>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage day to appear. Storage your accelerate 2019. I'm Lisa Martin Day. Volante is my co host, and we're very pleased to welcome for the first time to the Cube. Kathy Southwark. This C I O at pure Cathy. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. You have a great story. This is not only your fear. Your first your accelerate. You been at the company less than a year. You were not only a pure customer before, but in a completely different industry. So your first your accelerate. Here we are in Delhi Technologies backyard. Give us your perspective on appears business from your previous customer role. >> Yes. So I spent. I've been here just under a year, she said, and I spent the almost 22 years 18 t and coming into a company. It's completely different. Different size company, different size technology issues. Everything we do is looks very different. But there's a lot of similarities that, you know, you're trying to as any company trying to innovate and trying to stay on the cutting edge and you're trying to make sure you have the right teams in place and all that, so it's a lot of fun. It's great to see the energy and the excitement here, so that's been a lot of fun to come in and to see orange everywhere painted or so it's been a lot of fun coming on >> and you're complying with your orders. >> I got the memo. I said, You know, it's hard because orange is not one of my better colors toe where but no happy toe, happy to wear orange and proud to be part of such a company who's really looking at? How do we take care of the customer? >> Right. So you were sold on pure as a customer when you were with age and T. What was it about the technology that when you were in that prayer roll that really differentiated it from its competition? It was really >> interesting. I was sharing folks earlier today that here was very different, smaller company coming into a very large organization. We started working with them back in 18 t in 2013 so they were a very small company, very early on, but they were so bullish they had this completely different attitude about storage. And it wasn't really necessarily about this storage. It's about what we're gonna do to help you change your business. So for us, you know, I really looked at when you're in a very large company, you tend to not look so much at the particular like storage or computer or what you're really looking at, How many enabling my business and with the limited dollars that you have. And resource is etcetera, you're always trying to balance and prioritize. So for us when they came in, they made this proposition and said, Hey, we can show you this in two weeks and it'll, um And you know, when you're also big enterprise, you don't have time. Thio look a technology for weeks and months on end and then have to test it. And so we brought pure end. They they were tested out the products within two weeks, and we saw more than what we're expecting. And I think that was what changed for us is it wasn't just about we could do, you know, compression. We could do the deed if we could do. It was that all of a sudden was all these other capabilities been planned for So it really was. It was pretty pretty dramatic for us because we hadn't seen other providers to come in with a story that sounded different and not just the technology. Like I'm gonna save you a dollar. It's about now I'm going to enable your business to do something different faster. And we saw it firsthand. >> I was the role of C i o at a technology company. Different from you were in a c i o N a t. But you you had kind of an engineering roll. If I think it's a solution Engineering, how is the role different in terms of how you spend your time and what you care about? >> Yeah. So, you know, in 18 t, the CEOs were focused on the application delivery sites of specific applications at pure and so an 82. My role is centered around all the infrastructure for I t. As well as our network engineering. So what we did for the Service Writer network coming into pure, you have, you know, the whole spectrum. But we're a different kind of company. and that really 10 years old. Our technical debt looks very different. We use a lot of sass products, so we use a lot of hosted solutions from our partners and providers, and we do someone premise well. But it's a very different kind of landscape, so the opportunity is you don't have as much technical debt. You also have the ability to to try things because you are smaller and you can try things much quicker and be able to say, Well, this working isn't good enough and not have to have maybe things as gold plated. As you know, a regulated telecom would have versus a product technology product company that it's trying to be very agile to produce things and change for their customers. >> So essentially you were. I'll call you the C i o of of infrastructure at AT and T with infrastructure that had to support, like you said, highly regulated in a very diverse I'm sure application portfolio. Extremely there. Thousands of systems, probably >> thousands of applications and very complex business models. They, you know, they're ah, it's not a one. So the interesting is 80. >> She's >> not a one entity business, you know they've got their media business. They've got there mobility business. We've got their wireline business. So when you have people often think of 18 t as a company, But there's actually it's a very complex business model supporting multiple products. So it's just that those air, you know, multi $1,000,000,000 product portfolios versus coming into pure where you know we're still, you know, 1,000,000,000 have company building and growing our product portfolio. >> So what's your technology strategy of pure and how are you enabling business outcomes for the company? >> That's a great, great question. So, you know, really, a business strategy here has been that I t has to really evolve and scale differently than it had in the past. The organization before was really centered around Some of the end user capabilities wasn't as centered around business outcomes, and we've taken on a different role. So as I've come on to the organization, our opportunity and our challenge is that we now have different responsibilities, were taking on things like, How do we want to think about data across the enterprise, not just within each individual domain, and so as a start up company, you often are very focused on your R and D investments in your sales and marketing investments, and you do a lot of things to get it done. And that means that individual teams will do work. But you tend to not think about what the full life cycle is of, you know, of something that you're working on. So for our opportunity now this is take a step back, be able to look across and say it worked great for that period of time. Now we have the opportunity to rethink how we want to think about the customer experience from the time product is developed all the way through and, you know, a quote to a customer through its life cycle through delivery and then the support for that customer >> so so technology, the support that sort of workflow >> the ecosystem instead of within individual areas. And so that's really there are focuses. How do we help our business to become even faster? How do we get more focused on the customer from ah whole ecosystem? And that we think about the customer from the whole ecosystem instead of each individual area? >> Sounds like that horizontal view that Charlie Giancarlo talks about you know, with storage being so vertical in the past and cures wanting to revolutionize that and make that horizontal, ensuring that any type of business, whether we're talking about yours, business or ah retailer or our airline, every function in an organization has access to share. That data exactly struck business value to lower costs to find new revenue streams, new routes to market, et cetera. >> And we're no different as a business. We need to do those same things to make sure that we can. We can deliver those for business, so that's a big part of a lot of >> times we'll talk to C. I ose that technology companies and their large established technology companies that I think Cisco S A P. They've been around a long time. They have a lot of technical debt. They look a lot like your customers, frankly, many of your customers yours ever. But my question is a lot of these c I ose that I've just mentioned, sort of generically there come wine tasters, right? You know, they used to be dog food or his drink your own champagne, but But they they are like the first line of defense verse beta customer, and they give feedback to the product groups. Do you play that role as well? >> Way do we not probably to the extent, because we're a smaller company. So we tend Thio, as with our product announcements we've made will go out to a wide set of our customers, you know? So I think we had 16 1 of the bait is that was just done. What we do with an I T. Is because we have a smaller footprint just the size we do have flash ray with a flash blade with you do use pure one. We do it Maur of ah, from how would a a smaller customer look at it, Think about it and use it. And so that's tends to be the I'll say, the lens that we look through. I think that the role I've played coming in is the bringing a perspective from a larger enterprise on how does a larger enterprise an I t. Think about it and it's again. It's not just your helping me with storage. You're actually helping me to solve a business problem. So there's s oh, there's some other and some of the leaders that we've brought in. They also come from outside industry. Some have used pure, some have not, and so have that different kind of lens of what you know we would expect to see from our product seems, but they're also extremely open. Thio. What do you think? What is I t thinking about how you were thinking about these product ideas? What what's the input from I T. So there's a lot of what we're very small from a nightie organization. I think that the two way communication is what it's gonna you know, what will help, >> what are some of the innovations? And I know you've only had a short tenure there, but one of the things I read in the Q two earnings but that we're just released last month in August was seven. That new customers added per business safer pierce of 450 or so, plus customers at it in that quarter but also a 50% increase in multimillion dollar deals. So, enterprise, any innovations that you can share since you've been on board that your team has helped cure, understood to be able to go after those large enterprise multimillion dollar deals directly. >> Well, certainly from, um, you know, from a you know, a personal understanding of the product and what here could do it scale is, you know, I certainly have that perspective to share with our customers and bringing that confidence and credibility that, you know, if you are looking at a large enterprise customer in the opportunity, they have a lot of questions about. So how exactly did 18 t do it? It's not like they run a few arrays. They run hundreds and hundreds of rays and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes. So there's It's not like it's a proof of concept or a pilot. And it's been years of doing upgrades, non disruptive Lee over the years, with all the pure upgrades that have come into play. So I can certainly bring that to the table with helping the customers to get it, you know, a little bit of confidence, but also just an understanding about how pure is approaching it with these other large customers. So and as you've talked to other customers, there's there's enough customers out there that are, you know, very, >> very eager to >> share because they're so excited about what it's done for their business. We've >> heard. Sorry, David, I was going to say on the customer front we've, what 6600 plus customers pure now has in its 1st 10 years. And the customers we've spoken to the last two days, Dave and I have noticed that a common theme is they're talking about their overall experience with the technology. They're not talking about boxes and array names, and all these specifics are talking about how they are able to one customer from, ah, legal firm, I think in Florida didn't even do a PC had appear. That was a pure customer. And from that piers advice. I got it right on board and was really talking about the experience and all of the things to your point on the business side that they're able to to influence with the technology, not talking about speeds and feeds and arrange drives and things like that. So it's very, very different conversation. >> It's S O. It's interesting because and the role that I had, I had the teams that did the architecture, planning, design and through implementation. So the operation teams one of the most unique things I've said I share with customers is when you are in a technology and you're in a large enterprise, you tend to have a challenge with introducing new technology because you don't want more technical debt. It doesn't matter what you just don't want more technical debt. So typically your operation teams are >> doing a little >> bit of pushback on you. No, no, we don't need something new. No, we don't need unless they're having significant outages or incidents that they're trying to solve for what I found. And even to this day, there is some of the folks there actually around the floor here. The folks that were in operations, they were literally coming and saying, We want more pure And so when you're in a technology organisation that typically doesn't happen. It's S o it wasn't And it wasn't like we want more of like you said the array, it was we just want we don't wanna have to worry about. And I just took a reduction of my head count. So I want I find you have to take on more data and I am. You take on more support for the business. I don't have to worry about it. And so to have that. That's a very different. And we had the same experience of their application team saying, Hey, I just got lower latents. So they didn't actually know why. They just knew that when I was trying to do my work on the application side, working within a database, all the sudden I had all this improvement and, um and so what? We allowed them to sit. Okay, well, we'll give you more capabilities, more future functionality. And that doesn't happen. Before, those were things were like, really like operations and application teams are gonna work as a team together. Very different. I'm experience. >> So if I were a pure sales rep, I would say, >> Kathy, can you come tell my customers my prospect that >> story to the sales reps have access to your calendar? How much of your time? How much time you spend, you know, sales folks wanting you to tell stories like I got >> so the I have no the company that long. So I have I have spent a fair amount of my time talking to customers. But, you know, we also have a lot of work with an I t. And so are you know it's there just is incentive to have me work with an i. T. Because I can understand what we need to do to help our field as well. And that's one of our objectives is what are we gonna do an I t. To make it that much easier and better for not just our sales teams but the manufacturing teams. The support teams are hardware, teams, all the teams that takes a deliver. And so, you know, in fairness, I have joked with some that have stopped me and said, Hey, we need to I said, Remember, we also want to deliver for you so that to make your jobs easier So there's a balance >> that it's different. A technology company writes kind of encouraged that the C I. O goes out and evangelize is >> Yeah, it's actually a lot of fun. I, uh I I do joke that when I go out to talkto the other CEOs, I mean, they're my people there, too. I know it's It's the challenges that we have to deal with. The you know, you're dealing with the technology, those very specific items, then you're dealing with that. How do we help my business and then you're dealing with. I want to make sure I'm doing the right things for people development and all those so and you have a lens across the entire enterprise. So it's not like you're just looking at sales or you're just looking at ops for your You're kind of looking at everything to say, Well, how do I help all the teams to be that much better? Because the better we are, you know, be cliche. You know, collectively, that just got is gonna enable pure toe to do more fun. >> So what's on the minds of your peers in these days? >> You know, I feel so fortunate to be in the Bay Area, and there are amazing CEOs that get together, talk very openly, share strategies, actually eagerly and openly reach out to say, How can I help you? Um, and that's I think that's a unique as part of the CIA, a community that there's this willingness to say, Look, we're all in this together from a technology perspective. I mean, look, we all want to do well for our companies, but you're also trying to figure out how to make technology team stronger and you know it's a lot of the the same issues. It's how do I change the focus of and the perception of where I t fits into a business that it's not just a back office? It's not these systems, but it's actually becoming a very strategic, you know, Enabler, advisor, participant Helping to help, you know, can provide input. You can be that one of the first you know, Betas for your company if you're in a technology area and that's a change. There's a lot of companies who have always fascinated where it's like if you're a product and you have an I T. You're selling to those people, so pitch to them. If you can't sell to them, you're not gonna be successful. So I think it's just changing, evolving. You know some of those relationships and and that's a big deal and and you know, that's from the how you run your organization. There's that, you know, how do we make sure that the technologies were were all investing in our somewhat future proof and that they can evolve with us, not become inhibitors or, you know, box you into something that you can't kind of navigate through >> well, actually deliver on future proof. It's one of those marketing terms that is used by so many organizations delivering whatever kind of product. Same is with simple and seamless says We talk about this all the time. We did hear from customers wherever Green is concerned. You know, I said, non disruptive is how much of that goes from a marketing to reality and consistently heard about Piers ability to deliver their. But it's interesting and it's a refreshing, I think, to hear that you've experienced the changing role of the CEO to be collaborative versus he knows a lot of competition. And in tech, that's a refreshing The deer And I have an idea for you since you're so you're in such a habit to D'oh, it's good. What? You're gonna like this. I have an idea. Hash tag. Help Cathy Scale. Give them this video. Just so many pure customers all across the globe. >> Thank you. I will do that. I would. That's great advice. >> That's it. Easy to d'oh! D'oh! Well, Cathy's been great having you on the Cube. Thank you for sharing your perspective as there newish. See Io and how you went from here customer to running their i t. And congratulations on being part of the next decade of pure success. Thank you. Thank you for having our pleasure for day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin Day Volante is my co host were a pure accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas. A couple of guests joining us. Next. Please welcome Barack elected director product management for slunk. Welcome back to the Cube. Thank you. And guess who's back. Von Stewart. V. P. A. Technology from pure Avon. Welcome back. >> Hey, thanks for having us guys really excited about this topic. >> We are too. All right, so But we'll start with you. Since you're so excited in your nice orange pocket square is peeking out of your jacket there. Talk about the Splunk, your relationship. Long relationship, new offerings, joint value. What's going on? >> Great set up. So Splunk impure have had a long relationship around accelerating customers analytics The speed at which they can get their questions answered the rate at which they could ingest data right to build just more sources. Look at more data, get faster time to take action. However, I shouldn't be leading this conversation because Split Split has released a new architecture, a significant evolution if you will from the traditional Splunk architectural was built off of Daz and a shared nothing architecture. Leveraging replicas, right? Very similar what you'd have with, like, say, in H D. F s Work it load or H c. I. For those who aren't in the analytic space, they've released the new architecture that's disaggregated based off of cashing and an object store construct called Smart Store, which Broth is the product manager for? >> All right, tell us about that. >> So we release a smart for the future as part of spunk Enterprise. $7 to about a near back back in September Timeframe. Really Genesis or Strong Smart Strong goes back to the key customer problem that we were looking to solve. So one of our customers, they're already ingesting a large volume of data, but the need to retain the data for twice, then one of Peter and in today's architecture, what it required was them to kind of lean nearly scale on the amount of hardware. What we realized it. Sooner or later, all customers are going to run into this issue. But if they want in just more data or reading the data for longer periods, of time, they're going to run into this cost ceiling sooner or later on. The challenge is that into this architecture, today's distributes killer dark picture that we have today, which of all, about 10 years back, with the evolution of the Duke in this particular architecture, the computer and story Jacqui located. And because computer storage acqua located, it allows us to process large volumes of data. But if you look at the demand today, we can see that the demand for storage or placing the demand for computer So these are, too to directly opposite trans that we're seeing in the market space. If you need to basically provide performance at scale, there needs to be a better model. They need a better solution than what we had right now. So that's the reason we basically brought Smart store on denounced availability last September. What's Marceau brings to the table is that a D couples computer and storage, So now you can scale storage independent of computers, so if you need more storage or if you need to read in for longer periods of time, you can just kill independent on the storage and with level age, remote object stores like Bill Flash bid to provide that data depository. But most of your active data said still decides locally on the indexers. So what we did was basically broke the paradigm off computer storage location, and we had a small twist. He said that now the computer stories can be the couple, but you bring comfort and stories closer together only on demand. So that means that when you were running a radio, you know, we're running a search, and whenever the data is being looked for that only when we bring the data together. The other key thing that we do is we have an active data set way ensure that the smart store