I'm glad I can contribute. >> Hey, hey, that's the understatement of the century. >> It's good to be back. >> Yeah. >> Hopefully I'll see you guys in, I'll see you guys in 2034. >> No. (all laughing) No, you've got the Pure Accelerate conference. We'll be there. >> That's right. >> We'll be there. >> Yeah, we have our Pure Accelerate conference next year and- >> Great. >> Yeah. >> I love that, I mean, feel free to, you know, hype that. That's awesome. >> Great company, great runs, stayed true to the mission from day one, all Flash, continue to innovate congratulations. >> Yep, thank you so much, it's pleasure being here. >> It's a fun ride, you are a joy to talk to and it's clear you're just as excited as we are about hardware, so thanks a lot Justin. >> My pleasure. >> And thank all of you for tuning in to this wonderfully nerdy hardware edition of theCUBE live from Dallas, Texas, where we're at, Supercomputing, my name's Savannah Peterson and I hope you have a wonderful night. (soft music)

>>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr. This is breaking analysis with Dave Ante. >>Have you ever been driving on the highway and traffic suddenly slows way down and then after a little while it picks up again and you're cruising along and you're thinking, Okay, hey, that was weird. But it's clear sailing now. Off we go, only to find out in a bit that the traffic is building up ahead again, forcing you to pump the brakes as the traffic pattern ebbs and flows well. Welcome to the Seesaw economy. The fed induced fire that prompted an unprecedented rally in tech is being purposefully extinguished now by that same fed. And virtually every sector of the tech industry is having to reset its expectations, including the cloud segment. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by etr. In this breaking analysis will review the implications of the earnings announcements from the big three cloud players, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who announced this week. >>And we'll update you on our quarterly IAS forecast and share the latest from ETR with a focus on cloud computing. Now, before we get into the new data, we wanna review something we shared with you on October 14th, just a couple weeks back, this is sort of a, we told you it was coming slide. It's an XY graph that shows ET R'S proprietary net score methodology on the vertical axis. That's a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity, and an overlap or presence in the dataset that's on the X axis. That's really a measure of pervasiveness. In the survey, the table, you see that table insert there that shows Wiki Bond's Q2 estimates of IAS revenue for the big four hyperscalers with their year on year growth rates. Now we told you at the time, this is data from the July TW 22 ETR survey and the ETR hadn't released its October survey results at that time. >>This was just a couple weeks ago. And while we couldn't share the specific data from the October survey, we were able to get a glimpse and we depicted the slowdown that we saw in the October data with those dotted arrows kind of down into the right, we said at the time that we were seeing and across the board slowdown even for the big three cloud vendors. Now, fast forward to this past week and we saw earnings releases from Alphabet, Microsoft, and just last night Amazon. Now you may be thinking, okay, big deal. The ETR survey data didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know. But judging from the negative reaction in the stock market to these earnings announcements, the degree of softness surprised a lot of investors. Now, at the time we didn't update our forecast, it doesn't make sense for us to do that when we're that close to earning season. >>And now that all the big three ha with all the big four with the exception of Alibaba have announced we've, we've updated. And so here's that data. This chart lays out our view of the IS and PAs worldwide revenue. Basically it's cloud infrastructure with an attempt to exclude any SaaS revenue so we can make an apples to apples comparison across all the clouds. Now the reason that actual is in quotes is because Microsoft and Google don't report IAS revenue, but they do give us clues and kind of directional commentary, which we then triangulate with other data that we have from the channel and ETR surveys and just our own intelligence. Now the second column there after the vendor name shows our previous estimates for q3, and then next to that we show our actuals. Same with the growth rates. And then we round out the chart with that lighter blue color highlights, the full year estimates for revenue and growth. >>So the key takeaways are that we shaved about $4 billion in revenue and roughly 300 basis points of growth off of our full year estimates. AWS had a strong July but exited Q3 in the mid 20% growth rate year over year. So we're using that guidance, you know, for our Q4 estimates. Azure came in below our earlier estimates, but Google actually exceeded our expectations. Now the compression in the numbers is in our view of function of the macro demand climate, we've made every attempt to adjust for constant currency. So FX should not be a factor in this data, but it's sure you know that that ma the the, the currency effects are weighing on those companies income statements. And so look, this is the fundamental dynamic of a cloud model where you can dial down consumption when you need to and dial it up when you need to. >>Now you may be thinking that many big cloud customers have a committed level of spending in order to get better discounts. And that's true. But what's happening we think is they'll reallocate that spend toward, let's say for example, lower cost storage tiers or they may take advantage of better price performance processors like Graviton for example. That is a clear trend that we're seeing and smaller companies that were perhaps paying by the drink just on demand, they're moving to reserve instance models to lower their monthly bill. So instead of taking the easy way out and just spending more companies are reallocating their reserve capacity toward lower cost. So those sort of lower cost services, so they're spending time and effort optimizing to get more for, for less whereas, or get more for the same is really how we should, should, should phrase it. Whereas during the pandemic, many companies were, you know, they perhaps were not as focused on doing that because business was booming and they had a response. >>So they just, you know, spend more dial it up. So in general, as they say, customers are are doing more with, with the same. Now let's look at the growth dynamic and spend some time on that. I think this is important. This data shows worldwide quarterly revenue growth rates back to Q1 2019 for the big four. So a couple of interesting things. The data tells us during the pandemic, you saw both AWS and Azure, but the law of large numbers and actually accelerate growth. AWS especially saw progressively increasing growth rates throughout 2021 for each quarter. Now that trend, as you can see is reversed in 2022 for aws. Now we saw Azure come down a bit, but it's still in the low forties in terms of percentage growth. While Google actually saw an uptick in growth this last quarter for GCP by our estimates as GCP is becoming an increasingly large portion of Google's overall cloud business. >>Now, unfortunately Google Cloud continues to lose north of 850 million per quarter, whereas AWS and Azure are profitable cloud businesses even though Alibaba is suffering its woes from China. And we'll see how they come in when they report in mid-November. The overall hyperscale market grew at 32% in Q3 in terms of worldwide revenue. So the slowdown isn't due to the repatriation or competition from on-prem vendors in our view, it's a macro related trend. And cloud will continue to significantly outperform other sectors despite its massive size. You know, on the repatriation point, it just still doesn't show up in the data. The A 16 Z article from Sarah Wong and Martin Martin Kasa claiming that repatriation was inevitable as a means to lower cost of good sold for SaaS companies. You know, while that was thought provoking, it hasn't shown up in the numbers. And if you read the financial statements of both AWS and its partners like Snowflake and you dig into the, to the, to the quarterly reports, you'll see little notes and comments with their ongoing negotiations to lower cloud costs for customers. >>AWS and no doubt execs at Azure and GCP understand that the lifetime value of a customer is worth much more than near term gross margin. And you can expect the cloud vendors to strike a balance between profitability, near term profitability anyway and customer attention. Now, even though Google Cloud platform saw accelerated growth, we need to put that in context for you. So GCP, by our estimate, has now crossed over the $3 billion for quarter market actually did so last quarter, but its growth rate accelerated to 42% this quarter. And so that's a good sign in our view. But let's do a quick little comparison with when AWS and Azure crossed the $3 billion mark and compare their growth rates at the time. So if you go back to to Q2 2016, as we're showing in this chart, that's around the time that AWS hit 3 billion per quarter and at the same time was growing at 58%. >>Azure by our estimates crossed that mark in Q4 2018 and at that time was growing at 67%. Again, compare that to Google's 42%. So one would expect Google's growth rate would be higher than its competitors at this point in the MO in the maturity of its cloud, which it's, you know, it's really not when you compared to to Azure. I mean they're kind of con, you know, comparable now but today, but, but you'll go back, you know, to that $3 billion mark. But more so looking at history, you'd like to see its growth rate at this point of a maturity model at least over 50%, which we don't believe it is. And one other point on this topic, you know, my business friend Matt Baker from Dell often says it's not a zero sum game, meaning there's plenty of opportunity exists to build value on top of hyperscalers. >>And I would totally agree it's not a dollar for dollar swap if you can continue to innovate. But history will show that the first company in makes the most money. Number two can do really well and number three tends to break even. Now maybe cloud is different because you have Microsoft software estate and the power behind that and that's driving its IAS business and Google ads are funding technology buildouts for, for for Google and gcp. So you know, we'll see how that plays out. But right now by this one measurement, Google is four years behind Microsoft in six years behind aws. Now to the point that cloud will continue to outpace other markets, let's, let's break this down a bit in spending terms and see why this claim holds water. This is data from ET r's latest October survey that shows the granularity of its net score or spending velocity metric. >>The lime green is new adoptions, so they're adding the platform, the forest green is spending more 6% or more. The gray bars spending is flat plus or minus, you know, 5%. The pinkish colors represent spending less down 6% or worse. And the bright red shows defections or churn of the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get what's called net score, which is that blue dot that you can see on each of the bars. So what you see in the table insert is that all three have net scores above 40%, which is a highly elevated measure. Microsoft's net scores above 60% AWS well into the fifties and GCP in the mid forties. So all good. Now what's happening with all three is more customers are keep keeping their spending flat. So a higher percentage of customers are saying, our spending is now flat than it was in previous quarters and that's what's accounting for the compression. >>But the churn of all three, even gcp, which we reported, you know, last quarter from last quarter survey was was five x. The other two is actually very low in the single digits. So that might have been an anomaly. So that's a very good sign in our view. You know, again, customers aren't repatriating in droves, it's just not a trend that we would bet on, maybe makes for a FUD or you know, good marketing head, but it's just not a big deal. And you can't help but be impressed with both Microsoft and AWS's performance in the survey. And as we mentioned before, these companies aren't going to give up customers to try and preserve a little bit of gross margin. They'll do what it takes to keep people on their platforms cuz they'll make up for it over time with added services and improved offerings. >>Now, once these companies acquire a customer, they'll be very aggressive about keeping them. So customers take note, you have negotiating leverage, so use it. Okay, let's look at another cut at the cloud market from the ETR data set. Here's the two dimensional view, again, it's back, it's one of our favorites. Net score or spending momentum plotted against presence. And the data set, that's the x axis net score on the, on the vertical axis, this is a view of et r's cloud computing sector sector. You can see we put that magic 40% dotted red line in the table showing and, and then that the table inserts shows how the data are plotted with net score against presence. I e n in the survey, notably only the big three are above the 40% line of the names that we're showing here. The oth there, there are others. >>I mean if you put Snowflake on there, it'd be higher than any of these names, but we'll dig into that name in a later breaking analysis episode. Now this is just another way of quantifying the dominance of AWS and Azure, not only relative to Google, but the other cloud platforms out there. So we've, we've taken the opportunity here to plot IBM and Oracle, which both own a public cloud. Their performance is largely a reflection of them migrating their install bases to their respective public clouds and or hybrid clouds. And you know, that's fine, they're in the game. That's a point that we've made, you know, a number of times they're able to make it through the cloud, not whole and they at least have one, but they simply don't have the business momentum of AWS and Azure, which is actually quite impressive because AWS and Azure are now as large or larger than IBM and Oracle. >>And to show this type of continued growth that that that Azure and AWS show at their size is quite remarkable and customers are starting to recognize the viability of on-prem hi, you know, hybrid clouds like HPE GreenLake and Dell's apex. You know, you may say, well that's not cloud, but if the customer thinks it is and it was reporting in the survey that it is, we're gonna continue to report this view. You know, I don't know what's happening with H P E, They had a big down tick this quarter and I, and I don't read too much into that because their end is still pretty small at 53. So big fluctuations are not uncommon with those types of smaller ends, but it's over 50. So, you know, we did notice a a a negative within a giant public and private sector, which is often a, a bellwether giant public private is big public companies and large private companies like, like a Mars for example. >>So it, you know, it looks like for HPE it could be an outlier. We saw within the Fortune 1000 HPE E'S cloud looked actually really good and it had good spending momentum in that sector. When you di dig into the industry data within ETR dataset, obviously we're not showing that here, but we'll continue to monitor that. Okay, so where's this Leave us. Well look, this is really a tactical story of currency and macro headwinds as you can see. You know, we've laid out some of the points on this slide. The action in the stock market today, which is Friday after some of the soft earnings reports is really robust. You know, we'll see how it ends up in the day. So maybe this is a sign that the worst is over, but we don't think so. The visibility from tech companies is murky right now as most are guiding down, which indicates that their conservative outlook last quarter was still too optimistic. >>But as it relates to cloud, that platform is not going anywhere anytime soon. Sure, there are potential disruptors on the horizon, especially at the edge, but we're still a long ways off from, from the possibility that a new economic model emerges from the edge to disrupt the cloud and the opportunities in the cloud remain strong. I mean, what other path is there? Really private cloud. It was kind of a bandaid until the on-prem guys could get their a as a service models rolled out, which is just now happening. The hybrid thing is real, but it's, you know, defensive for the incumbents until they can get their super cloud investments going. Super cloud implying, capturing value above the hyperscaler CapEx, you know, call it what you want multi what multi-cloud should have been, the metacloud, the Uber cloud, whatever you like. But there are opportunities to play offense and that's clearly happening in the cloud ecosystem with the likes of Snowflake, Mongo, Hashi Corp. >>Hammer Spaces is a startup in this area. Aviatrix, CrowdStrike, Zeke Scaler, Okta, many, many more. And even the projects we see coming out of enterprise players like Dell, like with Project Alpine and what Pure Storage is doing along with a number of other of the backup vendors. So Q4 should be really interesting, but the real story is the investments that that companies are making now to leverage the cloud for digital transformations will be paying off down the road. This is not 1999. We had, you know, May might have had some good ideas and admittedly at a lot of bad ones too, but you didn't have the infrastructure to service customers at a low enough cost like you do today. The cloud is that infrastructure and so far it's been transformative, but it's likely the best is yet to come. Okay, let's call this a rap. >>Many thanks to Alex Morrison who does production and manages the podcast. Also Can Schiffman is our newest edition to the Boston Studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor in chief over@siliconangle.com, who does some wonderful editing for us. Thank you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wiki bond.com at silicon angle.com. And you can email me at David dot valante@siliconangle.com or DM me at Dante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do checkout etr.ai. They got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for the Cube Insights powered by etr. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to Detroit, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are live day two of our coverage of Coan Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had great conversations. Yeah. All day yesterday. Half a day today. So far we're talking all things, Well, not all things Kubernetes so much more than that. We also have to talk about storage and data management solutions for Kubernetes projects, cuz that's obviously critical. >>Yeah, I mean the big trend here is Kubernetes going mainstream has been for a while. The adopt is crossing over, it's crossing the CADs and with that you're seeing security concerns. You're seeing things being gaps being filled. But enterprise grade is really the, the, the story. It's going enterprise, that's managed services, that's professional service, that's basically making things work at scale. This next segment hits that part and we are gonna talk about it in grade length >>With one of our alumni. Moral morale to Molly is back DP and GM of Port Work's Peer Storage. Great to have you back really? >>Yeah, absolutely. Delightful >>To be here. So I was looking on the website, number one in Kubernetes storage. Three years in a row. Yep. Awesome. What's Coworks doing here at KU Con? >>Well, I'll tell you, we, our engineering crew has been so productive and hard at work that I almost can't decide what to kind of tell you. But I thought what, what, what I thought I would do is kind of tell you that we are in forefront of two major trends in the world of Kubernetes. Right? And the, the two trends that I see are one is as a service, so is trend number one. So it's not software eating the world anymore. That's, that's old, old, old news. It's as a service unifying the world. The world wants easy, We all are, you know, subscribers to things like Netflix. We've been using Salesforce or other HR functions. Everything is as a service. And in the world of Kubernetes, it's a sign of that maturity that John was talking about as a platform that now as a service is the big trend. >>And so headline number one, if you will, is that Port Works is leading in the data management world for Kubernetes by providing, we're going all in on easy on as a service. So everything we do, we are satisfying it, right? So if you think, if you think about, if you think about this, that, that there are really, most of the people who are consuming Kubernetes are people who are building platforms for their dev users. And dev users want self service. That's one of the advantages of, of, of Kubernetes. And the more it is service size and made as a service, the more ready to consume it is. And so we are announcing at the show that we have, you know, the basic Kubernetes data management as a service, ha d r as a service. We have backup as a service and we have database as a service. So these are the three major components of data. And all of those are being made available as a service. And in fact, we're offering and announcing at the show our backup as a service freemium version where you can get free forever a terabyte of, of, you know, stuff to do for Kubernetes for forever. >>Congratulations on the announcement. Totally. In line with what the market wants. Developers want Selfer, they wanna also want simplicity by the way they'll leave if they don't like the service. Correct. So that you, you know that before we get into some more specifics, I want Yeah. Ask you on the industry and some of the point solutions you have, what, it's been two years since the acquisition with Pure Storage. Can you just give an update on how it's gone? Obviously as a service, you guys are hitting all your Marks, developers love it. Storage are big part of the game right now as well as these environments. Yeah. What's the update post acquisition two years. You had a great offering Stay right In >>Point Works. Yeah. So look, John, you're, you're, you're a veteran of the industry and have seen lots of acquisitions, right? And I've been acquired twice before myself. So, you know, there's, there's always best practices and poor practices in terms of acquisitions and I'm, you know, really delighted to say I think this, this acquisition has had some of the best practices. Let me just name a couple of them, right? One of them is just cultural fit, right? Cultural fit is great. Entrepreneurs, anybody, it's not just entrepreneurs. Everybody loves to work in a place they enjoy working with, with people that they, you know, thrive when they, when they interact with. And so the cultural fit with, with Pure is fantastic. The other one is the strategic intent that Pure had when they acquired us is still true. And so that goes a long way, you know, in terms of an investment profile, in terms of the ability to kind of leverage assets within the company. So Pure had kind of disrupted the world of storage using Flash and they wanted to disrupt higher up the stack using Kubernetes. And that's kind of been our role inside their strategy. And it's, it's still true. >>So culture, strategic intent. Yeah. Product market fit as well. You were, you weren't just an asset for customers or acquisition and then let the founders go through their next thing. You are part of their growth play. >>Absolutely. Right. The, the beauty of, of the kind of product market fit is, let's talk about the market is we have been always focused on the global two k and that is at the heart of, you know, purest 10,000 strong customer base, right? They have very strong presence in the, in the global two k. And we, we allow them to kind of go to those same folks with, with the offering. >>So satisfying everything that you do. What's for me as a