has ah, very powerful cash manager that allows that ensures that the active data set is always very similar to the time when your laptop, the night when your laptop has active data sets always in the cash always on memory. So very similar to that smarts for cash allows you to have active data set always locally on the index. Start your search performance is not impact. >> Yes, this problem of scaling compute and storage independently. You mentioned H. D. F s you saw it early on there. The hyper converged guys have been trying to solve this problem. Um, some of the database guys like snowflakes have solved it in the cloud. But if I understand correctly, you're doing this on Prem. >> So we're doing this board an on Prem as well as in Cloud. So this smart so feature is already available on tramp were also already using a host all off our spun cloud deployments as well. It's available for customers who want obviously deploy spunk on AWS as well. >> Okay, where do you guys fit in? So we >> fit in with customers anywhere from on the hate say this way. But on the small side, at the hundreds of terabytes up into the tens and hundreds of petabytes side. And that's really just kind of shows the pervasiveness of Splunk both through mid market, all the way up through the through the enterprise, every industry and every vertical. So where we come in relative to smart store is we were a coat co developer, a launch partner. And because our object offering Flash Blade is a high performance object store, we are a little bit different than the rest of the Splunk s story partner ecosystem who have invested in slow more of an archive mode of s tree right, we have always been designed and kind of betting on the future would be based on high performance, large scale object. And so we believe smart store is is a ah, perfect example, if you will, of a modern analytics platform. When you look at the architecture with smart store as brush here with you, you want to suffice a majority of your queries out of cash because the performance difference between reading out a cash that let's say, that's NAND based or envy. Emmy based or obtain, if you will. When you fall, you have to go read a data data out of the Objects store, right. You could have a significant performance. Trade off wean mix significantly minimized that performance drop because you're going to a very high bandwith flash blade. We've done comparison test with other other smart store search results have been published in other vendors, white papers and we show Flash blade. When we run the same benchmark is 80 times faster and so what you can now have without architecture is confidence that should you find yourself in a compliance or regulatory issue, something like Maybe GDP are where you've got 72 hours to notify everyone who's been impacted by a breach. Maybe you've got a cybersecurity case where the average time to find that you've been penetrated occurs 206 days after the event. And now you gotta go dig through your old data illegal discovery, you know, questions around, you know, customer purchases, purchases or credit card payments. Any time where you've got to go back in the history, we're gonna deliver those results and order of magnitude faster than any other object store in the market today. That translates from ours. Today's days, two weeks, and we think that falls into our advantage. Almost two >> orders of magnitude. >> Can this be Flash Player >> at 80%? Sorry, Katie. Time 80 x. Yes, that's what I heard. >> Do you display? Consider what flashlight is doing here. An accelerant of spunk, workloads and customer environment. >> Definitely, because the forward with the smart, strong cash way allow high performance at scale for data that's recites locally in the cash. But now, by using a high performance object store like your flash played. Customers can expect the same high performing board when data is in the cash as well as invented sin. Remorseful >> sparks it. Interesting animal. Um, yeah, you have a point before we >> subjects. Well, I don't want to cut you off. It's OK. So I would say commenting on the performance is just part of the equation when you look at that, UM, common operational activities that a splitting, not a storage team. But a Splunk team has to incur right patch management, whether it's at the Splunk software, maybe the operating system, like linen store windows, that spunk is running on, or any of the other components on side on that platform. Patch Management data Re balancing cause it's unequal. Equally distributed, um, hardware refreshes expansion of the cluster. Maybe you need more computer storage. Those operations in terms of time, whether on smart store versus the classic model, are anywhere from 100 to 1000 times faster with smart store so you could have a deployment that, for example, it takes you two weeks to upgrade all the notes, and it gets done in four hours when it's on Smart store. That is material in terms of your operational costs. >> So I was gonna say, Splunk, we've been watching Splunk for a long time. There's our 10th year of doing the Cube, not our 10th anniversary of our 10th year. I think it will be our ninth year of doing dot com. And so we've seen Splunk emerged very cool company like like pure hip hip vibe to it. And back in the day, we talked about big data. Splunk never used that term, really not widely in its marketing. But then when we started to talk about who's gonna own the big data, that space was a cloud era was gonna be mad. We came back. We said, It's gonna be spunk and that's what's happened. Spunk has become a workload, a variety of workloads that has now permeated the organization, started with log files and security kind of kind of cumbersome. But now it's like everywhere. So I wonder if you could talk to the sort of explosion of Splunk in the workloads and what kind of opportunity this provides for you guys. >> So a very good question here, Right? So what we have seen is that spunk has become the de facto platform for all of one structure data as customers start to realize the value of putting their trying to Splunk on the watch. Your spunk is that this is like a huge differentiate of us. Monk is the read only skim on reed which allows you to basically put all of the data without any structure and ask questions on the flight that allows you to kind of do investigations in real time, be more reactive. What's being proactive? We be more proactive. Was being reactive scaleable platform the skills of large data volumes, highly available platform. All of that are the reason why you're seeing an increase that option. We see the same thing with all other customers as well. They start off with one data source with one use case and then very soon they realize the power of Splunk and they start to add additional use cases in just more and more data sources. >> But this no >> scheme on writer you call scheme on Reed has been so problematic for so many big data practitioners because it just became the state of swamp. >> That didn't >> happen with Splunk. Was that because you had very defined use cases obviously security being one or was it with their architectural considerations as well? >> They just architecture, consideration for security and 90 with the initial use cases, with the fact that the scheme on Reid basically gives open subject possibilities for you. Because there's no structure to the data, you can ask questions on the fly on. You can use that to investigate, to troubleshoot and allies and take remedial actions on what's happening. And now, with our new acquisitions, we have added additional capabilities where we can talk, orchestrate the whole Anto and flow with Phantom, right? So a lot of these acquisitions also helping unable the market. >> So we've been talking about TAM expansion all week. We definitely hit it with Charlie pretty hard. I have. You know, I think it's a really important topic. One of things we haven't hit on is tam expansion through partnerships and that flywheel effect. So how do you see the partners ship with Splunk Just in terms of supporting that tam expansion the next 10 years? >> So, uh, analytics, particularly log and Alex have really taken off for us in the last year. As we put more focus on it, we want to double down on our investments as we go through the end of this year and in the next year with with a focus on Splunk um, a zealous other alliances. We think we are in a unique position because the rollout of smart store right customers are always on a different scale in terms of when they want to adopt a new architecture right. It is a significant decision that they have to make. And so we believe between the combination of flash array for the hot tear and flash played for the cold is a nice way for customers with classic Splunk architecture to modernize their platform. Leverage the benefits of data reduction to drive down some of the cost leverage. The benefits of Flash to increase the rate at which they can ask questions and get answers is a nice stepping stone. And when customers are ready because Flash Blade is one of the few storage platforms in the market at this scale out band with optimized for both NFS and object, they can go through a rolling nondestructive upgrade to smart store, have you no investment protection, and if they can't repurpose that flash rate, they can use peers of service to have the flesh raise the hot today and drop it back off just when they're done within tomorrow. >> And what about C for, you know, big workloads, like like big data workloads. I mean, is that a good fit here? You really need to be more performance oriented. >> So flash Blade is is high bandwith optimization, which really is designed for workload. Like Splunk. Where when you have to do a sparse search, right, we'll find that needle in the haystack question, right? Were you breached? Where were you? Briefed. How were you breached? Go read as much data as possible. You've gotta in just all that data, back to the service as fast as you can. And with beast Cloud blocked, Teresi is really optimized it a tear to form of NAND for that secondary. Maybe transactional data base or virtual machines. >> All right, I want more, and then I'm gonna shut up sick. The signal FX acquisition was very interesting to me for a lot of reasons. One was the cloud. The SAS portion of Splunk was late to that game, but now you're sort of making that transition. You saw Tableau you saw Adobe like rip the band Aid Off and it was somewhat painful. But spunk is it. So I wonder. Any advice that you spend Splunk would have toe von as pure as they make that transition to that sass model. >> So I think definitely, I think it's going to be a challenging one, but I think it's a much needed one in there in the environment that we are in. The key thing is to always because two more focus and I'm sure that you're already our customer focus. But the key is key thing is to make sure that any service is up all the time on make sure that you can provide that up time, which is going to be crucial for beating your customers. Elise. >> That's good. That's good guidance. >> You >> just wanted to cover that for you favor of keeping you date. >> So you gave us some of those really impressive stats In terms of performance. >> They're almost too good to be true. >> Well, what's customer feedback? Let's talk about the real world when you're talking to customers about those numbers. What's the reaction? >> So I don't wanna speak for Broth, so I will say in our engagements within their customer base, while we here, particularly from customers of scale. So the larger the environment, the more aggressive they are to say they will adopt smart store right and on a more aggressive scale than the smaller environments. And it's because the benefits of operating and maintaining the indexer cluster are are so great that they'll actually turn to the stores team and say, This is the new architecture I want. This is a new storage platform and again. So when we're talking about patch management, cluster expansion Harbor Refresh. I mean, you're talking for a large sum. Large installs weeks, not two or 3 10 weeks, 12 weeks on end so it can be. You can reduce that down to a couple of days. It changes your your operational paradigm, your staffing. And so it has got high impact. >> So one of the message that we're hearing from customers is that it's far so they get a significant reduction in the infrastructure spent it almost dropped by 2/3. That's really significant file off our large customers for spending a ton of money on infrastructure, so just dropping that by 2/3 is a significant driver to kind of move too smart. Store this in addition to all the other benefits that get smart store with operational simplicity and the ability that it provides. You >> also have customers because of smart store. They can now actually bursts on demand. And so >> you can think of this and kind of two paradigms, right. Instead of >> having to try to avoid some of the operational pain, right, pre purchase and pre provisional large infrastructure and hope you fill it up. They could do it more of a right sides and kind of grow in increments on demand, whether it's storage or compute. That's something that's net new with smart store um, they can also, if they have ah, significant event occur. They can fire up additional indexer notes and search clusters that can either be bare metal v ems or containers. Right Try to, you know, push the flash, too. It's Max. Once they found the answers that they need gotten through. Whatever the urgent issues, they just deep provisionals assets on demand and return back down to a steady state. So it's very flexible, you know, kind of cloud native, agile platform >> on several guys. I wish we had more time. But thank you so much fun. And Deron, for joining David me on the Cube today and sharing all of the innovation that continues to come from this partnership. >> Great to see you appreciate it >> for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the Cube?

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. (air whooshes) >> Welcome to theCUBE's day two coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019 from Austin, Texas. I am Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, here is VP of Strategy Matt Kixmoeller. Kix, welcome back! >> Thank you very much, happy to be here. >> This has been a, being shot out of a cannon. Yesterday and today, lots of news. First of all, happy 10th anniversary to you and Pure. >> Thank you very much, yeah. >> Tremendous amount of innovation, as Tara Lee said yesterday, overnight in 10 years. (laughs) >> It's a really fun time at Pure. Just something about the nostalgia of 10 years gets people, naturally, to start thinking about what the next 10 years are about. And so, there's just a lot of that spirit right now at the company, so it's almost like people are really charging into the second chapter with a lot of energy, so that's cool. >> A lot of energy, I think, all fueled by this massive sea of orange that has descended on Austin. >> Absolutely. >> So, four announcements yesterday. Let's start with Cloud Block Store, what you guys are doing with AWS, and kind of this vision of Pure's cloud strategy. >> Yeah, look, the cloud discussions I've had with customers here at the show have been awesome. And I think more than anything, people have realized that we've really built something very unique with Cloud Block Store, something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry right now. And, you know, if you look at kind of other storage vendors over the time, people have certainly taken their storage OSes and put them in the cloud kind of as a test-dev experiment, a way to try things out, but never really thinking, "I want to build something "that runs tier-one applications." And that was our goal from day one. We looked at the Amazon platform and said, they really built EBS, their block offering, as kind of a way to beat boot VMs, but it was really never meant for a way to run mission-critical applications. So they've been very open in partnering with us to say, look, let's bring this capability onto the platform. And we really rearchitected our Purity Operating Environment, and so, the whole lower half of that is really optimized for the AWS services to help customers move tier-one apps to the cloud. >> Was that joint engineering, or was it really mostly Pure doing that work? >> You know, it was Pure engineering in the sense that we wrote the code, but there was a lot of co-architecture work with AWS so we could fundamentally understand the basics of all of their services and how to optimize for it. And one of the big realizations and choices that came out of that was not to base the storage layer of this on EBS, but instead to base it on S3. And if you look at your average cloud customer, they really use S3 as the storage basis for the apps they build on Amazon, and so, S3 is the 11-nines durable storage platform there. And so our whole goal here was, how do you use S3, but still deliver the level of performance you'd expect out of a tier-one block environment? >> Well, when you read the sort of cloud storage press release du jour, you can't really get into the nuance, but if I understand it correctly, you guys essentially have architected, using AWS services, a new class of block storage that runs on AWS, but looks like Pure. >> That's exactly it. >> So you're essentially front-ending cheap S3 storage with high-priority EC2s, you've got some mirroring for rights to give it high availability, and again, it looks like Pure. >> Kix: Yep. >> So you win, 'cause you're making money on the software, (laughs) AWS is selling services, and the customer has a Pure experience. Did we get that right? >> Yeah, and I think the combination, the one-two punch, that's been very interesting for customers is not only what we're doing with Cloud Block Store, but the new Pure as-a-Service offering. And so, Pure as-a-Service is our as-a-service consumption mechanism that allows you to essentially subscribe to or rent Pure arrays from Pure in your data center, but it's a license that can go between on-prem and cloud. And so, imagine you're a customer that is mostly on-prem today, but you have that mandate, "I've got to get to the cloud." You might need more storage, but the last thing you want to do is commit to another three- or five-year purchase of a storage array that just puts off that cloud journey that much longer. So a customer can subscribe to Pure as-a-Service, they'll maybe subscribe to 100 terabytes, and we put an array in their data center right now, but a year from now, they decide they're going to move 50 terabytes to Cloud Block Store in Amazon, that's just a transparent movement, they're already licensed for it. And so that-- >> And there's already, oh, sorry, sorry. >> Kix: No, go ahead. >> There's already customers that are in beta with Cloud Block Store, is that correct? >> Correct, yeah. >> Lisa: Any interesting insights that you can share without giving away secret sauce? >> Oh, absolutely. You know, I think the thing that pleased us the most about the beta was really the divergence of use cases. You know, we created this, but there's always, you create something, and you don't know what people are going to do with it, right? And so, we have this goal of going after tier-one apps. Obviously, there's a lot of people that are just focused on migration, "How do I get the tier-one app from on-prem to cloud?" And so that was what I would say would be the dominant use case. But there were a lot of interested in test-dev type use cases. And really interesting, I think we saw it in both directions. So we saw some customers who wanted to develop their app in the cloud, but then deploy on-prem. We saw the opposite, we saw people that wanted to develop on-prem but then deploy in the scalable infrastructure in the cloud. And so I thought that was quite interesting. >> How much of the impetus to do that offering was hardcore customer demand, "We need this," versus, "Hey, we need to embrace the cloud "and make it a tailwind and not be defensive about it"? >> You know, I think when we looked at what was going to be the buy-in criteria for the storage array of tomorrow, fundamentally, this is it, right? People want on-prem infrastructure that's connected to the cloud and provides them a roadmap or a bridge to the cloud. And I think we've seen a big change in mindset over even the last couple years. I'd say two or three years ago, the mindset from customers was, "I'm all in on cloud." I think we've seen that soften, where they've realized that the cloud is not a panacea, it's usually actually not cheaper or faster, but it is more agile, it is more flexible, and so, a combination of on-prem and cloud is the right answer. And so, what does that mean from a storage platform? Storage is the hard part. And so, I then need a storage architecture that can support both on-prem and cloud and drive commonality, as opposed to having it be totally different architecture. >> Was Outposts at all a catalyst in your thinking on this, or was this happening way before you even saw that? >> No, we started this effort before that, but I think Outposts is a good example, I believe, of how Amazon is just getting serious about saying, look, we can't ask everybody to rearchitect every application for web scale. There are certain apps that it won't make sense to rearchitect. How do we bring those to the cloud in an efficient way? And those are really the types of applications and the first-generation Cloud Block Store is perfect for. You connect your existing on-prem app, move it to the cloud without changing it, and then maybe slowly you rearchitect parts of the application, you evolve it over time, but that's not a gate to going to the cloud anymore. >> I like the way you said it, you thought about what storage is going to look like in the next 10 years. And we've said this a lot, it's the cloud experience, bringing that cloud experience to your data is what storage is going to look like, you know, wherever it lives, is going to look like in the next 10 years. >> Absolutely, and I think the other real mindset shift I think we've seen is how people are thinking about truly running their on-prem environment more like a service. You know, if you look at, the key message that we had at the show here was really the Modern Data Experience, and defining for customers what that meant. And in a lot of ways, I've been in the storage industry for a little while, I think back, 20 years ago, the buzzword was utility storage. I think one of our competitors had that as their slogan sometime in the '90s. >> Yeah, right. >> And the reality, though, is when you talk to most storage teams, they just never did that. They still ran a bunch of arrays on a project-by-project basis, and it didn't look at all like the cloud. And so, now people have learned the lessons from the public cloud and said, "We really need to apply those on-prem "to truly bring our infrastructure together "into much more of a virtual pool, "truly deliver it on demand, abstract consumption "from the back-end infrastructure to give flexibility." And so, that's really what we're trying to deliver with the Modern Storage Experience, is to say, look, let's get out of the world of array-by-array