business, whether I'm a financial services organization, I'm a hospital, I'm a retailer, what's in it for me >>As a customer? Yeah. So the, the what's in it for, for me is two things. It's speed and ease of use, which in a way are related. But, but, but you know, one is when something is provided as a service, it's much more consumable. It's instantly ready. It's like instant oatmeal, right? You just get it just ad hot water and it's there. Yep. So the world of of it has moved from owning large data centers, right? That used to be like 25 years ago and running those data centers better than everybody else to move to let me just consume a data center in the form of a cloud, right? So satisfying the cloud part of the data center. Now people are saying, well I expect that for software and services and I don't want it just from the public cloud, I want it from my own IT department. >>This is old news. And so the, the, the big news here is how fast Kubernetes has kind of moved everything. You know, you take a lot of these changes, Kubernetes is a poster child for things happening faster than the last wave. And in the last couple of years I would say that as a service model has really kind of thrived in the world of Kubernetes. And developers want to be able to get it fast. And the second thing is they want to be able to operate it fast. Self-service is the other benefit. Yeah. So speed and self-service are both benefits of, of >>This. Yeah. And, and the thing that's come up clearly in the cube, this is gonna be part of the headlines we'll probably end up getting a lot of highlights from telling my team to make a note of this, is that developers are gonna be be the, the business if you, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, they're not a department that serves the business, they are the business that means Exactly. They have to be more productive. So developer productivity has been the top story. Yes. Security as a serves all these things. These are, these are examples to make developers more productive. But one of the things that came up and I wanna get your reaction to is, is that when you have disruption and, and the storage vision, you know what disruption it means. Cuz there's been a whole discussion around disruptive operations. When storage goes down, you have back m dr and failover. If there's a disruption that changes the nature of invisible infrastructure, developers want invisible infrastructure. That's the future steady state. So if there's a disruption in storage >>Yeah. It >>Can't affect the productivity and the tool chains and the workflows of developers. Yep. Right? So how do you guys look at that? Cuz you're a critical component. Storage is a service is a huge thing. Yeah. Storage has to, has to work seamlessly. And let's keep the developers out of the weeds. >>John. I think what, what what you put your finger on is another huge trend in the world of Kubernetes where at Cube Con, after all, which is really where, where all the leading practitioners both come and the leading vendors are. So here's the second trend that we are leading and, and actually I think it's happening not just with us, but with other, for folks in the industry. And that is, you know, the world of DevOps. Like DevOps has been such a catchphrase for all, all of us in the industry last five years. And it's been both a combination of cultural change as well as technology change. Here's what the latest is on the, in the world of DevOps. DevOps is now crystallized. It's not some kind of mysterious art form that you read about how people are practicing. DevOps is, it's broken into two, two things now. >>There is the platform part. So DevOps is now a bunch of platforms. And the other part of DevOps is a bunch of practices. So a little bit on both these, the platforms in the world of es there's only three platforms, right? There's the orchestration platforms, the, you know, eks, the open ships of the world and so on. There are the data management platforms, pro people like Port Works. And the third is security platforms, right? You know, Palo Alto Networks, others Aqua or all in this. So these are the three platforms and there are platform engineering teams now that many of our largest customers, some of the largest banks, the largest service providers, they're all operating as a ES platform engineering team. And then now developers, to your point, developers are in the practice of being able to use these platforms to launch new services. So the, the actual IT ops, the ops are run by developers now and they can do it on these platforms. And the platform engineering team provide that as an ease of use and they're there to troubleshoot when problems happen. So the idea of DevOps as a ops practice and a platform is the newest thing. E and, and ports and pure storage leading in the world of data management platforms >>There. Talk about a customer example that you think really articulates the value that Port Works and Pure Storage delivers from a data management perspective. >>Yeah, so there's so many examples. One of the, one of the longest running examples we have is a very, very large service provider that, you know, you all know and probably use, and they have been using us in the cable kinda set box or cable box business. They get streams of data from, from cable boxes all over the world. They collected all in a centralized large kind of thing and run elastic search and analytics on it. Now what they have done is they couldn't keep up with this at the scale and the depth, right? The speed of, of activity and the distributed nature of the activity. The only way to solve this was to use something like Kubernetes manage with Spark coming, bringing all the data in to deep, deep, deep silos of storage, which are all running not even on a sand, but on kind of, you know, very deep terabytes and terabytes of, of storage. So all of this is orchestrated with the Heco coworks and there's a platform engineering team. We are building that platform for them with some of these other components that allows them to kind of do analytics and, and make some changes in real time. Huge kind of setup for, for >>That. Yeah. Well, you guys have the right architecture. I love the vision. I love what you guys are doing. I think this is right in line with Pures. They've always been disruptors. I remember when we first interviewed the CEO when they started Yep. They, they stayed on path. They didn't waiver. EMC was the big player. They ended up taking their lunch and dinner as well and they beat 'em in the marketplace. But now you got this traction here. So I have to ask you, how's the business, what's the results look like? Either GM cloud native business unit of a storage company that's transformed and transforming? >>Yeah, you know, it's interesting, we just hit the two year anniversary, right John? And so what we did was just kind of like step back and hey, you know, we're running so hard, you just take a step back. And we've tripled the business in the two years since the acquisition, the two years before and, and we were growing through proven. So, you know, that that's quite a fe and we've tripled the number of people, the amount of engineering investments we have, the number of go to market investments have, have been, have been awesome. So business is going really well though, I will say. But I think, you know, we have, we can't be, we we're watching the market closely. You know, as a former ceo, I, you have to kind of learn to read the tea leaves when you invest. And I think, you know, what I would say is we're proceeding with caution in the next two quarters. I view business transformation as not a cancelable activity. So that's the, that's the good news, right? Our customers are large, it's, >>It's >>Right. All they're gonna do is say, Hey, they're gonna put their hand, their hand was always going right on the dial. Now they're kind of putting their hand on the dial going, hey, where, what is happening? But my, my own sense of this is that people will continue to invest through it. The question is at what level? And I also think that this is a six month kind of watch, the watch where, where we put the dial. So Q4 and q1 I think are kind of, you know, we have our, our watch kind of watch the market sign. But I have the highest confidence. What >>Does your gut tell you? You're an entrepreneur, >>Which my, my gut says that we'll go through a little bit of a cautious investment period in the next six months. And after that I think we're gonna be back in, back full, full in the crazy growth that we've always been. We're gonna grow by the way, in the next think >>It's core style. I think I'm, I'm more bullish. I think there's gonna be some, you know, weeding out of some overinvestment pre C or pre bubble. But I think tech's gonna continue to grow. I don't see >>It's stopping. Yeah. And, and the investment is gonna be on these core platforms. See, back to the platform story, it's gonna be in these core platforms and on unifying everything, let's consume it better rather than let's go kind of experiment with a whole bunch of things all over the map, right? So you'll see less experimentation and more kind of, let's harvest some of the investments we've made in the last couple >>Of years and actually be able to, to enable companies in any industry to truly be data companies. Because absolutely. We talked about as a service, we all have these expectations that any service we want, we can get it. Yes. There's no delay because patients has gone Yeah. From the pandemic. >>So it is kind of, you know, tightening up the screws on what they've built. They, you know, adding some polish to it, adding some more capability, like I said, a a a, a combination of harvesting and new investing. It's a combination I think is what we're gonna see. >>Yeah. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to? You talked about some of the, the growth things in the investment, but as we round out Q4 and head into a new year, what are you excited about? >>Yeah, so you know, I mentioned our, as a service kind of platform, the global two K for us has been a set of customers who we co-create stuff with. And so one of the other set of things that we are very excited about and announcing is because we're deployed at scale, we're, we're, we have upgraded our backend. So we have now the ability to go to million IOPS and more and, and for, for the right backends. And so Kubernetes is a add-on which will not slow down your, your core base infrastructure. Second thing that that we, we have is added a bunch of capability in the disaster recovery business continuity front, you know, we always had like metro kind of distance dr. We had long distance dr. We've added a near sync Dr. So now we can provide disaster recovery and business continuity for metro distances across continents and across the planet. Right? That's kind of a major change that we've done. The third thing is we've added the capability for file block and Object. So now by adding object, we're really a complete solution. So it is really that maturity of the business Yeah. That you start seeing as enterprises move to embracing a platform approach, deploying it much more widely. You talked about the early majority. Yeah. Right. And so what they require is more enterprise class capability and those are all the things that we've been adding and we're really looking forward >>To it. Well it sounds like tremendous evolution and maturation of Port Works in the two years since it's been with Pure Storage. You talked about the cultural alignment, great stuff that you're achieving. Congratulations on that. Yeah. Great stuff >>Ahead and having fun. Let's not forget that, that's too life's too short to do. It is right. >>You're right. Thank you. We will definitely, as always on the cube, keep our eyes on this space. Mur. Meley, it's been great to have you back on the program. Thank you for joining, John. >>Thank you so much. It's pleasure. Our, >>For our guests and John Furrier, Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with the cube about Coan Cloud Native Con at 22. We'll be back after a short break.