management. If a customer buys 50 or 100 of our arrays, how do they take that pool of arrays and turn it into a block service, turn it into a file service, turn it into an object service for their customers, with real abstractions and real APIs for those services that have nothing to do with the back-end infrastructure? >> Dave: Mm-hm. >> When Charlie talked yesterday, Kix, about the Modern Data Experience, the three S's pop up. >> Kix: Yeah. (clears throat) >> Simple, seamless, sustainable. But as IT is getting more and more complex, and customers are in a multi-cloud environment, not necessarily from a strategic perspective, right, acquisition, et cetera, how does Pure actually take that word, simple, from a marketing concept into reality for your customers? >> Yeah, you know, I think simple is the most underappreciated but biggest differentiator (coughs) that Pure has. I was recalling for someone, you talked to Coz earlier today. I had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of Pure, (coughs) excuse me, with Coz, and we were just debating, I mean, this is before we wrote any code at all, about, what would be Pure's long-term differentiator? And I was kind of like, "Ah, we'll be the flash people, or high-performance, or whatever," and he's like, "No, no, no, we're going to be simple. "We are going to deliver a culture that drives "simplicity into our products, "and that'll be game-changing." And I thought he was a little crazy at the time, but he's absolutely turned out to be right. And if you look over the years, that started with just an appliance experience, a 10-card install, just a really easy environment. But that's manifested itself into every product we create. And it's really hard to reverse-engineer that. It's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build into the DNA of the company. >> Yeah, he kind of shared that with us, Lisa. He was basically, my words, saying, you don't ever want to suboptimize simple to get a little knob turn on performance, because you'll be turning knobs your entire career. There's a lot of storage arrays out there that, it's all about turning the knobs. >> Kix: Yeah, well-- >> If you can't fix it, you feature it. >> Oh, and if you think about really trying to automate something, it's really hard to automate complex stuff. If something's simple, if it's consistent, it plugs into an automation framework. >> You talked about "get your 10X"-- >> Kix: Yeah. >> I think, is that what you said? And an entrepreneur who was very successful once told me, "I look for two things, a large market and a 10X impact." >> Yep. >> So, what is your 10X? >> You know, we have two 10Xs at the show this year. So first was really kind of a 10-year jump in performance. When we first entered, people were used to 10-millisecond latency from disk, and we introduced them to one-millisecond latency. Now, with the shipping in direct memory and bringing SCM into the architecture, we can do 100 microseconds. That's another 10X. And so, it's hard to ignore that. >> Lisa: That's game-changing, as you said yesterday. >> (coughs) Exactly. The other is really around our next product, FlashArray C, which brings flash to tier-two data. And there, it's all about consolidation. Most people have not used flash to fix tier one, but their biggest problem now is tier two. They have less-important applications, but because they haven't optimized that, it's taking up way too much of IT time. And so, FlashArray C is, "How do I go "and basically consolidate 10X consolidation "at that tier-two level to really bring "sanity to tier-two storage?" >> And you've got NAM pricing, we talked to Charlie about this, that it ultimately should be a tailwind for you guys as NAM pricing comes down, as NOR fab capacity's coming online in China to go after the thumb drives, right, so that's going to leave the enterprise for all the traditional flash guys that we know and love. So that should open up new markets for you. Today, if you look at pricing for flash C class storage, if I got it right, I'm guessing $1, $1.50 a gigabyte. You see hybrid still at probably half that, 65, 70 cents. Do you see that compressing over the next, let's call it 18, 24 months? >> Absolutely, I mean, what we can do with this product is really bring out flash at disk prices. And so, if you think about the difference, I mean, what we now have in the product line is two platforms, FlashArray X, optimized for performance, at hundreds of microseconds of latency, but C, at a little bit slower performance, still in the millisecond range, can really get down now to those disk prices you just mentioned. And so, it fundamentally gives customers the chance to ask, "Can I really now eliminate disk from the data center?" You know, as I said in my keynote, that the slogan from Pure from day one has been "the all-flash data center." And 10 years ago, people didn't believe it. We were maybe leaning over our skis a little bit in doing that. It now really feels possible to go and have the all-flash data center. >> Well, I'll tell you, we believed it. David Floyer picked up on it early on, and he was-- >> Kix: Yeah. >> He was actually probably too aggressive with (laughs) his forecast. We missed the NAND supply constraints. >> Kix: Yeah. >> But now that seems to be loosening up. >> Well, and, look, one of the things that really helps us build the perfect product around QLC is the work we've done to integrate with raw flash. We cannot just use QLC, but we can use it really efficiently, and the challenge there is to make it reliable. It's inherently a less-reliable flash. And so, that's what we're good at, taking things that are less reliable and making them enterprise-grade. >> And your custom flash modules allow that? >> Yeah. >> Can you add some color to that? >> Basically, what we do is we source raw NANDs, put it in our system, but then do all the work in software to manage the flash. And so, when you have a less-reliable flash medium like QLC, generally, what you have to do is add more flash to overprovision and be careful writing to it. And so, when do it globally, we don't do it inside every SSD, we can do it across the whole system, which makes the whole thing more efficient, thus allowing us to drive costs down even more. >> Hm. >> One of the things that we have heard over the last day and a half from customers, even those that were onstage yesterday, those that were on theCUBE yesterday and those that will come on today, is, they talk about the customer experience. They don't talk about FlashBlade, FlashArray, they're not talking about product names. They're talking about maybe workloads that they're running on there. But the interesting thing is, when we go to some other shows, you hear a lot of names of boxes. >> Kix: Yep. >> We haven't heard that. Talk to me a little bit about how Pure has evolved and really maybe even created this customer experience that's focused on simplicity, on outcomes, that is, in your perspective, why people aren't talking about the specific technologies-- >> Kix: Yeah. >> But rather, this single pane of glass that they have. >> Look, when we started the company, I obviously talked to a lot of customers, and I found, in general, there was frustration with products, but they also just generally didn't like their storage company. And so, from day one, we said, how do we reinvent the experience? Of course, we have to build a better product, and we can use flash as kind of an excuse to do that, but we also want to work on the business model of storage, and we also want to work on the customer experience, the support experience, the just 360 view of how you deal with a vendor. And so, from day one, we've been very disciplined about all of that. Going all-flash was a key part of the product. Evergreen has probably been our quintessential investment in just, how do you change that buying cycle? And so, you can buy into an experience and nondisrupt the way they evolve, versus replace your storage array every three to five years. And then, I think the overall customer experience just comes from the culture of the company, right? Everybody at Pure is centered on making customers happy, doing the right thing, being a vendor that you actually want to work with. And that's not something you can really legislate, that's not something you can put rules around, it's just the culture at Pure. >> When we talked about Evergreen yesterday with a number of customers, including Formula 1. I said, "You know, as a marketer, "how much of that nondisruptive operations, "take me from marketing to reality," and all of them articulated the exact value prop that you guys talk about. It was really remarkable. And another customer that we talked to, I think from a legal firm here in the U.S., didn't even do a POC, talked to a peer of his at another company that was a Pure fan-- >> Kix: Yep. >> And (snaps fingers) bought it right on the spot. So the validation that you're getting from the voice of the customer is pretty remarkable. >> Yeah, this is our number one asset, right? And I mean, so when we think about, how do we spread the religion of Pure, it's just all about giving voice to our customers, so they can share their stories. 'Cause that's so much more credible than anything we say, obviously, as a vendor. >> You're one of only two billion-dollar independent storage companies, which, we love independent storage companies, 'cause, you know, the competition's great. How far out do you look and do you think about being an independent storage company? You've seen, as a "somewhat" historian of the industry, you've seen TAM expansion, you guys are working hard on TAM expansion now, new workloads. You got backup stuff goin' on. You got the cloud as an opportunity, multi-cloud as an opportunity. So you got some runway there. >> Yeah. >> Beyond that, you've seen companies try to vertically integrate, buy backup software companies, you know, a converged infrastructure, whatever it is. How far out do you think about it from a business model standpoint? Or do you not worry about that? >> You know, look, to put it in context a little bit, you look at the latest IDC numbers, we're maybe one-third in to the transition to flash, right? The world still buys two-thirds disk, one-third flash. That's a huge opportunity. We're now five or six globally in storage. That's a few spots that we have to go, right? And so, we're not at all market-share limited, or opportunity limited, even within the storage industry, so we could make a much, much larger company. And so, that's mission number one at Pure. But when we think beyond that, that's just a launching point. And so, you've seen us do some stuff here at the show where we're getting into different types of storage. The first obvious expansion is, let's make sure anything that is a storage product comes from Pure, and there's obvious categories we don't play in today. You saw us introduce a new product around VM Analytics Pro, where we're reaching up the stack and adding real value at the VM tier, taking our Meta AI technology and using to give VM-level optimization recommendations. And so, yeah, I think we increasingly understand that IT's a full-stack game, and so storage is maybe the hardest part of the stack, and that gives us a great base to work from, but we don't constrain our engineers to say, you can only solve storage problems. >> Geography's another upside for you. I mean, most of your business, the vast majority of your business, is in the U.S., whereas you take a company like some of these other ones around here, more than half their business is outside the U.S, so. >> Yeah, no, our international businesses, we've been international five or six years now, and it felt like the first couple years are investment years, and it took time. But we're really starting to see them grow and take hold, and so, it's great to see the international business grow. And I think Pure as a company is also learning to really think internationally, not just because we want the opportunity, but the largest customers in the world that we now deal with have international operations, and they want to deal with one Pure globally. >> So when you're talking, and maybe this has even happened the last day and a half, with a prospective customer who is still investing a lot on-prem, still not yet gone the route of flash, as you were saying, those numbers speak for themselves. What do you say to them? >> If they're not on flash yet? >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah, to show them the benefits. I mean, what's that conversation like? >> It's rare, to be honest, now to find customers who haven't started with flash. But I think the biggest thing I try to encourage folks is that flash is not just about performance. And when I look at the history of people who have embraced Pure, they usually start with some performance need, but very quickly, they realize it's all about simplicity, it's all about efficiency. And if they can make storage fundamentally simpler and more efficient, they free up dollars to put towards innovation. And we unlock the ability to drive dollars towards innovation, and then we drive storage to the new innovation projects, like analytics, like AI, et cetera. And so, we just try to talk about that broader opportunity. And I think that's the hardest thing for people to grasp, because the IT history has always been lots of ROI pitches that say, "Hey, this thing costs a lot, but trust me, "you'll make it up in all these other benefits," that no one believes. And so, you just have to get them to taste it to begin with, and when they see it for themselves, that's when it clicks and they start to really understand the ROI around that. >> Well, congratulations on 10 years of Pure unlocking innovation, not just internally, but externally across the globe. We appreciate your time, Kix. >> Thank you, we're looking forward to the next 10 years. >> All right, to the next 10! For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 2019. (upbeat music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From Austin, Texas it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host. I'm at Pure accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas and Dave and I are really pleased to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, John Colgrove, Coz, CTO and founder of Pure Storage, Coz, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ah, I'm glad to be here thanks for having me. >> And happy 10th anniversary. So, 10 years ago I'm sure you couldn't have envisioned 3, 000 people, Austin being taken over by a sea of orange. But let's go back 10 years, Why did you found Pure Storage? >> Why did I found it? Well, I wasn't really ready to be retired yet. Flash, I started have seen from when I worked at Amdahl many years ago all the way through Veritas, I saw disks continuing to get bigger and bigger and effectively slower and slower. Cause when they don't get any faster and they get bigger, they get slower from by their data. And flash was a catalyst that was going to to change that. But it was the catalyst. What we really wanted to do was to completely change the storage industry. Everything that had annoyed me about the storage industries through all the years in Veritas, All the complexity, all the bad customer practices that the industry forced on people, I wanted to change all that. think of what you demand from your personal tech from your iphone or your laptop or your tablet. Customers should demand that kind of quality, service ability, ease of use from their enterprise IT gear. >> When I started my career in the early '80s I was at IDC and they didn't have a storage analyst. And I started following mainframes and I learned a lot about channel command words and IO subsystems and I came to the conclusion that this is a really hard thing, hard problem to solve. And, so, I got interested in it. You obviously did as well. I'm interested in when you went from Amdahl to Veritas, you had to do some unnatural acts with software to make IO better, 'cause of the spinning disk and understanding the latencies and the scatty chatty protocols and everything else. When you went and thought about Pure and when you think about great architects and I've obviously put you in that category, you chose flash, others like another great architect, Moshe have said you know what I can even squeeze more out of spinning disks. What led you to flash versus trying to squeeze more blood from the spinning disk stone? If I can phrase it that way. >> I think I tend to be more of an extremist on things like that. And I think that's been the key to Pure's success. We were not the first all flash startup. We were the first to focus on affordable flash. Right, if you're going to change the world you have to make something for everyone not for an elite few. But the other thing was we were all flash. There were a lot of other startups that were hybrids that were squeezing more out of the disk and we just went all flash from the beginning. Everything about us is all flash. So, as the future goes more and more towards all flash, we're in a stronger and stronger position. >> And you think that was the game changer that led Pure to be that unicorn that IPO'd four years ago versus those other startups who are trying to do similar things with flash? >> So, that focus helped us a lot with that. The biggest thing that, as I said before flash was a catalyst. The biggest thing we brought to the industry is the simplicity and the evergreen business model. And it's really cool to see all the big companies that we've competed against all these years mimicking a lot of that, but that's the differentiator. Flash was the catalyst that lets you do that. >> Well, so, I'm interested as a little bit of an industry historian and some of the factors that led to your ability to achieve escape velocity which used to be defined as an IPO. I mean, I would argue the 3PAR achieved its escape velocity, I was a $250 million company before it got acquired for 2.5 billion or whatever it was, never reached a billion never even came close. You were the first storage company since NetApp to achieve billion dollar revenue. And you're well on your way to 2 billion, you'll do probably 1.7 this year. In addition to what you've said are there other factors that we should consider in our B school case study on Pure? >> I think one of the things we've tried to do is we've tried to build a company that's going to be in it for that long term. So, we never wanted to settle for an acquisition. We want to build a long term enduring great brand and part of that you have to build more of a partnership with your customers. You have to be a good partner to your partners. Right, if you are short-term focused if you try to squeeze every dollar you can out of people, they don't like you, they don't want to come back. If you build something great and you partner well with the environment around you you can build something long lasting. And we wanted to do that from the beginning, we focused a lot on culture and things like that to help us do that. >> Well it's impressive, congratulations are in order, 'cause 3PAR couldn't do it, Compelling couldn't do it, Isilon, on and on and on. And and EMC at the time was really about EMC that's how you went after. They were able to do virtualization and freeze the market on 3PAR . They were able to do a low cost call it the compellant killer. They were never able to figure out, now maybe they got distracted with elliot management and everything else, but they were never able to figure out how to squash you guys. And that's impressive that you're able to live through that. >> Well, thanks. I mean one of the things we've always tried to do is be supremely disruptive, and that does make it harder for them. >> So, I got to ask I got to challenge you on a couple of things that have come out largely from your competitors but I want to get your take on it. The first one is scale out how come Pure doesn't scale out? I'll leave it there. I have my own thoughts that I've shared with Lisa but. Two controller design. >> Yeah one thing I'd point out is well, FLashBlade, one of our products, is scale out. Flash array, our first product, is not scale out. Scale out isn't a capability for a customer, it's an architecture in how you build the product. When I scale out I have more complicated software. I have more components. More components lead to more failures. Right, if I have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and I have 10 pieces of memory, I'm going to fail it 10 times that same rate. So, scale out introduces complexity, it introduces more components. And then you have to say what do you get from it. So, if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering, if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product, we'd then react to that and go build scale out. Where the flash array sells, we don't see that as a major market need, it's more of a niche. Where FlashBlade sells, then there is much more of a need for that and that's why FlashBlade was scale out from day one. >> Well my correct to that the other thing you get from scale out is non disruptive controller swaps but you've solved that in other ways right? >> You say you get non disruptive controller swaps, I will point out that if you look at these scale out architectures out there there's a set of them that do provide that, but actually the larger set of them don't provide it. Because what they're doing is they're making what they view and what the customer views as one monolithic array built from a set of scale out components. So, in those architectures you can't swap out one part of the scale out, you have to swap out the whole thing. >> The other thing I heard, I love this analogy is you don't really see planes anymore. You see them but you really don't want to fly 'em cause they're old with four engines versus two engines 'cause the two engine planes are so, much more reliable. All right the other question is on proprietary flash modules. You guys have chosen your philosophies, do things that you can't do with just off the shelf components. So, you've gone proprietary and this history there, I mean 3PAR with Custom ASICs but I'd like you to share with us your philosophy on what you're doing there. >> So, kind of, there's a couple dimensions to that. Number one, we have gone with proprietary flash modules but in our flash array, we could plug in off-the-shelf drives any time we want. And in fact today our XR2 line, the lower end models use off the shelf flash and the higher end models use the proprietary. What we get with the proprietary is our own firmware on there. Right, it's the same nanochips, the same nanocontrollers, it's all the same components but it's our firmware. And our firmware only has to support one application, our purity operating system. However the customer reads and writes data into the array, we write it the same way down to the flash. We read it back the same way from the flash. So, by making simpler firmware that only has to solve that one problem, we get better performance out of the flash. We get longer life out of the flash and we get order less that one third of the failures of flash drives. Now the flash drives we were using were already failing, a lot less than disk drives. But we've gotten better than three times the reliability by going to our own flash modules. >> Tiering, your philosophy on tiering. Five, 10 years ago there was a big thing on automated tiering, we're going to put the hot data on the high performance either disk or flash and the slow data on the cheap stuff. Your philosophy on tiering, I think I infer you don't believe in tiering. Why not? Or maybe I don't want to put words in our mouth. >> Well so, tiering is another thing that it adds complexity. So, why do you tier? You tier because you say oh I can't afford all of the better things so, I'm going to layer it in with something that's a little cheaper. If you can get by without tiering that's a better solution it's a simpler solution. >> Simplicity is a theme here. The copy of your acquisition your a file system guru to my knowledge what I've read about them, strong file system. What do you intend to do with that? it's concerned about it forking your existing products. How do you respond? >> So, the compuverde file system, we're going to put that on top of our flash array line and make that a unified architecture where you can support block in file. Compuverde is a very complete file protocol stack. And file protocols are a lot more complex than block protocols. Implementing all of the SMB protocol is not an easy thing it takes a bunch of time. So, it's a way to accelerate that and get a very complete protocol stack for that product. Flash blade will continue on with its own scale out file protocols, file and object protocols independent of that. >> Last question I had is on, there's some criticism that's been laid on you guys on the evergreen. The controller, performance of controller upgrades which I we have not heard, we didn't hear that from customers, we've asked some customers that, but I'd love to get your take on, why is there no guarantee of performance improvements as you go to subsequent controller swap outs. Your thoughts? >> So, what we guarantee is you'll get the like or better. So, you might get a new set of controllers that are perform about the same, you might get one a little better. Generally speaking every time we've done it so far it's moved to better. It doesn't move to radically better, but it moves to the better. So, we are guaranteeing that, it's just a question of how much do you chose to deliver with that. What you're doing is you're keeping the array new. It's not so much about making huge strides in the performance it's about keeping the array new. >> But there's another nuance there that I want to test I mean, just conceptionally it seems to me, because the way you ship software constantly that you're making incremental improvements throughout that three year period. First of all is that an accurate assertion? >> it's actually very accurate. The first time we started really looking at how much better we realized that we had moved the needle on the old gear about, I think it was about 60% up during the time period so, yeah there was sort of a little less gains. >> Okay, so, the proper measurement is okay from what's the performance from day one delta to the controller upgrade? That is more significant versus the controller swap day, whatever and plus one if that makes sense. >> Well, I think both are valid ways to look at it. The biggest thing is the customer doesn't have to migrate and the migrations are the most horrible event in storage. Right it's like moving your house for everyone who has moved, you got to pack everything up. Things could get broken things could get lost, it's just a mess. You don't have to do that and the array just gets bigger, denser, more power efficient it gets better and better over time. And you're on that forever, we are happy to do controller swaps after three years, six years, nine years, 12 years. We will continue to do that as long as customers are paying for that it's our job to keep improving it and to keep making it better. >> We've done a lot of research on array migrations. At a minimum, your anti to do a array migration is $50,000. That's what our data shows. We talk to a very large practitioner last night he said, "When I'm doing an array migration I start six "to eight months ahead of time because it takes that long "to do an array migration, array migrations are horrendous "and anything you can do to avoid those is worth it." So, that's all I had that awesome. Thank you for addressing those questions. >> So, the acceleration, pun intended, that Pure has achieved in its first 10 years we talk about customers all the time we've had a number on yesterday from law firms to utilities to F1, we'll have more on today. But in order to achieve what Pure has, you have had to build a culture that's pretty unique. One, this vibrant orange color that just screams energy, boldness too, we're in Austin, Texas, Dell Technology's backyard. Give us a little bit as we wrap here about how you and your co-founders have developed and really fostered this culture of passion that is delivering more than your competitors would like to see. >> Well, so, one of the things that was a key part of the culture is we didn't just hire a bunch of storage people. We had a few early on cause you need some experience in the history but an awful lot of the people we hired came from other backgrounds. Other engineers, marketing people, et cetera, they did not come from storage. And what we challenge people to do when they come in the door is we're hiring them because of their brain power, right. We don't own minimal rights somewhere, we don't have buildings we don't have a lot of assets. Our asset is our people and what they can produce. And obviously if you think back, well, when I was the only employee, right, I was doing every job. Ideally everyone we've hired since can do whatever we've hired them to do a lot better than I could do it. And that's a philosophy you want to keep going. Every person in Pure should be focused on using their brains, using their creativity to deliver the most value possible to disrupt things where they can, to always look for how we do things better, and to always be looking to hire better than them. >> So, it kind of gets into the next 10 years. Don't hate me for saying this but in retrospect the first 10 years you had it kind of easy. You caught EMC off guard, you drove a truck through their install base, NetApp miss flash. You guys executed obviously, we talked about that billion dollar company. Next 10 years, a little different. Where's the TAM expansion come from in the next 10 years? It's Multicloud, it's new AI workloads, it's lower cost solutions that get you more of the market, it's partnering with backup. But you got cloud, you got competitors that are starting to figure it out. How do you see the next 10 years to go from beyond where you are and that next pike. >> Well, so, I'll start by saying when you start a company, you dream of success and the first 10 years have been as good as you could possibly have dreamt. So, A, hopefully the next 10 years will continue that way. I think you touched upon one thing is the cloud. People have been through the hype cycle of saying the entire world is going to be cloud, there's only going to be three data centers in the world and it's going to be Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They now understand the cloud is a tool and you need to use it properly. So, one of the focuses we're going to be working on over the next several years is making sure that someone can have their data, their application on prem. They can decide I want to put it in the cloud. Move there seamlessly. Move there as easily as you move from one of your cell phones to the next model. Move from one cloud to another cloud. Move from that cloud back on prem. Whether you want to move the data, the applications, both and get the same kind of service, the same kind of experience. That's going to be a big thing. >> You got a lot of work to do there, but yeah. But there's an opportunity isn't there? >> It's the way everybody wants to run, it's the way everybody should run. Running an IT service to deliver value to your company, value to your organization should not be rocket science. And our job at Pure is to make that accessible to everybody so, everybody can deliver that kind of quality experience to their organization. >> And it's an obvious question but you see that as technically feasible over the next five to 10 years? >> Yeah it is technically feasible. This goes back to one of the things that I was mentioning before with flash as a catalyst. One of the thing flash helps do to make this simpler is it frees you from the geometry constraints of disk. You don't have to care as much. Another thing that's making it possible, is faster networking, right. And better networking. And then again you have all the compute and GPUs and co-processors and things pushing things. As you get to where resources are more plentiful, then you have the ability to trade off some of the I've got to get like every microsecond out of this thing for the simplicity, for that ease of use. And that lets you deliver something better in the long run. Right, if I perfectly tune something I might be able to do a little bit better but I'm not going to be able to keep it in tune and I'm going to spend my whole life retuning it and retuning it and finding it out of sync. Simplicity, that drives so much efficiency. Agility, that drives so, much value. >> Well, Coz, thank you so, much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE this morning from Accelerate day two. You talked about flash being a catalyst that sounds to me like Coz has been one of the major catalysts of Pure's success. Happy 10th anniversary, we look forward to the next 10. >> Thanks a lot and thanks for having me. >> For Coz and Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate, 2019. (techno music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Q B. All the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with David Dante. Couple of gents back on the Cube we have on Stuart the VP of technology for pure von. Welcome back. >> It's great to be here. Thanks for being accelerate. >> Were accepted severe. And we've got Carrie Stanton, VP of Global Biz Dev and corporate development from Theme Carrie, Welcome back. Thank you very much. I'm in the rain. I love the love it planned. Of course. Thank you. Very good branding here. Lots going on with theme and pure. Let's secure. Let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about the nature of the V Impure partnership. I'm assuming better together, but give us the breakdown. Sure, >> we've had a relationship for many years, but over the past three years we've seen it. You know, this year, counting this year, like the scale out is just unbelievable. We're growing at triple digits on our Cosell winds in the field, all of its writing, all of the predominantly being driven from the flash blade success that we've had in the marketplace, Our customers are buying into the performance that they have. Our our relationship is growing through joint innovation and joint development. And so what we've seen is raising them to a global partner, on having dedicated resources on it, as only amplified our success. We have. So yeah, it's fantastic. >> And then one from your perspective, what are some of the things that you are hearing? Are you guys being brought in? Maur from team customers is being being brought in more from pure side. What's that mixed like >> we've had? We've had a strong set of channel partners that I think promoting our joint solution on our products kind of a top of their line card. Of course, there's always the customer requested to get pulled in, and I think customers who have experienced either one of our products look at their satisfaction. They look extremely it, like NPS scores right and say, you know, if I'm a pure customer, there's a data protection company. That's gotta nps very similar years, you know, tell us more about what you're doing with with theme. If you look at kind of our common ethos. Right simplicity in the model right co innovation Help Dr Scale. Whether it's been through joint A P I integration with the universal adaptor or tryingto lean into next generation architectures like Flash to flash the cloud. It's just been a very easy progressive partnership to drive and bring in a market. >> Talk more about that joint development. Um, there's a start in the field. No engineering resource is I'd love to Have you had some color to that? >> I think I think I think it's >> a combination of. So we'll start with a universal adapter that was beams initiative to help add scale to the back of process to as you're putting virtue machines into backup mode along, you know, leverage these the storage controller snapshots so that you could come in and out of that back about very quick. V, invisible to production operations, offload a bunch of data processing and in time, out of the equation that just helps scale right back up, more virtual machines faster. That's a program that they initiated that we were one of the founding partners on one of the first partners to publish ah Universal adaptor, or R A p i for it. The >> results have been The results are pure is by far the number one partner for downloads for a customer downloads that we have across our partner Rico system. So we have a vote 15 partner Rico Systems that have written to the universal FBI on. So just last week, you know, over 3000 downloads surpassed over 3000 downloads. Here is 6500 customers. I'll let you do the math. All right, so it's it's great that we see such strong adoption from their customer base. Almost 50% of their customers are team customers on. Then that >> contusion. That's hi, >> It's very high. >> Wow. So give me your favorite customer example that really articulates the value that pure brings the value that being brings. >> We've got a lot going on in the financial space in the healthcare space. >> Butler Health is a joint customer that we have a customer reference win that they've published in that we've published on dhe obviously many, many more, but especially in the people, customers in the financial health care that are looking for performance on Dhe. Looking to that flash blade, a za landing zone that's going to give them more than just a backup target. It's going to give them the ability to leverage it for a I and ML and many other factors, which is again, one of the reasons why we've seen such strong adoption. >> You talk about health care, we're talking about patient data, lives at stake. Give me some of the meat about what this customer, for example, is achieving at the business. Subtle and the human lives level >> Well, I think what they're seeing is of what they were used. It's not so much the exact stats that I could give you down to how money they're getting per second, but it's what they were using before, which is one of the legacy competitors that we have, which we call. You know, some of these donors that they give to market share that we take away day in and day out with without saying names. But there was a reform replace that we came in and taking a second generation solution from a legacy hardware appliance that was being used previously in a secondary storage. >> Yeah, allow me to elaborate a bit, right? So you asked about the technology we kind of talked about the universal adapter for the off load where we've really seen growth has been in this notion of flash to flash the cloud and peers introduced this notion of rapid restore. So again, how do we grow our businesses together? Growing amore mission critical or patient? Critical deployments has been this notion of not just backing up the data faster. That's kind >> of the the >> daily repetitive task that no organization wants to to deal with. Where the rubber meets the road is Can you put the data back? And we've seen this explosion in the increase of of the capacity of data, set sizes and the pressure they put on restoring that data. When you happen to have, ah, harbor failure, a data center go off line or a power issue and this goes so you go back to patient records gotta be online when everything fails and there's an issue with a chair, whatever. Maybe how quickly can we get the data? And we're orders of magnitude faster, then the legacy >> platform. So having an integrated appliance is part of that key and co engineering. Is that right? I mean, you guys pure software no pun intended, right? You don't want to be >> No, no, it sze taking the they wrote to our a p I right So the work that they did on the FBI and then continue to innovate and iterated against it right and coming out with the next version that they just come out with it is, is just differentiating themselves in the marketplace. And that's really what we're seeing. And we're seeing that success that the enterprise today, from what we have without even looking forward to our upcoming V 10 which is gonna have some high end enterprise feature sets. >> And we want to get into that. But something that mom that you were just saying It's almost as if data protection is no longer just an insurance policy. It's an asset. We have to be able to get it back. >> Absolutely fuel, We believe if you look at the legacy backup appliances, they were designed and optimized for short backup windows and are proving to be a challenge at restoring the data, which is actually where the value in the architecture is. We've talked about rapid restore in bringing, flashing that space. We worked with team engineering on V 10 actually double that performance so that customers, as they upgrade their code line, can again bring those mission critical workloads back online even faster than in the past. In addition to that, we've worked through some of the VM integrations for customs who want to mind that data who want to clone those workloads and bring them up on online and ADM or analytics or searching the metadata of that data. So there's a lot going on besides just your backup and recovery. >> So you guys are saying, Chuck, the appliance don't need the appliance. You've got a better model. Is that what I'm hearing? Or >> we win against appliances day in and day out? So absolutely software. Best of breed software. Best of breed storage hardware. >> What should we expect for V 10 adoption there? You guys announced in the spring? >> Yes, and it will shift in Q four. Dave, honestly, this is gonna be Anton is gonna shit >> a good track record. They're gonna go out there. >> No, but we have some key features that will differentiate us in the marketplace, especially as we go to the enterprise with pier storage, such as immune ability right, So that's a feature that we've talked about. You know, we've been hyping because we believe in it that what it's gonna bring for the protection of ransom, where malware and it's it's gonna be a game changer. We believe in the marketplace and our famous now, as they were finally gonna support now support for their enterprise customer base. So, I mean, those two keep features in and of itself. So again, I talked about the scale that we're having today in the marketplace without these key enterprise features and then having those chip, you know, in the next 90 days are again we believe just gonna continue to elevate our business. >> We're talking to Charlie earlier today about just a CZ. Part of his job is tam expansion and data protection is an obvious area for that. You could have chosen to go buy a small software company, certainly have the cash on your balance sheet and compete. We have chosen to partner talk about the opportunity that you guys jointly see in terms of the market you can penetrate. >> I think it is such a Our ecosystem is so comprised today of partnerships that are based on. On one hand, you're partnering, and on the other hand, you're competing that it is. It is really refreshing to find a partnership like Veen, where we've got very clear lines of what our product offerings are, where they come together and no competitive obstacles. It makes partying in the field the easiest, right? We've got great partnerships across the board somewhere. Appliance vendors. Sometimes those partnerships work fast. Sometimes they running hurdles. We never run into a hurdle together, so it's worked very well. I think our partners, our channel partners, have preferences around the server side that they like to go to market with. We give them the freedom together to pick and choose. So they put invested class software with best class storage to to meet the needs. They put the rest together based on what fits their business model or their current agreements go forward. So >> clear, clear swim lanes, Big market. You guys showed some data at V Mon. I want to say Danny's data, maybe $15 billion Tim man larger. You guys get a piece of that, you get a piece of that >> on a savant said. It's just there's no there's no friction in the marketplace is going out and doing the work we need to do to win. But we never get it that Oh, we can introduce this because it's gonna compete with, even if it's only 2% of what they have, there's there's looting. No, they do not have data protection. And we don't do as, you know. We don't do hardware in storage. So again invested breeds. And I >> think those numbers maybe even conservative because, you know, as you were pointing out, the traditional backup products were designed to deal with the biggest problem, which was back up window, which, by the way, 60% of times the backup didn't work anyway. But you have to get inside of, you know, Yeah, we backed it up check. But backup is One thing is my friend Fred Morris. Recovery is everything. So things are shifting in a digital business recovery. You know, it is tantamount. You know, ever you can't ever not be without your data. So it's an imperative. Yeah, >> it's, um, when you're and the flashlight business unit first came up with the construct of a rapid restore. I mean, admittedly, I was sitting in the corner. I'm just saying there's no way. There's no way that a customer would look to pay a premium for Flash for their backup. And then you meet the customers and it's just one after the other. And there's these stories around. We had to stop production. We couldn't get the AARP back online. Right Way couldn't take transactions because the processing database of the purchasing database was off line and you're just sitting there going. These are really world right issues that impact revenue for organizations. And so we are going through an evolution about rethinking around data protection and what it means into in today's day and age. >> It's security. Such top of mind carry today on the CEO's mind and data protection is part of that. Backup is a key part of that. You think about Ransomware, right? You guys get solutions there. I mean, it all fits together. It's not these sort of bespoke, you know, ideas anymore. It's really one big mosaic so that people can drive their digital transformations. I mean, that's really what they care about. >> I think the themes, old slogan, it just works right. It continues to evolve and that you talked about backup not working in the first place, right? So we have our core fundamental foundations. That theme has right is that it will trust that the customer will know that it will be online. We have the