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to Detroit, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are live day two of our coverage of Coan Cloud Native, Con North America. John, we've had great conversations. Yeah. All day yesterday. Half a day today. So far we're talking all things, Well, not all things Kubernetes so much more than that. We also have to talk about storage and data management solutions for Kubernetes projects, cuz that's obviously critical. >>Yeah, I mean the big trend here is Kubernetes going mainstream has been for a while. The adopt is crossing over, it's crossing the CADs and with that you're seeing security concerns. You're seeing things being gaps being filled. But enterprise grade is really the, the, the story. It's going enterprise, that's managed services, that's professional service, that's basically making things work at scale. This next segment hits that, that part, and we're gonna talk about it in grade length >>With one of our alumni morale to Molly is back VP and GM of Port Work's peer Storage. Great to have you back really? >>Yeah, absolutely. Delightful to >>Be here. So I was looking on the website, number one in Kubernetes storage. Three years in a row. Yep. Awesome. What's Coworks doing here at KU Con? >>Well, I'll tell you, we, our engineering crew has been so productive and hard at work that I almost can't decide what to kind of tell you. But I thought what, what, what I thought I would do is kind of tell you that we are in forefront of two major trends in the world of es. Right? And the, the two trends that I see are one is as a service, so is trend number one. So it's not software eating the world anymore. That's, that's old, old, old news. It's as a service, unifying the world. The world wants easy, We all are, you know, subscribers to things like Netflix. We've been using Salesforce or other HR functions. Everything is as a service. And in the world of Kubernetes, it's a sign of that maturity that John was talking about as a platform that now as a service is the big trend. >>And so headline number one, if you will, is that Port Works is leading in the data management world for the Kubernetes by providing, we're going all in on easy on as a service. So everything we do, we are satisfying it, right? So if you think, if you think about, if you think about this, that, that there are really, most of the people who are consuming Kubernetes are people who are building platforms for their dev users and their users want self service. That's one of the advantages of, of, of Kubernetes. And the more it is service size and made as a service, the more ready to consume it is. And so we are announcing at the show that we have, you know, the basic Kubernetes data management as a service, ha d r as a service. We have backup as a service and we have database as a service. So these are the three major components of data. And all of those are being made available as a service. And in fact, we're offering and announcing at the show our backup as a service freemium version where you can get free forever a terabyte of, of, you know, stuff to do for Kubernetes for forever. >>Congratulations on the announcement. Totally. In line with what the market wants. Developers want self serve, they wanna also want simplicity by the way they'll leave if they don't like the service. Correct. So that you, you know, that before we get into some more specifics, I want to Yeah. Ask you on the industry and some of the point solutions you have, what, it's been two years since the acquisition with Pure Storage. Can you just give an update on how it's gone? Obviously as a service, you guys are hitting all your Marks, developers love it. Storage a big part of the game right now as well as these environments. Yeah. What's the update post acquisition two years, You had a great offering Stay >>Right In Point Works. Yeah. So look, John, you're, you're, you're a veteran of the industry and have seen lots of acquisitions, right? And I've been acquired twice before myself. So, you know, there's, there's always best practices and poor practices in terms of acquisitions and I'm, you know, really delighted to say I think this, this acquisition has had some of the best practices. Let me just name a couple of them, right? One of them is just cultural fit, right? Cultural fit is great. Entrepreneurs, anybody, it's not just entrepreneurs. Everybody loves to work in a place they enjoy working with, with people that they, you know, thrive when they, when they interact with. And so the cultural fit with, with Pure is fantastic. The other one is the strategic intent that Pure had when they acquired us is still true. And so that goes a long way, you know, in terms of an investment profile, in terms of the ability to kind of leverage assets within the company. So Pure had kind of disrupted the world of storage using Flash and they wanted to disrupt higher up the stack using Kubernetes. And that's kind of been our role inside their strategy. And it's, it's still true. >>So culture, strategic intent. Yeah. Product market fit as well. You were, you weren't just an asset for customers or acquisition and then let the founders go through their next thing. You are part of their growth play. >>Absolutely. Right. The, the beauty of, of the kind of product market fit is, let's talk about the market is we have been always focused on the global two k and that is at the heart of, you know, purest 10,000 strong customer base, right? They have very strong presence in the, in the global two k. And we, we allow them to kind of go to those same folks with, with the offering. >>So satisfying everything that you do. What's for me as a business, whether I'm a financial services organization, I'm a hospital, I'm a retailer, what's in it for me >>As a customer? Yeah. So the, the what's in it for, for me is two things. It's speed and ease of use, which in a way are related. But, but, but you know, one is when something is provided as a service, it's much more consumable. It's instantly ready. It's like instant oatmeal, right? You just get it just adho water and it's there. Yep. So the world of of IT has moved from owning large data centers, right? That used to be like 25 years ago and running those data centers better than everybody else to move to let me just consume a data center in the form of a cloud, right? So satisfying the cloud part of the data center. Now people are saying, well I expect that for software and services and I don't want it just from the public cloud, I want it from my own IT department. >>This is old news. And so the, the, the big news here is how fast Kubernetes has kind of moved everything. You know, you take a lot of these changes, Kubernetes is a poster child for things happening faster than the last wave. And in the last couple of years I would say that as a service model has really kind of thrived in the world of Kubernetes. And developers want to be able to get it fast. And the second thing is they wanna be able to operate it fast. Self-service is the other benefit. Yeah. So speed and self-service are both benefits of, of >>This. Yeah. And, and the thing that's come up clearly in the cube, and this is gonna be part of the headlines, we'll probably end up getting a lot of highlights from telling my team to make a note of this, is that developers are gonna be be the business if you, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, they're not a department that serves the business, they are the business that means Exactly. They have to be more productive. So developer productivity has been the top story. Yes. Security as a services, all these things. These are, these are examples to make developers more productive. But one of the things that came up and I wanna get your reaction to Yeah. Is, is that when you have disruption and, and the storage vision, you know what disruption it means. Cuz there's been a whole discussion around disruptive operations. When storage goes down, you have back DR. And failover. If there's a disruption that changes the nature of invisible infrastructure, developers want invisible infrastructure. That's the future steady state. So if there's a disruption in storage >>Yeah. It >>Can't affect the productivity and the tool chains and the workflows of developers. Yep. Right? So how do you guys look at that? Cause you're a critical component. Storage is a service, it's a huge thing. Yeah. Storage has to, has to work seamlessly. And let's keep the developers out of the weeds. >>John. I think what, what what you put your finger on is another huge trend in the world of Kubernetes where Atan after all, which is really where, where all the leading practitioners both come and the leading vendors are. So here's the second trend that we are leading and, and actually I think it's happening not just with us, but with other, for folks in the industry. And that is, you know, the world of DevOps. Like DevOps has been such a catchphrase for all of of us in the industry last five years. And it's been both a combination of cultural change as well as technology change. Here's what the latest is on the, in the world of DevOps. DevOps is now crystallized. It's not some kind of mysterious art form that you read about. Okay. How people are practicing. DevOps is, it's broken into two, two things now. >>There is the platform part. So DevOps is now a bunch of platforms. And the other part of DevOps is a bunch of practices. So a little bit on both these, the platforms in the world of es there's only three platforms, right? There's the orchestration platforms, the, you know, eks, the open ships of the world and so on. There are the data management platforms, pro people like Port Works. And the third is security platforms, right? You know, Palo Alto Networks, others Aqua are all in this. So these are the three platforms and there are platform engineering teams now that many of our largest customers, some of the largest banks, the largest service providers, they're all operating as a ES platform engineering team. And then now developers, to your point, developers are in the practice of being able to use these platforms to launch new services. So the, the actual IT ops, the ops are run by developers now and they can do it on these platforms. And the platform engineering team provide that as an ease of use and they're there to troubleshoot when problems happen. So the idea of DevOps as a ops practice and a platform is the newest thing. And, and ports and pure storage leading in the world of data management >>Platforms there. Talk about a customer example that you think really articulates the value that Port Works and Pure Storage delivers from a data management >>Perspective. Yeah, so there's so many examples. One of the, one of the longest running examples we have is a very, very large service provider that, you know, you all know and probably use, and they have been using us in the cable kind of set box or cable box business. They get streams of data from, from cable boxes all over the world. They collected all in a centralized large kind of thing and run elastic search and analytics on it. Now what they have done is they couldn't keep up with this at the scale and the depth, right? The speed of, of activity and the distributed nature of the activity. The only way to solve this was to use something like Kubernetes manage with Spark coming, bringing all the data in into deep, deep, deep silos of storage, which are all running not even on a sand, but on kind of, you know, very deep terabytes and terabytes of, of storage. So all of this is orchestrated with the he of Coworks and there's a platform engineering team. We are building that platform for them, them with some of these other components that allows them to kind of do analytics and, and make some changes in real time. Huge kind of setup for, for >>That. Yeah. Well, you guys have the right architecture. I love the vision. I love what you guys are doing. I think this is right in line with Pures. They've always been disruptors. I remember when we first interviewed the CEO and they started Yep. They, they stayed on path. They didn't waver. EMC was the big player. They ended up taking their lunch and dinner as well and they beat 'em in the marketplace. But now you got this traction here. So I have to ask you, how's the business, what's the results look like? You're a GM cloud native business unit of a storage company that's transformed and transforming. >>Yeah, you know, it's interesting, we just hit the two year anniversary, right John? And so what we did was just kind of like step back and hey to, you know, we're running so hard, you just take a step back and we've tripled the business in the two years since the acquisition, the two years before and, and we were growing through proven. So, you know, that that's quite a fee. And we've tripled the number of people, the amount of engineering investments we have, the number of go to market investments have been, have been awesome. So business is going really well though, I will say. But I think, you know, we have, we can't be, we're watching the market closely. You know, as a former ceo, I, you have to kind of learn to read the tea leaves when you invest. And I think, you know, what I would say is we're proceeding with caution in the next two quarters. I view business transformation as not a cancelable activity. So that's the, that's the good news, right? Our customers are large, >>It's >>Right. Never gonna stop prices, right? All they're gonna do is say, Hey, they're gonna put their hand, their hand was always going right on the dial. Now they're kind of putting their hand on the dial going, hey, where, what is happening? But my, my own sense of this is that people who continue to invest through it, the question is at what level? And I also think that this is a six month kind of watch, the watch where, where we put the dial. So Q4 and q1 I think are kind of, you know, we have our, our watch kind of watch the market sign. But I have the highest confidence. What >>Does your gut tell you? You're an >>Entrepreneur. My, my gut says that we'll go through a little bit of a cautious investment period in the next six months. And after that I think we're gonna be back in, back full, full in the crazy growth that we've always been. Yeah. We're gonna grow by the way, in the next, I think >>It's corn style. I think I'm, I'm more bullish. I think it's gonna be some, you know, weeding out of some overinvestment, pre covid or pre bubble. But I think tech's gonna continue to grow. I don't see >>It's stopping. Yeah. And, and the investment is gonna be on these core platforms. See, back to the platform story, it's gonna be in these lower platforms and on unifying everything, let's consume it better rather than let's go kind of experiment with a whole bunch of things all over the map, right? So you'll see less experimentation and more kind of, let's harvest some of the investments we've made in the last couple >>Of years and actually be able to, to enable companies in, in the industry to truly be data companies because absolutely. We talked about as a service, we all have these expectations that any service we want, we can get it. Yes. There's no delay because patients has gone Yeah. From the pandemic. >>So it is kind of, you know, tightening up the screws on what they've built. They, you know, adding some polish to it, adding some more capability, like I said, a, a a, a combination of harvesting and new investing. It's a combination I think is what we're gonna see. >>Yeah. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to? You talked about some of the, the growth things in the investment, but as we round out Q4 and head into a new year, what are you excited about? >>Yeah, so, you know, I mentioned our, as a service kind of platform. The global two K for us has been a set of customers who we co-create stuff with. And so one of the other set of things that we are very excited about and announcing is because we're deployed at scale, we're, we're, we have upgraded our backend. So we have now the ability to go to million IOPS and more and, and for, for the right backends. And so Kubernetes is a add-on, which will not slow down your, your core base infrastructure. Second thing that that we, we have is added a bunch of capability in the disaster recovery business continuity front, you know, we always had like metro kind of distance Dr. We had long distance dr. We've added a near sync Dr. So now we can provide disaster recovery and business continuity for metro distances across continents and across the planet. Right? That's kind of a major change that we've done. The third thing is we've added the capability for file block and Object. So now by adding object, we're really a complete solution. So it is really that maturity of the business Yeah. That you start seeing as enterprises move to embracing a platform approach, deploying it much more widely. You talked about the early majority. Yeah. Right. And so what they require is more enterprise class capability and those are all the things that we've been adding and we're really looking forward to it. >>Well it sounds like tremendous evolution and maturation of Port Works in the two years since it's been with Pure Storage. You talked about the cultural alignment, Great stuff that you are achieving. Congratulations on that. Great stuff >>Ahead and having fun. Let's not forget that that's too life's too short to do. It is. You're right. >>Right. Thank you. We will definitely, as always on the cube, keep our eyes on this space. Mur. Meley, it's been great to have you back on the program. Thank you for joining, John. >>Great. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Our, >>For our guests and John Furrier, Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with the cube about Cob Con Cloud native Con at 22. We'll be back after a short break.

(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Virtually all tech companies have expressed caution in their respective earnings calls, and why not? I know you're sick in talking about the macroeconomic environment, but it's full of uncertainties and there's no upside to providing aggressive guidance when sellers are in control. They punish even the slightest miss. Moreover, the spending data confirms the softening market across the board, so it's becoming expected that CFOs will guide cautiously. But companies facing execution challenges, they can't hide behind the macro, which is why it's important to understand which firms are best positioned to maintain momentum through the headwinds and come out the other side stronger. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," we'll do three things. First, we're going to share a high-level view of the spending pinch that almost all sectors are experiencing. Second, we're going to highlight some of those companies that continue to show notably strong momentum and relatively high spending velocity on their platforms, albeit less robust than last year. And third, we're going to give you a peak at how one senior technology leader in the financial sector sees the competitive dynamic between AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks. So I landed on the red eye this morning and opened my eyes, and then opened my email to see this. My Barron's Daily had a headline telling me how bad things are and why they could get worse. The S&P Thursday hit a new closing low for the year. The safe haven of bonds are sucking wind. The market hasn't seemed to find a floor. Central banks are raising rates. Inflation is still high, but the job market remains strong. Oh, not to mention that the US debt service is headed toward a trillion dollars per year, and the geopolitical situation is pretty tense, and Europe seems to be really struggling. Yeah, so the Santa Claus rally is really looking pretty precarious, especially if there's a liquidity crunch coming, like guess why they call Barron's Barron's. Last week, we showed you this graphic ahead of the UiPath event. For months, the big four sectors, cloud, containers, AI, and RPA, have shown spending momentum above the rest. Now, this chart shows net score or spending velocity on specific sectors, and these four have consistently trended above the 40% red line for two years now, until this past ETR survey. ML/AI and RPA have decelerated as shown by the squiggly lines, and our premise was that they are more discretionary than the other sectors. The big four is now the big two: cloud and containers. But the reality is almost every sector in the ETR taxonomy is down as shown here. This chart shows the sectors that have decreased in a meaningful way. Almost all sectors are now below the trend line and only cloud and containers, as we showed earlier, are above the magic 40% mark. Container platforms and container orchestration are those gray dots. And no sector has shown a significant increase in spending velocity relative to October 2021 survey. In addition to ML/AI and RPA, information security, yes, security, virtualizations, video conferencing, outsourced IT, syndicated research. Syndicated research, yeah, those Gartner, IDC, Forrester, they stand out as seemingly the most discretionary, although we would argue that security is less discretionary. But what you're seeing is a share shift as we've previously reported toward modern platforms and away from point tools. But the point is there is no sector that is immune from the macroeconomic environment. Although remember, as we reported last week, we're still expecting five to 6% IT spending growth this year relative to 2021, but it's a dynamic environment. So let's now take a look at some of the key players and see how they're performing on a relative basis. This chart shows the net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and the pervasiveness of the vendor within the ETR survey measured as the percentage of respondents citing the vendor in use. As usual, Microsoft and AWS stand out because they are both pervasive on the x-axis and they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. For two companies of this size that demonstrate and maintain net scores above the 40% mark is extremely impressive. Although AWS is now showing much higher on the vertical scale relative to Microsoft, which is a new trend. Normally, we see Microsoft dominating on both dimensions. Salesforce is impressive as well because it's so large, but it's below those two on the vertical axis. Now, Google is meaningfully large, but relative to the other big public clouds, AWS and Azure, we see this as disappointing. John Blackledge of Cowen went on CNBC this past week and said that GCP, by his estimates, are 75% of Google Cloud's reported revenue and is now only five years behind AWS in Azure. Now, our models say, "No way." Google Cloud Platform, by our estimate, is running at about $3 billion per quarter or more like 60% of Google's reported overall cloud revenue. You have to go back to 2016 to find AWS running at that level and 2018 for Azure. So we would estimate that GCP is six years behind AWS and four years behind Azure from a revenue performance standpoint. Now, tech-wise, you can make a stronger case for Google. They have really strong tech. But revenue is, in our view, a really good indicator. Now, we circle here ServiceNow because they have become a generational company and impressively remain above the 40% line. We were at CrowdStrike with theCUBE two weeks ago, and we saw firsthand what we see as another generational company in the making. And you can see the company spending momentum is quite impressive. Now, HashiCorp and Snowflake have now surpassed Kubernetes to claim the top net score spots. Now, we know Kubernetes isn't a company, but ETR tracks it as though it were just for context. And we've highlighted Databricks as well, showing momentum, but it doesn't have the market presence of Snowflake. And there are a number of other players in the green: Pure Storage, Workday, Elastic, JFrog, Datadog, Palo Alto, Zscaler, CyberArk, Fortinet. Those last ones are in security, but again, they're all off their recent highs of 2021 and early 2022. Now, speaking of AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks, our colleague Eric Bradley of ETR recently held an in-depth interview with a senior executive at a large financial institution to dig into the analytics space. And there were some interesting takeaways that we'd like to share. The first is a discussion about whether or not AWS can usurp Snowflake as the top dog in analytics. I'll let you read this at your at your leisure, but I'll pull out some call-outs as indicated by the red lines. This individual's take was quite interesting. Note the comment that quote, this is my area of expertise. This person cited AWS's numerous databases as problematic, but Redshift was cited as the closest competitors to Snowflake. This individual also called out Snowflake's current cross-cloud Advantage, what we sometimes call supercloud, as well as the value add in their marketplace as a differentiator. But the point is this person was actually making, the point that this person was actually making is that cloud vendors make a lot of money from Snowflake. AWS, for example, see Snowflake as much more of a partner than a competitor. And as we've reported, Snowflake drives a lot of EC2 and storage revenue for AWS. Now, as well, this doesn't mean AWS does not have a strong marketplace. It does. Probably the best in the business, but the point is Snowflake's marketplace is exclusively focused on a data marketplace and the company's challenge or opportunity is to build up that ecosystem and to continue to add partners and create network effects that allow them to create long-term sustainable moat for the company, while at the same time, staying ahead of the competition with innovation. Now, the other comment that caught our attention was Snowflake's differentiators. This individual cited three areas. One, the well-known separation of compute and storage, which, of course, AWS has replicated sort of, maybe not as elegant in the sense that you can reduce the compute load with Redshift, but unlike Snowflake, you can't shut it down. Two, with Snowflake's data sharing capability, which is becoming quite well-known and a key part of its value proposition. And three, its marketplace. And again, key opportunity for Snowflake to build out its ecosystem. Close feature gaps that it's not necessarily going to deliver on its own. And really importantly, create governed and secure data sharing experiences for anyone on the data cloud or across clouds. Now, the last thing this individual addressed in the ETR interview that we'll share is how Databricks and Snowflake are attacking a similar problem, i.e. simplifying data, data sharing, and getting more value from data. The key messages here are there's overlap with these two platforms, but Databricks appeals to a more techy crowd. You open a notebook, when you're working with Databricks, you're more likely to be a data scientist, whereas with Snowflake, you're more likely to be aligned with the lines of business within sometimes an industry emphasis. We've talked about this quite often on "Breaking Analysis." Snowflake is moving into the data science arena from its data warehouse strength, and Databricks is moving into analytics and the world of SQL from its AI/ML position of strength, and both companies are doing well, although Snowflake was able to get to the public markets at IPO, Databricks has not. Now, even though Snowflake is on the quarterly shock clock as we saw earlier, it has a larger presence in the market. That's at least partly due to the tailwind of an IPO, and, of course, a stronger go-to market posture. Okay, so we wanted to share some of that with you, and I realize it's a bit of a tangent, but it's good stuff from a qualitative practitioner perspective. All right, let's close with some final thoughts. Look forward a little bit. Things in the short-term are really hard to predict. We've seen these oversold rallies peter out for the last couple of months because the world is such a mess right now, and it's really difficult to reconcile these counterveiling trends. Nothing seems to be working from a public policy perspective. Now, we know tech spending is softening, but let's not forget it, five to 6% growth. It's at or above historical norms, but there's no question the trend line is down. That said, there are certain growth companies, several mentioned in this episode, that are modern and vying to be generational platforms. They're well-positioned, financially sound, disciplined, with strong cash positions, with inherent profitability. What I mean by that is they can dial down growth if they wanted to, dial up EBIT, but being a growth company today is not what it was a year ago. Because of rising rates, the discounted cash flows are just less attractive. So earnings estimates, along with revenue multiples on these growth companies, are reverting toward the mean. However, companies like Snowflake, and CrowdStrike, and some others are able to still command a relative premium because of their execution and continued momentum. Others, as we reported last week, like UiPath for example, despite really strong momentum and customer spending, have had execution challenges. Okta is another example of a company with strong spending momentum, but is absorbing off zero for example. And as a result, they're getting hit harder from evaluation standpoint. The bottom line is sellers are still firmly in control, the bulls have been humbled, and the traders aren't buying growth tech or much tech at all right now. But long-term investors are looking for entry points because these generational companies are going to be worth significantly more five to 10 years down the line. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching this "Breaking Analysis" episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson and Ken Schiffman on production. And Alex manages our podcast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE do some wonderful editing for us, so thank you. Thank you all. Remember that all these episodes are available as podcast wherever you listen. All you do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, or DM me @dvellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out etr.ai for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (gentle music)