shortest r p o r t o is right in the marketplace, and then you take that and the's enterprise class features again. That's why marrying it with Piers route to market and there go to market strategy is having the success we're having in the marketplace. >> You're hearing a lot from customers. Flash Flash MacLeod. This is There is a very strong need for this. Some of the things that were announced today terms up some more firsts that piers delivering to the market. What are some of the things that you guys were? You maybe Carrie. We'll start with you from themes partnership perspective like a flash Teresi, for example, or starting to be able to deliver. I saw Blake smiles, uh, be ableto bring the cost down so that customers could look at putting a spectrum of workloads, even backups on flash. What is themes? Reaction? Well, smiles. I tend to >> do with Lisa, but I mean, to be honest with you. We sit back and love everything that piers doing from innovation. And so if they're going to come out with a broader set of target solutions for secondary storage, then we're going to be there partner there as we are with flashlights. So we're sitting back and loving the innovation that they're bringing to the market place and to their customers. >> I saw that Cheshire cat grin von >> s o for the audience who may be missed. We had a number of product announcements this morning taking the flash ray from a single product line into a portfolio going to that two year zero workload with the direct memory cache acceleration powered by Intel's often products as we go into a chair to economic space but still keeping all the Tier one features and availability we not flash or a C, which is leveraging QSC is a storage medium. Uh, while we have a design, do expand our tam and find new workloads. We have not looked at backup for the flash rate. See, at this point the flash, the flash, the cloud powered by the data hub in the rapid restore is going strong, so you want to kind of keep the team focused on that? And we've got other markets that we have yet to penetrate that have been more price sensitive where we think the flash racy is a better alignment. Now again, maybe over time I'll be found wrong and we'll change our tune. But you know, I'll give an example. Go back to Ransomware. Ransomware is a top three question in terms of any storage conversation. When you deal with a financial institution today to the point where not only are they asking about, what are you doing in your products? What are you doing across your partner ecosystem? Some of the modern proof of concepts required it to go through a ransomware recovery procedure because you know these financial institutions, they're worried about getting not just locked out, but locked out on your H a sight because you just replicated the ransomware over. So this this ability have immutable, immutable image to bill to bring it back online fast a rapid restored somewhere. You could see what these technologies start to line up in a comprehensive solution for the customers, and so flash racy is great. It has nowhere. The band with a flash blade. So we're gonna try to keep those a separate products in different markets at the time. But at least for time being, >> thanks for clarifying >> that cloud. I gotta ask the quad cloud question. It's interesting you guys have both embraced. Cloud is you're seeing it. In the old days, I was saying, I think I'm saying Charlie again. Executives were like, No, don't do that. It's gonna kill us. But now it's okay. It's not a zero sum game. That trend is your friend. You gotta embrace it. How are you making cloud each of you a tailwind versus the You know what all the analysts expect ahead, What else gets going? Zero sum game is going to steal from a to B. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you can imagine from my vantage point, it's easy to say that we're looking at Cloud is just, you know, expanding the TAM, expanding the ecosystem features we have today at the archive here. The success we're having with both Microsoft Azure and eight of us are phenomenal. Growing 40% month over month, right, the adoption with all the new innovations that Danny and Antonio have talked on the show that were coming out with envy. 10 are only gonna amplify that. But it all starts back with our partners ships today that we have one private clouds and as customers are looking to evolve to the cloud So we work with our partners like peer to ensure that we're working with them today. And as customers want to embrace the cloud they can. But predominantly, those primary workloads are still remaining on Prem and they're looking on how they're going to support the cloud. And we're doing that today and we'll be doing that. Maura's we go forward >> block storage announcement you guys made today was quite interesting way now spinning up East End shoes and s threes And what >> So this morning we announced general availability for pure Claude Block store on AWS and plans, as we are currently in beta and development for other clouds. But the folks today is this AWS and you pair Claude Block store, which is basically the software of a flash ray architect for the hardware inside of a W s so that you have the same functionality and service that you have on Prem and you pair that with pure is a service, which is our op X moderate could pay as you consume and the flexibility of sign a 12 month contracts. You want 90% on Prem today in 10% of cloud two months from now, you want it 50 50 like used the utility model to consume wherever you want, so you can meet the requirements of your infrastructure, whether it's on Prem in the cloud or some hybrid combination. >> But the interesting thing to me was your doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the customers with regard to the architecture. What you architect in the club that I wonder. Is there an opportunity to do something like that with backup? Or is that just, you know, not economical, deep, deep archive, things like that? I mean, >> I'm pretty sure we're told not to make any news right now because >> stay tuned. I've already said >> too much, so I'm probably a >> good thing. We're live >> in big trouble. >> Wow, guys. So the 1st 10 years of pure, tremendous amount of innovation is, Charlie said, an overnight success in 10 years, so much more coming down. We've already heard about a tremendous amount of innovation and evolution today. So we can't wait to have you guys back on to the next event in here. Get our neck braces on for the whiplash of news that's gonna be coming at us. All right. We are like your day Volante. I'm Lester Martin. Go pats. >> You're sorry. And Bruce. Carrie and I were crazy >> sports fans. Let's just be very PC. Go, everybody. Everybody gets participation. Trophies just coming anyway. You're watching the Cube. Lisa Martin for day, Volante. Thanks for watching.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome to the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage covering up your accelerate 2019. Lisa Martin with Dave Ilan in Austin, Texas, this year. Pleased to welcome a couple of guests to the program. Please meet Charlie Boyle, VP and GM of DJ X Systems at N Video. Hey, Charlie, welcome back to the Cube, but in a long time ago and we have Brian Schwartz, VP of product management and development at your brain. Welcome. >> Thanks for having me. >> Here we are Day one of the event. Lots of News This morning here is just about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. A lot of innovation and 10 years. Nvidia partnerships. About two is two and 1/2 years old or so. Brian, let's start with you. Give us a little bit of an overview about where pure and and video are, and then let's dig into this news about the Aye aye data hub. >> Cool, it's It's been a good partnership for a couple of years now, and it really was born out of work with mutual customers. You know we brought out the flash blade product, obviously in video was in the market with DJ X is for a I, and we really started to see overlap in a bunch of initial deployments. And we really realized that there was a lot of wisdom to be gained off some of these early I deployments of capturing some of that knowledge and wisdom from those early practitioners and being able to share it with the with the wider community. So that's really kind of where the partnership was born going for a couple of years now, I've got a couple of chapters behind us and many more in the future. And obviously the eye data hub is the piece that we really talked about at this year's accelerate. >> Yeah, areas about been in the market for what? About a year and 1/2 or so Almost >> two years. >> Two years? All right, tell us a little bit about the adoption. What what customers were able to dio with this a ready infrastructure >> and point out the reason we started the partnership was our early customers that were buying dejected product from us. They were buying pure stored. Both leaders and high performance. And as they were trying to put them together, they're like, How should we do this? What's the optimal settings? They've been using storage for years. I was kind of new to them and they needed that recipe. So that's, you know, the early customer experiences turned into airy the solution, and, you know, the whole point of this to simplify. I sounds kind of scary to a lot of folks and the data scientists really just need to be productive. They don't care about infrastructure, but I t s to support this. So I t was very familiar with pure storage. They used them for years for high performance data and as they brought in the Nvidia Compute toe work with that, you know, having a solution that we both supported was super important to the I T practitioners because they knew it worked. They knew we both supported it. We stood behind it and they could get up and running in a matter of days or weeks versus 6 to 9 months if they built it >> themselves. >> You look at companies that you talk to customers. Let's let's narrow it down to those that have data scientists least one day to scientists and ask him where they are in their maturity model, if one is planning to was early threes, they got multiple use cases and four is their enterprise wide. How do you see the landscape? Are you seeing pretty aggressive adoption in those as I couched it, or is it still early? >> I mean so every customers in a different point. So there's definitely a lot of people that are still early, but we've seen a lot of production use cases. You know, everyone talks about self driving cars, but that's, you know, there's a lot behind that. But real world use cases say medicals got a ton? You know, we've got partner companies that you are looking at a reconstruction of MRI's and CT scans cutting the scan time down by 75%. You know, that's real patient outcome. You know, we've got industrial inspection, we're in Texas. People fly drones around and have a eye. Models that are built in their data center on the drone and the field operators get to re program the drones based on what they see and what is happening. Real time and re trains every night. So depending on the industry really depends on where people are in the maturity her. But you know, really, our message out to the enterprises are start now. You know, whether you've got one data scientist, you've got some community data scientists. There's no reason to wait on a because there's a use case that work somewhere in your inner. >> So so one of the key considerations to getting started. What would you say? >> So one thing I would say is, look any to your stages of maturity. Any good investment is done through some creation of business value, right? And an understanding of kind of what problem you're trying to solve and making sure it's compelling. Problem is an important one, and some industries air farther along. Like you know, one of the ones that most everybody's familiar with is the tech industry itself. Every recommendation engine you've probably ever seen on the Internet is backed by some form of a I behind it because they wanted to be super fast and, you know, customized to you as a user. So I think understanding the business value creation problem is is a really important step of it and many people go through an early stage of experimentation, data modeling really kind of, say, a prototyping stage before they go into a mass production use case. It's a very classic i t adoption curve. Just add a comment to the earlier kind of trend is it's a megatrend. Yes, not everybody is doing it in massive wide scale production today. There's some industries that are farther ahead. If you look forward over the next 15 to 20 years, there's a massive amount of Ai ai coming, and it's a It is a new form of computing, the GPU driven computing and the whole point about areas getting the ingredients right. Thio have this new set of infrastructure have storage network compute on the software stack all kind of package together to make it easier to adopt, to allow people to adopt it faster because some industries are far along and others are still in the earlier stages, >> right? So how do you help for those customers and industries that aren't self driving cards of the drones that you talked about where we use case, we all understand it and are excited about it. But for other customers in different industries. How do you help them even understand the A pipeline? And where did they start? I'm sure that varies very >> a lot. But, you know, the key point is starting a I project. You have a desired outcome from Not everything's gonna be successful, but you know Aye, aye. Projects aren't something that it's not a six month I t project or a big you know, C r m. Refresh it. Something that you could take One of our classes that we have, we do a lot of end user customer training are Deep Learning Institute. You can take 1/2 day class and actually do a deep learning project that day. And so a lot of it is understanding your data, you know, and that's where your and the data hub comes in, understanding the data that you have and then formulating a question like, What could I do if I knew this thing? That's all about a I and deep learning. It's coming up with insights that aren't natural. When you just stare at the data, how can the system understand what you want? And then what are the things that you didn't expect defined that A. I is showing you about your data, and that's really a lot of where the business value comes. And how do you know more about your customer? How do you help that customer better, eh? I can unlock things that you may not have pondered yourself. >> The other thing. I'm a huge fan of analogies when you're trying to describe a new concept of people. And there's a good analogy about Ai ai data pipelines that predates, Aye aye around data warehousing like there's been industry around, extract transformers load E T L Systems for a very long period of time. It's a very common thing for many, many people in the I T industry, and I do think there's when you think about a pipeline in a I pipeline. There's an analogy there, which you have data coming in ingress data. You're cleansing it, you're cleaning it. You're essentially trying to get some value out of it. How you do that in a eyes quite a bit different, cause it's GP use and you're looking, you know, for turning unstructured data into more structure date. It's a little different than data. Warehousing traditionally was running reports, but there's a big analogy, I think, to be used about a pipeline that is familiar to people as a way to understand the new concept. >> So that's good. I like the pipeline concept. One of the one of the counters to that would be that you know, when you think about e. T ells complicated process enterprise data warehouses that were cumbersome Do you feel like automation in the A I Pipeline? When we look back 10 years from now, we'll have maybe better things to say than we do about E D W A R e g l. >> And I think one of the things that we've seen, You know, obviously we've done a ton of work in traditional. Aye, aye, But we've also done a lot in accelerated machine learning because that's a little closer to your traditional Data analytics and one of the biggest kind of ah ha moments that I've seen customers in the past year or so. It's just how quickly, by using GPU computing, they can actually look at their data, do something useful with it, and then move on to the next thing so that rapid experimentation is all you know, what a I is about. It's not a eyes, not a one and done thing. Lots of people think Oh, I have to have a recommend er engine. And then I'm done. No, you have to keep retraining it day in and day out so that it gets better. And that's before you had accelerated. Aye, aye pipeline. Before you had accelerated data pipelines that we've been doing with cheap use. It just took too long so people didn't run those experiments. Now we're seeing people exploring Maur trying different things because when your experiment takes 10 minutes, two minutes versus two days or 10 days, you can try out your cycle time. Shorter businesses could doom or and sure, you're gonna discard a lot of results. But you're gonna find those hidden gems that weren't possible before because you just didn't have the time to do >> it. Isn't a key operational izing it as well? I mean again, one of the challenges with the analogy that you gave a needy W is fine reporting. You can operationalize it for reporting, and but the use cases weren't is rich robust, and I feel as though machine intelligence is I mean, you're not gonna help but run into it. It's gonna be part of your everyday life, your thoughts. >> It's definitely part of our everyday lives. When you talk about, you know, consumer applications of everything we all use every day just don't know it's it's, you know, the voice recognition system getting your answer right the first time. You know there's a huge investments in natural language speech right now to the point that you can ask your phone a question. It's going through searching the Web for you, getting the right answer, combining that answer, reading it back to you and giving you the Web page all in less than a second. You know, before you know that be like you talked to an I. V R system. Wait, then you go to an operator. Now people are getting such a better user experience out of a I back systems that, you know over the next few years, I think end users will start preferring to deal with those based systems rather than waiting on line for human, because it'll just get it right. It'll get you the answer you need and you're done. You save time. The company save time and you've got a better outcome. >> So there's definitely some barriers to adoption skills. Is one obvious one the other. And I wonder if Puritan video attack this problem. I'm sure you have, but I'd like some color on it. His traditional companies, which a lot of your customers, their data is in pockets. It's not at the core. You look at the aye aye leaders, you know, the Big Five data their data cos it's at the core. They're applying machine intelligence to that data. How has this modern storage that we heard about this morning affected that customers abilities to really put data at their core? >> You know, it's It's a great question, Dave and I think one of the real opportunities, particularly with Flash, is to consolidate data into a smaller number off larger kind of islands of data, because that's where you could really drive the insights. And historically, in a district in world, you would never try to consolidate your data because there was too many bad performance implications of trying to do that. So people had all these pockets, and even if you could, you probably wouldn't actually want to put the date on the same system at the same time. The difference with flashes as so much performance at the at the core of it at the foundation of it. So the concept of having a very large scale system, like 150 blade system we announced this morning is a way to put a lot of the year and be able to access it. And to Charlie's point, a lot of people they're doing constant experiment, experimentation and modeling of the data. You don't know that how the date is gonna be consumed and you need a very fast kind of wide platform to do that, Which is why it's been a good fit for us to work together >> now fall upon that. Dated by its very nature. However, Brian is distributed and we heard this morning is you're attacking that problem through in a P I framework that you don't care where it is. Cloud on Prem hybrid edge. At some point in time, your thoughts on that >> well, in again the data t be used for a I I wouldn't say it's gonna be every single piece of data inside an organization is gonna be put into the eye pipeline in a lot of cases, you could break it down again. Thio What is the problem? I'm trying to solve the business value and what is the type of data that's gonna be the best fit for it? There are a lot of common patterns for consumption in a I AA speech recognition image recognition places where you have a lot of unstructured data or it's unstructured to a computer. It's not unstructured to you. When you look at a picture, you see a lot of things in it that a computer can't see right, because you recognize what the patterns are and the whole point about a eyes. It's gonna help us get structure out of these unstructured data sets so the computer can recognize more things. You know, the speech and emotions that we as humans just take for granted. It's about having computers, being able to process and respond to that in a way that they're not really people doing today. >> Hot dog, not a hot dog. Silicon Valley >> Street light. Which one of these is not a street lights and prove you're not about to ask you about distributed environments. You know customers have so much choice for everything these days on Prem hosted SAS Public Cloud. What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I always thought that to really be able to extract a tremendous amount of value from data and to deliver a I from it you needed the cloud because you needed a massive volumes of data. Appears legacy of on print. What are some of the things that you're seeing there and how is and video you're coming together to help customers wherever this data is to really dry Valley business value from these workloads, >> I have to put comments and I'll turn over to Charlie. So one is we get asked this question a lot. Like where should I run my eye? The first thing I always tell people is, Where's your data? Gravity moving these days? That's a very large tens of terror by its hundreds of terabytes petabytes of data moving very large. That's the data is actually still ah, hard challenge today. So running your A II where your date is being generated is a good first principle. And for a lot of folks they still have a lot on premise data. That's where their systems are they're generating the systems, or it's a consolidation point from the edge or other other opportunities to run it there. So that's where your date is. Run your A I there. The second thing is about giving people flexibility. We've both made pretty big investments in the world of containerized software applications. Those things are things that can run on grammar in the cloud. So trying to use a consistent set of infrastructure and software and tooling that allows people to migrate and change over time, I think, is an important strategy not only for us but also for the end users that gives them flexibility. >> So, ideally, on Prem versus Cloud implementations shouldn't be. That shouldn't be different. Be great. It would be identical. But are they today? >> So at the lowest level, there's always technical differences, but at the layers that customers are using it, we run one software stack no matter where you're running. So if it's on one of our combined R E systems, whether it's in a cloud provider, it's the same in video software stack from our lowest end consumer of rage. He views, too. The big £350 dejected too you see back there? You know, we've got one software stack runs everywhere, And when the riders making you know, it's really Renee I where your data is And while a lot of people, if you are cloud native company, if you started that way, I'm gonna tell you to run in the cloud all day long. But most enterprises, they're some of their most valuable data is still sitting on premise. They've got decades of customer experience. They've got decades of product information that's all running in systems on Prem. And when you look at speech, speech is the biggest thing you know. They've got, you know, years of call center data that's all sitting in some offline record. What am I gonna do with that? That stuff's not in the cloud. And so you want to move the processing to that because it's impossible to move that data somewhere else and transform it because you're only gonna actually use a small fraction of that data to produce your model. But at the same time, you don't want to spend a year moving that data somewhere to process it back the truck up, put some DJ X is in front of it. And you're good to go. >> Someone's gonna beat you to finding those insides. Right? So there is no time. >> So you have another question. >> I have the last question. So you got >> so in video, you gotta be Switzerland in this game. So I'm not gonna ask you this question. But, Brian, I will ask you what? Why? You're different. I know you were first. He raced out. You got the press release out first. But now that you've been in the market for a while what up? Yours? Competitive differentiators. >> You know, there's there's really two out netted out for flash played on why we think it's a great fit for an A i N A. I use case. One is the flexibility of the performance. We call multi dimensional performance, small files, large files, meditated intensive workloads. Flash blade can do them all. It's a it's a ground up design. It's super flexible on performance. And but also more importantly, I would argue simplicity is a really hallmark of who we are. It's part of the modern date experience that we're talking about this morning. You can think about the systems. They are miniaturized supercomputers And yes, you could always build a supercomputer. People have been doing it for decades. Use Ph. D's to do it and, like most people, don't want to happen. People focused on that level of infrastructure, so we've tried to give incredible kind of capabilities in a really simple to consume platform. I joke with people. We have storage PhDs like literally people. Be cheese for storage so customers don't have to. >> Charlie, feel free to chime in on your favorite child if you want. I >> need a lot of it comes from our customers. That's how we first started with pure is our joint customers saying we need this stuff to work really fast. They're making a massive investment with us and compute. And so if you're gonna run those systems at 100% you need storage. The confusion, you know, pure is our first in there. There are longest partner in this space, and it's really our joint customers that put us together and, you know, to some extent, yes, we are Switzerland. You know, we love all of our partners, but, you know, we do incredible work with these guys all up and down the stack and that's the point to make it simple. If the customer has data we wanted to make be a simplest possible for them to run a ay, whether it's with my stuff with our cloud stuff, all of our partners, but having that deep level of integration and having some of the same shared beliefs to just make stuff simple so people can actually get value out of the data have I t get out of the way so Data scientists could just get their work done. That's what's really powerful about the partnership. >> And I imagine you know, we're out of time, but I imagine to be able to do this at the accelerated pace accelerated, I'm gonna say pun intended it wasn't but, um, cultural fed has to be pretty align. We know Piers culture is bold. Last question, Brian and we bring it home here. Talk to us about how the cultural cultures appearing and video are stars I lining to be able to enable how quickly you guys are developing together. >> Way mentioned the simplicity piece of it. The other piece that I think has been a really strong cultural fit between the companies. It's just the sheer desire to innovate and change the world to be a better place. You know, our hallmark. Our mission is to make the make the world a better place with data. And it really fits with the level of innovation that obviously the video does so like to Silicon Valley companies with wicked smart folks trying to make the world a better place, It's It's really been a good partnership. >> Echo that. That's just, you know, the rate of innovation in a I changes monthly. So if you're gonna be a good partner to your customers, you gotta change Justus fast. So our partnership has been great in that space. >> Awesome. Next time, we're out of time, But next time, come back, talk to a customer, really wanna understand it, gonna dig into some of the great things that they're extracting from you guys. So, Charlie Brian, thank you for joining David me on the Cube this afternoon. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for David. Dante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube. Y'all from pure accelerate in Austin, Texas.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Howdy, y'all Welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of Day one of pure accelerate 19 from Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin. My co host is Day Volonte. We got a couple of gentlemen here chatting with us. Next, we've got one of our alumni. Mike Bundy's back head of Cisco Worldwide alliances for appear. Mike. Welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Sporting the very dapper >> It's not ours today, but it's enough. >> I like it. Very subtle on we've got Andrew Tenant joining us for the first time Senior manager Worldwide sales at Cisco Andrew, Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we know we've had lots of conversations with Cisco and Cure Isis. Go live. Just a few months ago, Mike was on with this bright orange blazer. You guys have been partners for about four years now, Mike, let's start with you and talk about the evolution of that partnership from Bogota Market. A field A sales perspective, right? Overall partnership. How are things going? >> Well, things were great from a mo mentum perspective. We're we're on track to eclipse You know, I'm not supposed talk about a lot of numbers, but in the next year we will eclipse together a billion dollar run rate >> with partnership, which is tremendous milestone >> in a 4 to 5 year regulations. So things were, well, you know, it started from the field and what customers were requiring. And now, in the last, um, year, we've we've added about six new CDs were up to 22 we have three in the queue between now and the calendar year. So in terms of the growth, the product development and momentum, it's it's tremendous. And what we'll talk about today will be kind of one of the next generations and errors that that will hit on regarding this. >> And you guys were also we had a conversation a little bit ago with with Nathan Hall. Really, this partnership with Cisco and Pure is now getting started in the field, as you were talking about, but it's all the way down into the engineering level in terms of being very pervasive throughout. You guys have really achieve that. Yes, >> Yeah, top to bottom, right From From that field, engagement began. It was watching our customers embrace purest innovation. Right? And everywhere you turned pure was showing up, and it was it was really the field. Say, Hey, we got to get on board with this. And Tim Shanahan, who's part of our correctional organization on the descent aside, said, Hey, this is a big deal. We need to get in front of this thing. So that's really you. Mention where it started. And now we're doing everything from integrating products, right, integrating management tools to try to bring that together for our customers. And it's It's an awesome partnership. >> Absolutely. So where's the product focus. Where do we start? >> Yes, so you joked, right? Fibre channel. I think I remember Fibre Channel from many years ago. It Cisco, and then you look back and suddenly it's not dead, right? The truth is, five channels the best protocol for mission critical storage traffic that's ever been built. It's probably best critical out there for that. It's not sexy, though, right, so we can't took our eye off the ball at Cisco. But as we now develop these next generation storage technologies, there's never been a more important time to bring that switching fabric into play right It's absolutely critical that we have the right tools to accomplish what our customers trying to deliver from applications standpoint. So the agility, the visibility, just the overall performance is more important today. That was back in sort of that the heyday of fibre channel, if you will. Right? So the partnership that we're working on right now is making sure that we're we're maximizing the outcome of these investments. Custer's making with all of yours storage offerings, leveraging a sand infrastructure that's compatible with it and really gonna make it sing. >> And you're right and you go back 10 plus years and it was a vice scuzzy was coming in, but had some f f C bigots is that I will never hang on to win the NFC. Oh, we now you got N v m e over fabric. We'll talk about that. But so from pure perspective, you have always had to pay attention to that segment of the market. Guys went hard after the high end. Of'em sees business, which was heavy fiber channel, absolutely early days. >> Yeah, I mean four out of five of our razor attached fibre channel to a customer's environment. It is core to what we do. And we're excited about the resell opportunity that we just started with pure because, you know, Andrew and I joke last week, but we put pen to paper in terms of we believe our our introduction of this is a re silk and help them grow their sand business by 35 40%. And that's the kind of disruption that we're seeing with our A raise in the market. And we think because of how we're evolving customers to modernize those networks, that we can drag the Sisko Fibre Channel business right along with it. >> This is a sorry Mike. This is a re sell pure reselling wth the MDS product line. How is you the pure Channel? Responding to this news? >> They love it because it's it's a new buying center, you know that they're getting to talk to Ah, and it helps us, you know, establish Maur, you know, understanding the customers, whole business, not just from a storage perspective. So >> So how was envy? Emmy changing landscape? What do you guys seeing there? I mean, you guys, I think the first another first Charlie didn't mention it today on stage, So money first. It's hard to keep track of. But how is that affecting? You know what's going on in the field? >> Yeah. So I mean, again, it's the timing of this generational shift to next. Gen. Sarge, envy me being probably the most critical of that. If we look at what happened with all flash A raise, for example, all of those ended up on critical mission critical workloads and all ended up on fibre Channel 80. 85% of those end up on that legacy technology because it was so capable of getting the job done. Envy me is gonna take us another leap forward so customers will be challenged toe have something that lives both in the what they have today and bridges them to that future proof state. Right? So it's absolutely critical that you have tools that are gonna let you adopt envy me as it makes sense on carry it operationally alongside the same modality that you had for those workloads in the past, right? That's the key. Is that the folks we're gonna own this stuff going forward to the ones who own it now, right? Just with maybe older technology >> and the business impact is what you could do more with less performance, lower costs, more >> last performance, visibility right so you can help. Troubleshoot way had a situation not that long ago where a customer had Honore, not it was a competitive ray, right? It was getting hammered and it was locking up. And when they looked at the the forensics coming off, the rate said they had 4000 I ops off of that array. A very nominal amount. It should have been the problem. It shifted the focus elsewhere. Well, using some of the telemetry built into the MPs platform, it was obvious that there were 25,000 I ops hitting that array because VM, where was doing a lot of command control traffic to the array. So having that visibility at the's scales and speeds, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't see what's going on. You could be flying blind and struggling and everybody loses there. So >> you know we're excited about this because we don't want to bring our rays into an environment that's not suited for high end performance and reliability, cause that's what we've kind of made our brand on when it comes to customer networks, especially with the X 60 and nineties that we launched the year ago. They're all envy me ready. So we want to make sure that, as we did, ploy that that the entire infrastructure's ready and Cisco, in my opinion, has the best. Every product is 64 gig capable. It's envy me today. And so we're ready, you know, envy me, you know, in the end, if you will. So when when the host are ready to take advantage of this full network and full storage system, we're ready. Um, an Andrew also mentioned analytics. So, you know, >> we we >> extract ourselves on the analytics capabilities of our system as it works today with after one and so that allows us to, you know, very quickly using machine learning solve most of our customers problems. In fact, we open about 85% of our own customers tak cases for them because we predict when things were going to get rough and bumpy. So as we extend and bridge that together with what Cisco has and their Sandwich Analytics capability, it's gonna make the experience way different than it would be on a competitive sand fabric and a competitive storage array, whether it's flash or not. So that's that's what we're doing together, which makes fiber Channel better and more unique than it has been in the past. >> In terms of adoption. You mentioned when the host guys already, What's the blocker? There's just silicon. Is it just, >> you know, you could You could take Cisco's example. You know, they're they're looking at the new memory technology. And how do they apply that to the interface adapter? And how do you handle that situation? So, you know, as they evolve their next platform, it will be pervasive in that. And I'm sure that the other you know, host providers are gonna be doing >> standards standards. Low hanging fruit was envy me over converge Ethernet, right, because that was kind of the first place to start. But reality is weaken were the only vendor who can provide both of those in the Cisco side. Right. So we have the same tooling on the same, actually administrative tooling on on either. Right. So that's ah, terrific. >> And it's not just the infrastructure from the hostess, the operating system as well. So you know Lennox can take advantage of it in a different way. So, you know, we're seeing most of our deployments today, our fibre channel over Ethernet, because the the customer base that air deploying that are purely a Linux based environment. So they're able to do that. So, as you know, not all of our enterprising and commercial customers run that environment. So it's It's a little bit of the technology. It's a little bit of the Intel cycle. It's a little bit of the operating system, but the point is, we're ready. And there's a long, long road map. You know, for customers if we go this route, >> when should customers start thinking about this terms >> immediately? Right? Ultimately, it's not a question of if it's a question of when, but if they're, if they're getting things ready now, if you're making investment today, you can make an investment today that accommodates what you're doing today. Like back in the day. If we were selling a storage platform, the sandwich is sort of this necessary thing behind the scenes. That wasn't necessarily you could actually let it sit there for a couple of generations of the storage it was supporting. That's no longer going to be the case right, because, quite simply, the evolution on the storage front. And it's so much faster that you need to make sure the thing you're plugging it into. That's a simple question for any customer there. What'd you plugging this into right? Because at the end of the day, if it's just that that old san you have sitting around it may or may not be capable. Regardless of Endor, right, it's it's gonna actually diminished value you get in the time value of that investment you've made in this incredible platform. >> So where are you having these customer conversations that we talk about the joint go to market in the field? You know, it's It's not just about fibre channel and speed and storage, these air business critical work loads that are being protected and run and access to be able to extract all these insights. When you're talking with customers, where are you? You're not at the storage. I've been level. I imagine this is a much more business intensive conversation. It's a >> great question. Go ahead. >> So I think you know people that are driving the cloud platform strategy for the infrastructure. They obviously need to understand how. How does this work in a hybrid cloud or multi cloud environment? Then you've got, you know, the people that are developing the mission Mission critical business APS. Whether that's you know, Oracle s a p et cetera, et cetera. But it's also the non traditional business APS that are coming to play things that leverage stores that are file or object oriented, or kubernetes or things like that. It's so you're having discussions with the teams that are deploying the apse for the business and that will drive and dictate the requirements. Is that you know, we're trying to help the infrastructure on the cloud infrastructure teams adapt to >> multi cloud piece gets interesting here, right? Because us now talk about building massively scalable distributed systems, and you're not gonna be able to You don't want to necessarily ship all your data around, but you want to ship the metadata and be smart enough to know where the data is so you can go ship to compute right to the data, right? And I >> think that that's another interesting thing. And a positive aspect of leveraging some things we've already done with Cisco is you know they have the concept of a C I anywhere. No, you know, just like we're doing with Cloud Block store of extending that storage capability into the cloud. Cisco has done the same with a C I. So it's not just it's not sure, making sure the workload in the data payload our mobile, but also the application. And that's, you know, yes, that that may not be the case today for Fibre Channel, but the technology is there if the customer demands it. So that's 60% of Cisco's revenue in the data center comes from his networking core. That's what we're more excited about. The next generation's partnership is we feel like we've done a good job and built momentum with the computer part of their business, and I think as we evolve into this part of the business, it's gonna It's gonna be better for customers. In the end, >> it's either today, customers gonna spend more time operating this than anything, right, and really, that's all about visibility. Meantime, the resolution just how quickly they can make sure that those this thing's running and and as proactively get in front of congestion and issues at a time if they can. So it's Ah, it's a complimentary hardware software problem solved. You have to be able to do things at extremely high rates of speed with visibility I've never seen before. So analytics built into a six incredibly important stuff to get that streaming right out of the chip so you could tell what's going on at any level of the stack. Where is Like I said today, we've seen many cases now where their challenges in the network and in the sand and on the array and everyone's blind to it because our >> engineers love it because the monitoring and the scoping capability that were required, a lot of sand fabrics to deploy would require extra tools. Extra tap kits Cisco has at built in the A six so literally. It's just enable that with software. And you can do all the diagnostics you ever wanted to do at the at the wire and the fiber level, >> as opposed to a discreet probe. Exactly a disruptive drives the >> costs way out. The complexity reduces risk troubleshooting floor space, you know, the whole you know >> that's big time >> based. So today there's an issue. Last night Hey, Mike, what happened last night? I know. Let me know. That happens again. That's pretty much the ticket Close, right? We could actually go back in time now kind of a DVR and actually see now for the first time in a sand fabric what's actually happening and go back and reconstruct it to figure out how we proactively prevent it going on from the next time. So >> so, Mike, Last question. We're out of time. But last question for you. Everybody says future proof. Pardon? Everybody says future proved how are is pure delivering that with Cisco. What is it gonna mean to that business leader that I have an infrastructure in place that will truly be the food? Your proof? >> Good question. So you know, it's evergreen is the term that pure uses for you know what we do. So you never buy the same storage twice, right? And if you look at the platform that Cisco has for MDS, it is clearly capable to 400 gig capability. And today most networks are purchased for 30 to get capable with 16 gig optics, so they have 32 64. There's a long way to go here so the platform and their innovation will continue this to be, you know, a future proof network that marries up with our evergreen story. So we were excited We wouldn't get in this relationship if we felt that it was not gonna provide the same level of benefits and standard that we have for our own customers. So >> correct. Mike Andrew. Thank you for joining David me on the Q. But way. Look forward to hearing what happens in your five of the pure Cisco relationship. I know. We'll probably stay tuned. I know we'll see you again. Thank you for your time. Thanks for David. Dante. I Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from pure accelerate 19.