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

(bright intro music) >> The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer to pizza teams and DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model, and security, of course, the shift from CapEx to OPEX, and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning, at least not the way you used to. You'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story, and while pay for use more closely ties IT consumption to business value, procurement teams don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing and as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave Vellante and welcome to "At Your Storage Service" made possible by Pure Storage, and with me is Prakash Darji who's the General Manager of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure. Prakash, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >> You bet. Okay, we've seen this shift to as a service, the as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's clear over the past several years. What's driving this shift? Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >> Well, look, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, "Hey, I can go for a pay up front or pay as I go." Service is more about, "How do I not buy something just by the outcome?" So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage, performance, capacity, availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning, capacity management? Those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the SaaSification of storage, and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >> So that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you've made inroads here, pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really Pure's raison d'etre. How does storage as a service fit in to your innovation agenda overall? >> Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned, with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the Evergreen Architecture. That architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, "I can improve performance or capacity as I need it." Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, "Oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte," but how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non-disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via software update? Those elements of non-disruptive updates, when you think SaaS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update. You don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability. It just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and SaaSification in service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, "I want to change from this service here to that service here," and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >> Okay, so I like the Salesforce analogy, but I want to jump out do a little side for a second. So I've got to make some commitment to Pure, right? Some baseline commitment, and if I do, then I can dial up and then pay for what I use, and I can dial it down, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce, all right? I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce, I would argue. Okay. >> Yeah. I would agree with that. >> Okay, so, and I got to pay for everything up front. Anyway, let's go back to I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the all-important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customer standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >> Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue, most of the time, people are guessing, right? It's like, "Well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need or this is the capacity I think I need," and, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something, and you're like, "Do I need more? Do I need less?" You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy, and that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >> Yeah. >> They're going to want different levels of storage. They're going to want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogy for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. You don't, you can pay less, and you can actually get lower performance tiers. Not everything is a tier one application, and you need the ability to deploy it, but when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are going to be consuming or do you need a dictated upfront? 'Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >> I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, "Okay, what should I get, should we get red wine? We got to go white wine, we got to get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles." 'Cause you don't know what people are going to have, and so you over provision everything and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, "Ah, we're running the bubbles," so you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I got to do business with those guys every time 'cause it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or I can dial up performance, and dial it back down if I don't use it. >> Where you're going to be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >> Yeah, exactly, like which is the last thing you want. Okay, so let's talk about how Pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your differentiators from others in the market. You know, love to hear about the momentum. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, look, our business is growing well largely built on, you know, what customers need. Specifically, where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX. Like that definitely exists in the industry around, "How do I get a paper use model?" The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in, "How do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage?" And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, "How do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage?" Being a storage producer should be about standardization so I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier, in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. Linux has new vulnerabilities every other day, like find two, three critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, "Look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem, and assume the vendor's going to deliver this to me." So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets a like a fine line that gets better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA so it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >> Yeah, I mean, just even though words you're using and the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are different, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to Pure's R&D. I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. So let's stick with the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the as a service economy? >> Well, the first thing is I always tell people you can't deliver a service without monitoring because if you can't monitor something, how you're going to know whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IoT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car. It'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's going to crash and drive you off the road. In the same way, what if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the view of an application. An application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted and MSP can run it. It can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices, very similar to an IOT system? So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack regardless of your application, regardless of, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in it you're on. That approach is very similar to the way the IoT industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to storage, and that's the foundation on which we built Pure as a service. >> So that implies or, at least I infer, that you've, obviously, got control of the experience on prem, but you're extending that into AWS, Google, Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world, and then eventually, actually today, 'cause you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe mini Pure at some point in time, but so I call that super cloud, that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value and is a singular experience, what you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout. Is that the right way to think about it? And how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >> Oh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets. First, you need management. So how do you ensure consistent management experience, creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape? The second one is monitoring. How do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at? And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement, meaning what happens when you run out? Do you need to increase your reserve commits? Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models such that you can say, "I can use what I need," and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's going to break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring, and procurement across the tech, and yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, you know, Pure mini at the edge, right? So, you know, all of those things are tied to our Pure as a service delivery. >> Yeah, technically, non-trivial, but hey, you guys are on it. Well, we got to leave it there, Prakash. Thank you, great stuff, really appreciate your time. >> All right, thanks for having me, man. >> You're very welcome. Okay, in a moment, Steve McDowell. For more insights and strategies, he's going to give us the analyst perspective on as a service. You're watching "theCUBE", the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright outro music)

>>When AWS introduced the modern cloud in 2006, many people didn't realize the impact that it would have on the industry, but some did see the future of an as a service economy coming. I mean, SAS offerings came out several years before. And the idea of applying some of these concepts to infrastructure and simplifying deployment and management, you know, kinda looked enticing to a lot of customers and a subscription model, or, but yet a consumption model was seen as a valuable proposition by many customers. Why not apply it to infrastructure? And why should the hyperscalers have all the fun welcome to at your storage service? My name is Dave ante. And as an analyst at the time, I was excited about the, as a service trend early on. And one of the companies that caught my attention back in the beginning of last decade was pure storage. >>Pure not only was delivering cloud- simplicity, but it's no forklift approach to infrastructure was ahead of its time. And that's why we're here today to dig into what's happening with the, as a service trends that we see popping up all over the world today, we're gonna dig into three sessions with noted experts in the field. First pre Darie is the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure storage. He's gonna join us. And then we bring in Steve McDowell, Steve's a senior analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy, a well known consultancy and analyst firm. And finally, we close with Amil sta Emil is the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer at open line, open lines, a managed service provider. They serve the mid-market and Emil's got a very wide observation space. He's gonna share what he's seeing with customers. So sit back and enjoy the show. >>The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer two pizza teams, a DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model in security. And of course the shift from CapEx to OPEX and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning. At least not the way you used to you'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story and well pay for use more closely ties. It consumption to business value procurement teams. Don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing. And as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave ante and welcome to at your storage service made possible by pure storage. And with me is Pash DJI. Who's the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure Pash. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >>You bet. Okay. We've seen this shift to, as a service, the, as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's it's clear over the past several years, what's driving this shift. Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >>Well, look, um, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, Hey, I can go for pay up front or pay as I go. Service is more about how do I not buy something just by the outcome. So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage performance, capacity availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning capacity management, those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important, where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the ation of storage and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >>So that's, that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you, you, you've made inroads here pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really pures rayon Detra. How does storage as a service fit into your innovation agenda overall? >>Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the evergreen architecture, that architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, I can improve performance or capacity as I need it? Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte. But how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via a software update, those elements of non disruptive updates. When you think SAS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update, you don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and sation and service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, I want to change from this service tier to that service tier and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >>Okay. So I like the Salesforce analogy, but I wanna jump out, do a little side for a second. So I I've gotta, I've gotta make some commitment to pure, right. Some baseline commitment. And if I do, then I can dial up and pay for what I use and I can dial it down. Correct? Correct. Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce. <laugh> right. I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce. I would argue. Okay. Yeah, >>I would, I would agree with that. >>Okay. So, and I gotta pay for everything up front anyway. Um, let's go back. I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the, the all important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customers standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >>Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue most of the time people are guessing, right? It's like, well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need. Or this is the capacity I think I need. And, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something and you're like, do I need more? Do I need less? You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy. And that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >>Yeah. They're gonna want different levels of storage. They're gonna want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogies for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. Um, you don't, you can pay less and you can actually get lower performance, tiers, not everything is a tier one application. And you need the ability to deploy it. But when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are gonna be consuming? Or do you need a dictated upfront? Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >>I, I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, okay, what should I get? Should we get red wine? We gotta go white wine. We gotta get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles. Cause you don't know what people are gonna have. And so you over provision everything <laugh> and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, ah, we run outta bubbles. So you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I gotta do business with those guys every time. Cuz it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or can dial up performance and dial it back down if I don't use it >>Or you or you're gonna be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >>Yeah, exactly. Which is the last thing you want. Okay. So let's talk about how pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your, your differentiators from others in the market. Um, you know, love to hear about the momentum. What, what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. Look, our business is growing well, largely built on, you know, what customers need. Um, specifically where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX, where like that definitely exists in the industry around how do I get a pay use model? The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in how do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage? And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, how do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage. Being a storage producer should be about standardization. So I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. >>Linux has new vulnerabilities every, every other day, like find 2, 2, 3 critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem. And assume the vendor's gonna deliver this to me. So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day a, the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets like a fine line that gets better, better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA. So it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >>Yeah. I mean, just even though words you're using in the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are, are, are different. Uh, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to pures R and D I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. Um, so let's, let's, let's stick with the, the, the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the, as a service economy? >>Well, the first thing is I always tell people, you can't deliver a service without monitoring, because if you can't monitor something, how you're gonna know what your, whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology. Differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level, OB obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly, meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IOT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that push pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car it'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. >>It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's gonna crash and drive you off the road in the same way. What if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the world in the view of an application, an application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center, it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted, an MSP can run. It can, can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices? >>Very similar to an I IOT system. So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack, regardless of your application, regardless of, uh, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in you're on that approach is very similar to the way the T industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest, thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to. And that's the foundation on which we built PI as a service. >>So that implies, or at least I infer that you've obviously got control of the experience on Preem, but you're extending that, uh, into AWS, Google Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world. And then eventually, actually today, cuz you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe, maybe mini pure at some point in time. But so I call that super cloud that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value. And is this singular experience? What you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout, is that the right way to think about it and how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >>Oh, uh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from a, an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets, first, you need management. So how do you ensure a consistent management experience creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories, like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape. The second one is monitoring, how do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or uh, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at. And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement. Meaning what happens when you run out, you need to increase your reserve commits. Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models, such that you can say, I can use what I need and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's gonna break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring and procurement across the tech. And yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, um, you know, pure mini at the edge. Right. <laugh> so, you know, tho all of those things are tied to our pure, a service delivery. >>Yeah, technically non-trivial but uh, Hey, you guys are on it. Well, we gotta leave it there. Pash. Thank you. Great stuff. Really appreciate your time. >>All right. Thanks for having me, man. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, Steve McDowell from more insights and strategies, it's gonna give us the analyst perspective on, as a service, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Why are customers making the change to pure as a service >>Other vendors, offering flexible consumption models will promise you the world on the surface. It's just what you need. But then you notice the asterisk that dreaded fine print. That turns just what you need into long-term commitments, disruptive upgrades and unpredictable costs, pure storage, launched pure as a service to provide the flexibility to respond to your ever changing needs. With clear per unit costs, no large upfront purchases and no asterisks. A usage based model should be simple, innovative, and adapt with the changing market. Unlike other vendors, pure is offering exactly that with options, for service tiers and short term contracts in a single unified subscription that allows you to improve your discounts over time. Pure makes sure you can grow and upgrade without ever taking your environment offline and without the constant worry of hidden costs with complete billing, transparency, unlike any other, you only pay for what you use and pure one helps track and predict demand from day to day, making sure you never outgrow your storage. So why are customers making the change to pure as a service convenient solutions with unlimited potential without the dreaded fine print? It's as simple as that, >>We're back with Steve McDowell, the principal analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on, tell us a little bit about yourself. You got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >>Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, right? Whether it's OnPrim or cloud or, or, or, you know, software as a service. Uh, my background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. Uh, came up through the ranks and, and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management. Uh, and I've been doing, uh, working as an industry analyst now for about five years, more insights and strategy. >>Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started. It's gonna snowballing, you know, however you look at it, percent of spending on storage that you think is gonna land in as a service. How, how do you see the evolution here? >>I think it buyers are looking at as a service, a consumption based is, is, uh, uh, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility, all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty around cost and security and things like that, right. That also come with a public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I've worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So I don't know that we have hard data on how much, uh, adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, uh, you know, and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So it's, it's clearly popular with CIOs and, and it practitioners alike. >>So Steve organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys. And of course, as a result, they're gonna have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an it buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever >>Can absolutely be, uh, a growth leader. Uh, it, it gives me the flexibility as, as an it architect to scale my business over time, without worrying about how much money I have to invest in, in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloudlike flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment. Uh, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my permit. And I manage it like a storage array that I own. Uh, so you know, it, it's, it's beautiful for, for organizations that are scaling and, and it's equally nice for organizations that just wanna manage and control cost over time. Um, so it's, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and, and certainly growing in adoption and popularity. >>How about from a technology vendor perspective you've worked for in the, in the tech industry mm-hmm <affirmative> for, for companies? What do you think is gonna define the winners and losers in this space? If you were running strategy for, uh, storage company, what would you say? >>I, I think the days of, of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right, what would, what these organizations like pure delivering, but they're offerings is, is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right. It becomes storage as a utility. So it's not just the, you know, the consumption based economic model of, of, uh, as a service. Uh, it, it's also the manageability that comes with that, or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to, to, uh, you know, a workload that needs it. Um, and it just becomes very simple, right. For the storage administrator in a way that, you know, kind of old school OnPrim storage can't really deliver. >>You know, I wanna, I wanna ask you, I mean, I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are, you know, moving, hopping on the, as a service bandwagon, I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives, the innovation is gonna come from making that singular experience from on-prem to the clouds across clouds, maybe eventually out to the edge. Um, do you, do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >>Well, there there's two levels of innovation, right? One, one is business model innovation, right? I, I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure, to support my digital transformation efforts. Um, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is, as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form, right. I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, uh, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud, I don't know where my data is and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that, uh, uh, manageability experience, uh, to, to the it administrators. So when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right? This is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know, end to end management of my data and, and, you know, and all of the things around that. >>Yeah. So you, to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to, to, you have to over provision, whereas here, and I wanted to ask you about that. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting model, right? Cuz you gotta read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you gotta commit to some level typically. And then if, you know, if you go over you, you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's, that's gotta be very attractive for folks. I, I wonder if you will ever see like true cloud-like consumption pricing, that is two edges to it. Right. You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah. People like it, the lines of business maybe cuz they pay in by the drink, but then procurement hates it cuz they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >>No, I, I do. I do see that maturing. Right? And, and when you work with a company like pure to understand their consumption based and as a service offerings, uh, it, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale, right? You, you buy in at a certain level, uh, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to, you can shrink if you need to. So it really does put more control in the hands of the it buyer than uh, well certainly then traditional CapEx based on-prem but also more control than you would get, you know, working with an Amazon or an Azure. >>Okay. Thanks Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there at your storage service continues in a moment. >>Some things are meant to last your storage should be one of them say hello to the evergreen storage program, say goodbye to refreshes and rebates. Forget planned downtime, performance impact and data migrations. Forget forklift upgrades. Evergreen storage starts with your agile storage architecture and covers the entire life cycle of the array from first purchase to ongoing use. And whenever it's time to modernize and grow, your satisfaction is covered with an evergreen subscription. 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One of them >>We're back at your storage service. Emil Stan is here. He's the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer of open line. Thank you Emil for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you, David. Nice. Uh, glad to be here. >>Yes. Yeah. So tell us about open line. You're a managed service provider. What's your focus? >>Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider and I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the spheres that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And then unfortunately, everybody only thinks there's one cloud, but it's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating it. We're a cloud manages provider in the Netherlands, focusing on, uh, companies who have head office in the Netherlands, mainly in the, uh, healthcare local government, social housing logistics department. And then in the midst size companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. Uh, and that's what we do. We provide 'em with excellent cloud managed services, uh, as it should be >>Interesting, you know, a lot early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare government were somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? >>And I think, uh, there are a number of reasons why they do business with us or choose to choose for our manage services provider that first of course are looking for stability and continuity. Uh, and, and from a cost perspective, predict predictable costs. But nowadays you also have a shortage in personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access, uh, those skill sets because most it, people just want to have, uh, a great variety in work, what they are doing, uh, towards, towards the local government, uh, healthcare, social housing. They actually, uh, a sector that, uh, that are really in between embracing the public cloud, but also have a lot of legacy and, and bringing together best of all, worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy, uh, needs from a manager's perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud. Uh, and, uh, I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually we focus on using an ideal cloud, being a mix of traditional and future based cloud. >>Thank you. I, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the, as a service economy that we often talk about on the cube. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and, and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes, continuous value delivery via, you know, suites of services and, and they're leaning into platforms versus one off product offerings, you know, do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? >>Yeah. Uh, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like, look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps, uh, and download apps the way you want to. So they have a lot of apps about how do you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you, David or works for me. Uh, so the difficulty, some sometimes lies in, uh, the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions, but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain, a workflow supply chain, uh, and, and, uh, they're being hyped as well. So what we also have a lot of time in, in, in, in managing our customers is that the tremendous feature push feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers. Whereas if you provide 10 features, you only need one or two, uh, but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. Uh, so there's a natural way in that people are embracing, uh, SA solutions, embracing cloud solutions. Uh, but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it is the way that you integrate all those solutions toward something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution. There's always a chain of solutions. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges for us, but also for our customers, >>You see that trend toward, as a service continuing, or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum, you know, swinging back and forth, somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that, you know, changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? >>Ah, I, I think that's very, very good question, David, because that's something that's keeping our busy all the time. We do see a trend in a service looking at, uh, talk about pure later on. We also use pure as a service more or less. Yeah. And that really helps us. Uh, but you see, uh, um, that sometimes people make a step too, too fast, too quick, not well thought of, and then you see what they call sort of cloud repatriation, tend that people go back to what they're doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging. The possibilities are actually there. Uh, so from our consultancy, our guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much as possible to think in a SA thought, but just don't use the, cloud's just another data center. Uh, and so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. >>So I'm interested in how your sort of your philosophy and, and as relates, I think in, in, in terms of how you work with pure, but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't and send them to over rotate, but then you're not also, you don't wanna be too late to the game. How, how do you manage all that? >>Oh, there's, there's, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. And so I think a well known, uh, uh, thing that people is customer intimacy. That's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they're moving. But the, the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So no, the application and services landscape, our customers know the primary providers and work with them, uh, to, to, to create something that, that really fits the customers. They just not looked at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider that we actually work in the ecosystem with, with, with, with the primary providers. And we have, I think with the average customers, I think we have, uh, uh, in a month we have so much interactions on our operational level and technical levels, strategic level. >>We do bring together our customers also, and to jointly think about what we can do together, what we independently can never reach. Uh, but we also involve our customers in, uh, defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board. So we present a strategy and say, does it make sense? Eh, this is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also, uh, understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this, in this broadcast, David there. So you can imagine that at this moment, not thinking go wrong. Yeah. If, if, if the internet stops that we have a problem. And now, so we, we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers and we manage that. It's always on, uh, uh, where in the other moments in the week, we might have a little less attention, but this moment we should be there. And these moments of truth that we really embrace, we got them well described. Everybody working out line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. Uh, uh, so we have a big logistics provider. For instance, you does not have to ask us to, uh, have, uh, a higher availability on black Friday or cyber Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or her. Does it answer your question, David? >>Yes. We know as well. You know, when these big, the big game moments you have to be on your top, uh, top of your game, uh, you know, the other thing Emil about this as a service approach that I really like is, is it's a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie, you can see adoption, you know, daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically in what kind of patterns you're seeing in, in, in the adoption. >>Uh, yeah, pure as a service for our customers is mainly never visible. Uh, we provide storage services to provide storage solutions, storage over is part of a bigger thing of a server of application. Uh, so the real benefits, to be honest, of course, towards our customer, it's all flash, uh, uh, and they have the fastest, fastest storage is available. But for ourself, we, uh, we use less resources to manage our storage. We have far more that we have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with pure. Uh, so, uh, actually the way we treat our customers is that way pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a used click. So the real benefits, uh, uh, how we leverage is it normally we had a bunch of guys managing our storage. Now we only have one and knowing that's a shortage of it, personnel, the other persons can well be, uh, involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So, uh, that's simply great. >>You know, um, my takeaway the meal is that you've made infrastructure, at least, least the storage infrastructure, invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You didn't have to worry about it. And you've, you've also attacked the, the labor problem. You're not, you know, provisioning lungs anymore, or, you know, tuning the storage, you know, with, with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic, which is business transformation. That, that means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different it model. Now I'm not managing infrastructure same way. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a bus now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? >>I think I do not know if they, they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business. They have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, cetera, but we also add new, uh, certainties to it, like, uh, uh, the, the latest service we we released was imutable storage being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to, uh, thanks to the pure technology, but for customers, it takes them to give them a good night rest because, you know, we have some, uh, geopolitical issues in the world. Uh, there's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and, and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation, does it transform their business? I think that gives them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. Um, so to me, it's not really a transformation is just using the right opportunities at the right moment. >>The imutable piece is interesting because, because, but speaking of as a service, you know, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it's seeing the, as a service economy hit, hit everywhere, the good and the, and the not so good. Um, and so I presume that your customers are, are looking at, I imutability as another service capability of the service offering and really rethinking, maybe because of the recent, you know, ransomware attacks, rethinking how they, they approach, uh, business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? >>Yep, definitely. Definitely. I tell not all of them yet. Imutable storage. So it's like an insurance as well, which you have when you have imutable storage and you have been, you have a ransomware attack at least have you part of data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware. Every data is corrupted. You cannot order new data. Now we got that safe and well. And so we offer them the possibility to, to do the forensics and free up their, uh, the data without tremendous loss of time. Uh, but you also see that you raise the new, uh, how do you say, uh, the new baseline for other providers as well? Eh, so there's security of the corporate information security officer, the CIO, they're all very happy with that. And they, they, they raise the baseline for us as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from say, security operation center. Cuz now we can really focus on our prime business risks because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, uh, which is a combination of people, processes and technology. >>Right. Makes sense. Okay. I'll give you the last word. Uh, talk about your relationship with pure, where you wanna see that that going in the future. >>Uh, I hope we've be working together for a long time. Uh, I, I ex experienced them very involved. Uh, it's not, we have done the sell and now it's all up to you now. We were closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime architect, Marcel height is very happy and it looks a little more or less if we work with pure, like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier and a customer, uh, and uh, the whole pure concept is fascinating. Uh, I, uh, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office and they told me to fish in how they launched, uh, pure being, if you want to implement it, it had to be on one credit card. The, the, the menu had to be on one credit card. Just a simple thought of put that as your big area, audacious goal to make the simplest, uh, implementable storage available. But for us, uh, it gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with pur in the near future. Uh, and for us as a provider, what we, uh, literally really look forward to is that, that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services or storage services. Uh, so that's what I expect. And that was what I, and we look forward to. >>Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much, Emil, for coming on the, the cube and, and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. >>Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. 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