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome to Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is the fourth pure accelerate. I'm here with my co host, David. Dante and David are pleased to be welcoming back to the Cube, the chairman and CEO of Pier storage. Charlie Giancarlo. Charlie, Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thank you. Such a pleasure to be here >> already. Getting loud on the keynote. Just rapping about 3000 folks here. Standing room only. We just came from the keynote. Something symbolic. Besides, the location of this event is that you are just about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of pure storage >> of our founding. October 1st. >> Yes, just around the corner. Tremendous innovation. As you say it. Overnight success in 10 years delivering 10 X and prevents us a little bit of a preview about what you shared in the Kino. What's to come in the next 10 years? >> Exactly right. It is wonderful to be able to sell. They celebrated birthday and able to talk about what you've delivered over the 1st 10 years. But it also gave us the opportunity to really say Okay, what's the second decade going to be about? What is it gonna be like? And way were planning not only for this, but for the year that we were gonna put in place of development. We said, Well, you know, we've brought a lot of things to storage and to the storage array. We made it much simpler. We made it upgradeable, non disruptive Lee, meaning that customers would have a continuously new product in their environment. Andi started to bring it into the cloud. And we said, You know, for our second decade, we want to transform the entire storage experience. We don't want it to be about boxes and a raise. We wanted to be about a storage system for the entire enterprise. That's multi protocol, multi cloud, multi tearing or what we call storage classes and entirely automated so that when an application calls for storage, service is it's delivered automatically without humans getting involved. That is completely as a service consumed as a service, delivered as a service entirely automated in the back end. So this is the goal that we have for our second decade. We think we're going to deliver it over the next several years. But of course, for us to go down the entire customer journey is a great mission for us for next decade. >> So in terms of, you know, I don't want to make it sound like the first decade was easy because you were really the only all flash array company. Thio reach escape velocity and many. But at the same time you caught DMC flat footed. You drove a truck through their install base and obviously the rest is history. I feel like the main job of the CEO is too. Is Tam expansion, right? You're focused on that. There's a I there's new workloads. There's the cloud, there's multi cloud. And in your entering new territory now, yes, maybe no. Guys like eight of us, they're not flat footed, right? You've got Europe against Google and Cisco and Microsoft in the multi cloud arena. But you're a specialist on one. If you could talk about your vision in terms of tam expansion, >> thank you very much for that question. The TAM expansion really is following where solid state takes us. You know, we've gone from a world that was where believe it or not, most computers still had mechanical systems operating them. It's sort of like having a mechanical calculator rather than Elektronik calculator, right? We had mechanical discs in our computers literally spinning rust, right? And it's only been in the last decade where a semiconductor, you know, where solid state has taken the place of that called Flash, right? Well, as that continues to get less expensive, we now can bring not only flash performance into disc economics, but more importantly, now we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for having greater flexibility with our data. As data grows it. Now we say it has gravity. That is, it gets heavy. It gets hard to manage hard, hard to move between different environments. And now a lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data, managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data center environment. We want to eliminate all that. We want to automate all of that, you know, on the theme of decades. Two decades ago, every application had its own individual communication stack. There were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company. One decade ago, every application had its own custom hardware stack and custom operating system stack. Well, today there's one network. It's called the Internet. Today, everything, every application, every server is virtualized, allowing mobility. And yet storage is still static way want this decade a bit to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment? >> So >> what if you >> could compare this opportunity to some other mega trends that you've been part of? You were there in the early days of wireless when nobody wanted to buy wireless saw the I P changeup. People think the minicomputer was killed by the microprocessor in apart. It was, but it was I p. It was destroyed. Many computer everybody had their own networks. >> Where do you >> put so that the trend that you're after? How do you compare and what are your expectations? >> I think it's an analogous trend, and it's you know, this long term trend of vertical, whether it's vertical industries or vertical technology's going to becoming horizontal. So let's just give a couple of examples again. Networking was tightly tied to the application, and every application had its own network and its own set of protocols right that was vertically tied. Now networking is horizontal. It's all I P. Right again, we'll go back to applications. Applications had a vertical stack. The entire stack hardware and software was tied to specific application today that's been made virtualized and therefore horizontal. You could move applications among different servers. Storage is still vertical. It's still tied very tightly to the to the rack. And there are a lot of good reasons for that. You needed a high speed interface. High speed networking didn't exist. Disks were slow. They could only support one application at a time, with solid state that no longer exists. So now weaken, make storage free. We can make it ah, horizontal layer rather than tightly tied to any individual application. And that's what the next decades gonna be about >> Business leaders today, I feel there's so much more open than when we started in this. In this industry, where you know the famous line about Ken Olsen, Unix is snake oil and those that you old enough to remember that business leaders today they recognize the trend is your friend right. So gentleman from AWS at 88% of the customers and a gardener survey said their cloud first, but 86% are still spending on Prem. Right In the old days, when I said I'll keep it on Prime and Amazon so we'll keep it in the cloud. And yet you guys, customers, they're sort of forcing you to come together. Yes, I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic and specifically your cloud strategy? >> Absolutely So our cloud strategy is really quite simple. We want to make the cloud and every cloud appear to an application developer to be the same as it is on Prem. With all the advanced service is the advanced applications. It interfaces the same AP eyes because largely applications have been especially primary to your applications have been developed for with on Prem interfaces and on Prem service is the cloud, while wonderful from the standpoint of being able to be dynamic, does not have sophisticated service is for data. And so by making it appear to be the same to the application into the developer on premise in the cloud, it just makes the entire system or dynamic it allows for for companies to more easily move applications to the cloud or to another cloud or back on Prem. And it changes the dynamic and the decision making of enterprises not to. How much work do we have to do to move something to the cloud? But where is it best placed economically and based on service is we take it out of being a technology decision and make it more of an economic decision. >> Why were you in a unique position relative to your competition? I mean, why can't deli emcee or net app for IBM sort of take that same AP I economy mentality and drive it through their portfolio and get to market fast? And why is your pure unique? >> Well, for one, it takes investment will invest 18% of revenue in R and D this year. Nearly all of our competitors are spending less than 5% there, really viewing storage as an old antiquated market, not as a high tech market. They're reaping, if you will, rather than selling on re really view storage as next frontier off great innovation and our competitors largely don't see that. >> Let's talk about a little bit digging into the evolution of your Amazon Web service is relationship. We talked about that a minute ago when you guys talked about Announce Cloud Block store. There's dozens of customers in beta. Are they viewing it as this bridge, the hybrid cloud? And what are some of the benefits? If you could talk about it from any of those customers that are abated, what are they? What are you starting to see so far? That's really exciting, that this is the delivering or will be the modern data experience Way had >> a great speaker from eight of us onstage today, and I think he summed it up really well. At the end of his talk, he said that now the migration to cloud is easy because pure has done all the heavy listed lifting for you to take your enterprise applications and move them into the cloud. I mean, I think all the cloud players recognize that while they have provided some great capabilities, especially for Dev ops, that the level of of sophistication and the completion of service is for things like very complex enterprise. APS have not been fully accomplished yet, and so they recognize that experts like pure who have been delivering against enterprise primary tier applications for a long time have a lot to add in terms of the sophistication of our product in their environment. I think what they also recognize is that it's hard for customers to rewrite their applications to a completely different set of data. AP eyes and mind. You'd not only does, for example, he ws have different AP eyes in their cloud than customers have on Prem. But Azure has different AP eyes and then Amazon. Google has yet different, and so for a customer to write their application three or four times is really beyond what is in the interest of most customers. We have taken all that heavy lifting and enabled a customer to take their applications. They've already written, whether on cloud or in the print on Prem, and to move it in those other environments with much less investment. >> And let me let me try to explain, as I understand it, and make sure I got a right is essentially, What you've done is take the pure software stack and management framework and then using AWS Service's E C two High Priority E. C two's front ended on s3 cheap Best three created block storage. That's higher availability, probably faster rights, right? Three Real Boat reads and writes, are probably comparable with the pure experience. That's right on, Baby. You got to pay a little bit more for that. But you get you get better availability and there's value there. >> Actually, the beautiful thing is that we create an environment in AWS where it's faster, that is, the storage is faster. That it has a very higher reliability has. All of the service is that customers want tohave such as snapshots, replication and encryption. And the entire bill between what they pay for pure and what they pay for eight of us is no more than what they would pay for A W S on its own. For those storage service is >> because you're using cheaper s3. To me, this is brilliant. Eight others is happy because they're selling E. C. To an s3. You're happy because you're making money on your software. Stock was happy because they get the pure experience in the cloud. It's exactly actually quite innovative. >> It's almost matching >> quickly. Talk about Nan pricing. I know that was an issue this quarter. It hurt revenues a little bit on the stock drop, but then when you saw everybody else announced, the stock went back up because you're was 28% growth to everybody else's minus 16 minus 21 0 was the best. But to me, lower Nan pricing is a is an opportunity for you. It's a tailwind to go eat into more of the spinning dis market. Do you see it that way? >> No. Absolutely right. I mean, when it all hits in 1/4 it could be a challenge. But over time, the consistent and fast decrease in Nan pricing simply means that we will eventually get to solid state for all storage. I have no doubt about that. The days of disk are certainly numbered, and what that does is open up the entire storage market. Today, disc is only by terabytes. 15% of the storage market flashes only 15%. So it eventually we have 85% of storage market still to go after, and we believe that one day that will be all solid state. >> I want to ask you about the macro you guys said on the call. You really not concerned about the macro. You don't win on pricing. You don't lose on pricing that even a downturn. You guys feel like you can gain share. And I would agree with that. By the way, of course, we don't want a downturn. Got it? But if you don't have a downturn, But what are your thoughts on your ability to compete independent of Of of the macro. >> Right. So, you know, we have from day one, obviously, we had no sales when we got started. Right? So every sale we've made has always been a competitive sale. There was always someone that we had to displace, right? Some some incumbent. And that speaks to the type on the quality of the sales and marketing team that we have, right? Not only they aggressive, but you know, in the parlance of the industry, they're hunters. I think a lot of companies, once you become more mature, you develop more farmers in your in your sales force, right? Managing the customer account, managing the install base and so forth. And when the macro is flat or down, you suffer. You know, from you suffer overall from that because you haven't been used to expanding your footprint. In our case, I think even when the Makri is down not that we won't be hurt by it. We will. But because we have a team of hunters, we continue to gain market share away. Will >> you >> change it? It's hard to predict, right, But But Frank's Lupin once told me, Hey, if things change, I can turn this on. And we could become an a T. M when he was running the service. Now, right now, you're going for growth in the street rewards growth. You got a three plus X revenue multiple. Everybody else is lucky to get one X so that they're rewarding you for growth. Do you feel like if things change that you might turn those knobs a little bit? Or is it you know, >> So I don't expect things to change for quite some time, but, you know, we produce 70% gross margin in the last quarter, right? I mean, most of our competitors are in the fifties, right? If not, if not the forties. So clearly growth costs money in this business, right? You have to build your sales force before they start producing for you. You have to invest in marketing before they start producing. And because of our high focus around R and D right, which is all about new products again, your front ending your costs before the before the growth actually comes in. So now we're gonna continue to focus on growth. And as long as we believe that the medium to long term growth for us is in the thirties, you know, high twenties, thirties, even maybe even forties, we're going to continue to operate profitably but relatively lower profit once growth slows down. Yeah. I mean, it will all start flowing. >> Reassess it at that time. At least our data and the data shows that pure is in a position from a spending intention standpoint to continue to gain share. We don't see any change to that in the next several quarters. >> Last question for you, Charlie. We got to talk about a I we talked about at every conference. When we're looking at pure and customer conversations, it's about data data. Is oil lifeblood gold, currency, whatever you wanna call it? How? What is that conversation that that tape, urine and video have together in customers about? How can data ignite our workloads. Help companies identify new products. New service is deliver more automation. This is >> probably one of my favorite topics. When I'm talking to customers is how to make data actually useful. Not so much the, you know, the bits and bytes of how do you actually store it? But you know, what does it mean to them is a business but also to their customers because a lot of times they're using it for overall customer benefit. And the great part of that conversation and whether it's us or in video or both of us together, is we both use it for our to improve our business and our customers lives as well. You know, we talk today about how we have 15 petabytes of operational data from our customers, a raise, right, how they're performing. And we analyze that on a on an hour by hour basis toe look to see. Is the customer getting to the point where they need where they didn't need to modify how they're operating or where they need to upgrade, or where they need to add or even reduce more capacity so that they don't fall? You know they don't trip over things that will get their business in trouble. So it And now we even allow the customer to analyze their business. And do what if scenario plant planning to say, Well, if I'm going to double the amount of customer transactions I have, you know, what will that mean from an infrastructure Sandpoint? You know? Well, I need to change your upgrade. So, you know, this has been great fun because we are in the same boat as our customers, depending on a I to improve our our mutual customers experience. But >> this conversation is best. Very insightful. Charlie, Thank you for joining David Me on the Cube today. Again. Happy 10th anniversary. Here we look forward to the next two days >> and happy 10th year to you. >> Thanks very much. >> That's right for day, Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from pure accelerate. 19

or is done a great job of simplifying the experience for the customer no question much in the same way that 3-part did 10 or 15 years ago they've clearly set the bar on simplicity so check the other piece that they've done really well is marketing and marketing is how companies differentiate today there's no question about things better today dramatically let's have a plan they get you in the future but also create a community an ecosystem where are aware of what's happening in the DevOps side and connect the dots between IT and the data science you know storage was really I think up until now really viewed as maybe you know an aging technology something that was you know becoming commoditized something where where innovation wasn't really important and fewer was the one company that actually thought that storage was important realized a partnership with your with all flash and the faster network and Tasha compute we realized there is something unique that we can bring to bear for the customer so our partnership mindset really said this is the next big one that we're going to invest time and energy and so we clearly did that and then we continued you know helping physicians when they're working directly with patients there's only these are there's so many systems so many datasets so many ways to analyze and yet like getting it all in front of them in some kind of real-time way so that they can use it effectively as tricky so AI machine learning have a chance to help us like funnel that into something that's immediately useful in the moment

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

(Music) >> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium, in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Storage accelerate, 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin sporting Prince today, with Dave Vellante sporting The Who. And I'm sandwiched, most importantly, between two Celtics fans. And the Warriors are across the bay. We'll save that for after the conversation. So we want to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Ken Ringdahl the VP of Global alliance Architecture. From Veeam, welcome. >> Great. Thank you, Lisa. >> Dave: Well the truth be told, we're afraid of the warriors, okay. We really don't want to play the Warriors. >> Oh really, alright. >> And we're not afraid of many people in Boston, but I don't know, they look pretty good. >> Well, I appreciate the honesty, that's pretty cool. >> Well... Though they lost last night. Right? We're going to start the sports talk now. >> Yep. >> Iguodala was out, they showed some foulability. So, anyway. >> We digress to- >> We'll be back to it later on in this segment stay tuned. >> Alright, so you're just fresh off Veeam On, last week. We're impressed that you still have a voice, you've recovered from that. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that are new with Veeam and Pure. So just a month ago, in April, new intergradation between VM availability platform, and Pure Storage flash a way to deliver business continuity, agility, intelligence for the Cloud era. Expand a little bit upon that. >> Yeah, sure, I mean really this integration with Pure Storage, in the VM backup and replication product, end of last year we introduced this new functionality called Universal Storage API. And what this really is, is a way for us to enable our partners to take control of their destiny a little bit more. It's a program we invite our partners into, you know Pure is one of the first that we integrated with, and invited into the program very early. We announced this last year, and we've now finished the integration, as you've mentioned, we announced it last month. It's now been out there, and I think the number I heard earlier today is that we've already had a couple hundred downloads and deployments. So that's just great adoption, and just shows the pent up demand for that. But what we've integrated is the ability for our partners, our storage partners in particular to integrate with our storage snapshot technology to really off load the snapshot from the VMware side, and really put more of it on the storage side, and take it really off the production environment. And so it's a better together story where you know we take the feature that we've introduced into the backup and replication, and Pure built this plug-in, and they integrate with their own APIs and we jointly test and develop, and release that plug-in. And they can install it with VM backup and replication, and it really takes the mention, it takes that load off the production environment. So that snapshot without this integration, it's a VMware snapshot, that snapshot stays open as long as the backup is. Which can be minutes, and you know tens of minutes potentially for a large system. But now we shrink that down literally to just seconds. So we take a VMware snapshot, we take the Pure snapshot, we close the VMware snapshot. And typically it's like 10-12 seconds long where as opposed to the minutes, and even tens of minutes from before. So, really it's really offloading a lot of that back up impact, and we're able to do it in a very secure quiesce fashion from the production environment. >> Lets roll back and understand that a little bit better. >> Ken, if you could explain it to us and our audience. In the 2008, seven, eight, nine timeframe. Virtualization Gem of VMware in particular started to take hold. And you ended up replacing a bunch of physical servers with virtual servers, which was awesome, because all those physical servers were underutilized, except for one major workload, which was backup. So when you did want to do the backup, you didn't have enough resources. Veeam's ascendancy coincided with that trend, so there was a simplicity component, but it seems like what you're describing now is another instantiation of offloading that bottle neck. So what was the journey to Veeam's efficiency in a virtualization environment? >> Ken: Yeah if you look at that journey, and Veeam really grew up in the virtualization age, right. So backup prior to VM, or virtualization was all agent based, it was physical. So everything was over the wire, and Veeam went and said, hey look you know we see VMware really sort of growing, and we see that trend towards virtualization, right, and at this point, what's the world 95 percent virtualized, at this point the only workloads that aren't virtualized are really legacy work loads. And so we made a significant leap forward in a data protection stance, by integrating with the hyper visors. So instead of off loading that into the individual guests, right. The Windows guest, the Linux guest. We said, okay we're going to go the hyper visor. Right? And we're going to do this in an agent less fashion, so that you don't have to go an visit every little, every system that you're looking to backup. That was sort of the first step, right. Now what we're saying is we can do even better. And we can off load the hyper visor, and off load that to the storage system. So we can have a very small impact on the hyper visor, really minimize that. And now really put that workload on the storage system which has a lot of extra cycles and availability, and we can go straight to the backup environment. And not through the VM, or through the hypervisor to get there. >> Dave: So VMware admins, they don't like snapshots because it's overhead intensive, it clogs up their system if you will. This capability makes that transparent, or irrelevant to them? >> It does, it minimizes them to such a small degree that it's a blip. You know it's a little blip on the radar, as opposed to when you snapshot a VM you're essentially quiescing that VM, so everything sort of slows down for a very short period of time. And what happens is that it spawns another virtual disc. So while that snapshot is open this other virtual disc is being written to. And then when you close that snapshot, and you remove that snapshot, that disc gets merged back in, right. This is generally how VMware snapshots work. And what we're saying is we're going to minimize as much as we possibly can. The data that goes in there, so if you think of a running virtual machine, if you're merging back in a Gigabyte disc versus a disc that has 10 Megabytes, you know that's going to be really, really quick, as opposed to, you know if you keep that snapshot open for a long period of time that merge operation, and it just slows things down, and we're trying to minimize that impact on the system. >> Lisa: So business benefits; I get the performance improvements that this integration with Pure facilitates, if we think of this in the context of digital business transformation, where companies that are doing well, have the ability to really glean actionable insights from their data to be able to drive, you know, new products and get products to market faster. Is this actually going to facilitate a company being able to get new products to market faster? >> Absolutely, so there a feature inside of VM backup and replication we call data labs. And what data labs is, is the ability to take a production snapshot, in this case, we're talking about a pure snapshot, and be able to stand that up in a sandbox environment. And you can run DEV tests, you can apply your Windows' patches in an environment that literally matches production. And it's a key differentiator. It's a key differentiator for Veeam, and it's enabled by the Pure Snapshot integration that you have this environment, and even if you have an infected system, you go put it over in data labs, it's sandboxed, so you can put in a private network so it doesn't have any connectivity. Say if you have a worm, or some other ransom ware, you can run analytics, you can run diagnosis on any of that, and not worry about it infecting any other environment, nor does it put work load on your production environment. So you get patched Tuesday, right, and we all know that Windows' patches don't always go as they seem, right? So data labs, let's take that Pure snapshot, let's stand up a virtual environment, which exactly matches production, let's test that patch, right. And we have confidence there, so when we go to production, we have confidence because we've already done it. We've already run that in production. So there's a lot of value in that capability. >> So we were at Veeam On last week fresh off the Kool-Aid injection. It's all orange here, it was all green at Veeam in Chicago. The messaging there was all about multi-cloud and hyper availability in this multi-cloud world. We're hearing a lot about cloud like function here, but of on prem activity. Of course multi-cloud includes on prem, so I wonder if you could dove tail your messaging last week, what you're seeing in the field, and what you're seeing with the partnership with companies like Pure. >> Yeah no question. I mean the Veeam platform, and really you saw it last week at Veeam On we talked kind of about sort of private cloud, and public cloud and our ability to orchestrate, and really stretch across all those environments, and we know that customer all the way from SMB all the way up to enterprise, right. They have remote offices, branch offices some of them use the cloud, some of them use multiple data centers, and really they need their data protection to be able to stretch across those environments. They don't want point solutions in each of those locations. They want a platform that they can trust, and have visibility, right. That's one of the five stages that we talked about about hyper availability, like last week. Is visibility, they want visibility across those clouds. Phase two is aggregation, they want to be able to aggregate all these different places. And that's what we provide our customers with the platform is backup, visibility, aggregation, orchestration, automation. And we provide them on different stages of that journey for our customers. We have different products, services and integration actions with our partners, that really help our customers along that journey. >> We know from our research, the crew at Wiki Bond does some great work on this. We know that data protection, and orchestration are moving up on the list of CXO priorities. At the same time, for a lot of IT practitioners who are under real budget constraints it's like trying to sell more insurance to a 24 year old. So those are kind of two countervailing trends, what are you seeing in the market place? >> What we're seeing is customers, you know down time is really is gone. I mean, I think last week we heard in one of our keynotes, you know you roll back a couple of years, you were talking about availability in terms of five-nines, right? Now it's zero. I mean people don't talk about down time because down time can't exist, and customers need that sense of security and availability. You know, it will happen, lets face it even Amazon, the best data centers in the world, go down, right, there's been some notable S3 outages, but it's about how fast can you recover. And you're talking about low RPOs, and one of the things that this week at Pure Accelerate we're hearing a lot about rapid recovery, flash blade, and the ability and you take rapid recovery and flash blade, and you combine that with the Veeam platform and our instant recovery, and you can get to near zero time recovery, in your environments. To really provide that security, and lets face it, time is money for a lot of our customers, right? So they longer they're down, the more time their losing money, they need availability, and the RPOs are near zero these days. = [Dave] The other thing, if I may just follow up, just one follow up. The other thing our research shows is the average Fortune 1000 company, over a three or four year period is leaving, literally, a billion plus dollars on the table because of poorly architected backup, or inadequate backup. So that's a huge opportunity for you and others, obviously. There's a lot of opportunity right now for vendor turn. That's the other thing our research shows, is that people aren't wed to their backup and recovery vendor. So, does that resonate with customers, are they because of digital, for example, are you seeing that tipping point, that critical mass occur, and then if you could tie that in to sort of your partnership with Pure, I'd be interested in that. >> Sure, yeah, no doubt about it. We're seeing customers, you know, they want that flexibility and that portability. One of the things we do with out platform, it's one of our unique selling features is is that it is agnostic, right. And I'll tie it back to Pure in a moment, but you know when we back up, we back up in a storage agnostic fashion. So any Veeam backup that lands on a disc on the tape anywhere, can be reconstituted, can be re imported, so even if you have a full disaster scenario, we can go stand that back up some where else, and fully consume that backup and restore it, and we have direct restore capabilities. We can port those backups and direct restore them. For example, a direct restore Azure, for example. So that flexibility, and portability is extremely valuable. Now, bring that back to Pure, some of the things we're doing around rapid recovery around the snapshot integration, we talked about is we're really enabling customers to have high performing primary storage environments. High performing secondary storage environments. And really bring that together in a way that works. We talked about multi cloud, right, you know, remote data centers and work across, and aggregate and give visibility. That's really where the Veeam Pure story together, becomes really strong because you've got an incredibly high performing primary and secondary with a highly flexible, portable secondary data protection environment. And you get the capability to get to the cloud. You know DL, a lot of customers looking to the cloud for DR, because they don't have to stand up infrastructure there. When they need it, they can spin it up, and then they can bring it back. And there's a lot of value there. >> I hear a lot of harmony, but I actually read recently, online, that a different analyst firm called the Pure Veeam relationship a match of opposites. Now they say opposites attract, and you've done a great job of talking about the integration, do you agree that it's a good blending of opposites, and if so what's that kind of symbiotic benefit that those bring to each other? >> Yeah, I don't know that I saw that report, but what I would say you know, there's a lot of synergy, we're growing at a very rapid rate, I think. When I looked at Pure, and I look at Veeam we grew 36 percent last year, I think Pure is growing at like 50 percent year over year. We have NPS scores, our NPS score is 73, we're really proud of that. The Pure NPS score, I think I saw- >> 83. >> Ken: 83. >> Dave: I didn't think it could be higher than 73. >> It's incredible. It is incredible, and I think there is a lot of synergy, the size of the organizations, I think the age of our organizations, the aggressiveness that we have, we have joint competitors in the market, so I think there's a lot of synergies between where we are as an organization, as Veeam, and where Pure is. I wish I read the article in terms of the opposites, because I'd love to understand. >> Personally, as a long time analyst, I would say the similarities are greater than the differences. >> Sure sounds like it. >> You're both about a billion dollars, you're both growing at lets call it 35-40 percent a year. You're both pursuing platforms, your both really aggressive, you're insanely passionate about your customers and winning. And you like colors, you like green, they like orange. Alright, we got to talk a little sports here. >> Lisa: Speaking of green. >> I'm going to start somewhere else though because I asked this question of a number of folks at Veeam On. If you were, Ken, if you were Robert Kraft would you have traded Tom Brady? >> {Ken] No. >> Elaborate. >> I think when you look at a, the guy was the MVP of the league last year, so that by itself stands on it's own, but you have to look and the Patriots have always been about, sort of you know, trading or moving on a year or two early, versus a year or two late. So you could make that case with Tom Brady, but I think there's always exceptions, and when you look at, I mean he is basically like an adopted son of Robert Kraft and the organization. He's brought five Superbowls, he's basically, he built Patriot place, you know. Robert Kraft built Patriot place on the backs of Tom Brady and Bill Belichik to that extent. But how do you move on from someone who's brought you so much success, that has been under market. You know, get paid under market so that they can go and do other things, and have flexibility with the gap. I just don't know how you could move on from that. >> So, that's consistent now, I think it's four for four of people we've asked, Boston fans. So appreciate that feed back. Let's talk a little hoops, you know Celtics we were feeling pretty good, up two zip, now it's tied two-two. Houston, Golden state, tied two-two. Those two teams have proven they could win on the road, Celtics haven't proven that yet. What are your thoughts on that series? >> Yeah so certainly Cleveland came storming back, I think the stories of the down fall of the Cavs were clearly over exaggerated. They came back in a big way. I think they Celtics started to figure out the Cavs in quarters two, three, and four. They got themselves in a big hole in the first quarter in the last game. I feel good, the Celtics are nine and O at home this year in the post season. You know, it's basically the best of three, and they have two of them at home, so. The Cavs will have to break serve if they want to win the series. >> Dave: If they're lucky enough to get through to the finals, which would be unbelievable, do they have any shot against the Warriors? >> So, I think to say they have no shot is probably going a little too far, but- >> Dave: Got to play the game. >> You know you got to play the games, and the Celtics have, traditionally, matched up well against the Warriors. I mean least year, the Celtic actually came into Oracle, and broke, I don't know, what was it, like a 50 game home winning streak or something. So, you know, and that was a team that didn't have Kyrie, or Gordon Haywood, and I know they're still out so the future looks bright for the Celtics. But in the context of this years finals, certainly, if I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money behind the Warriors, but I don't doubt that Brad Stevens could come up with a scheme that could steal a couple of games, and make people in the Bay area feel a little uneasy. >> Would love to see a non Lebron Final, you know. >> Yeah I think as the words would like the Celts >> Sorry Brandon, sorry buddy. >> A little diversity, you know three years in a row we've had the same things, so I'll extend my support to the Celtics in honor of both of you guys. >> Alright, and we can talk, if they get to the finals then we can take it from there. >> I can't imagine what the day after the Superbowl was like for both of you. We won't go there. >> I still haven't recovered, so. >> (laughs) Awesome, well Ken, thanks so much for stopping by. Congrats on being a CUBE alumni, now. We look forward to seeing you Veeam World in just a few months time. >> Yes, great. Thank you. We'll be there for sure. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, Dave and I will be back with a wrap in just a moment. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live at Pure Accelerate 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, moonlighting as Prince today, joined by Dave Vellante, moonlighting as The Who. Should we call you Roger? >> Yeah, Roger. Keith. (all chuckling) I have a moon bat. (laughing) >> It's a very cool concert venue, in case you don't know that. We are joined by a couple of guests, Cube alumnae, welcoming them back to The Cube. Rajiev Rajavasireddy, the VP of Product Management and Solutions at Pure Storage and Siva Sivakumar, the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Rajiev: Happy to be here. >> So talk to us about, you know, lots of announcements this morning, Cisco and Pure have been partners for a long time. What's the current status of the Cisco-Pure partnership? What are some of the things that excite you about where you are in this partnership today? >> You want to take that, Siva, or you want me to take it? >> Sure, sure. I think if you look back at what brought us together, obviously both of us are looking at the market transitions and some of the ways that customers were adopting technologies from our site. The converged infrastructure is truly how the partnership started. We literally saw that the customers wanted simplification, wanted much more of a cloud-like experience. They wanted to see infrastructure come together in a much more easier fashion. That we bring the IT, make it easier for them, and we started, and of course, the best of breed technology on both sides, being a Flash leader from their side, networking and computer leader on our side, we truly felt the partnership brought the best value out of both of us. So it's a journey that started that way and we look back now and we say that this is absolutely going great and the best is yet to come. >> So from my side, basically Pure had started what we now call FlashStack, a converged infrastructure offering, roughly about four years ago. And about two and a half years ago, Cisco started investing a lot in this partnership. We're very thankful to them, because they kind of believed in us. We were growing, obviously. But we were not quite as big as we are right now. But they saw the potential early. So about roughly two-and-a-half years ago, I talked about them investing in us. I'm not sure how many people know about what a Cisco validated design is. It's a pretty exhaustive document. It takes a lot of work on Cisco's site to come up with one of those. And usually, a single CVD takes about two or three of their TMEs, highly technical resources and about roughly three to six months to build those. >> Per CVD? >> Per CVD. >> Wow. >> Like I said, it's very exhaustive, I mean you get your building materials, your versions, your interoperability, your, you can actually, your commands that you actually use to stand up that infrastructure and the applications, so on and so forth. So in a nine-month span, they kind of did seven CVDs for us. That was phenomenal. We were very, very thankful that they did that. And over time, that investment paid off. There was a lot of good market investment that Cisco and Pure jointly made, all those investments paid off really well in terms of the customer adoption, the acquisition. And essentially we are at a really good point right now. When we came out with our FlashArray X70 last April, Cisco was about the same time, they were coming out with the M5 servers. And so they invested again, and gave us five more CVDs. And just recently they've added FlashBlade to that portfolio. As you know, FlashBlade is a new product offering. Well not so new, but relatively new, product offering from PR, so we have a new CV that just got released that includes FlashArray and Flash Blade for Oracle. So FlashArray does the online transaction processing, FlashBlade does data warehousing, obviously Cisco networking and Cisco servers do everything OLTB and data warehouse, it's an end to an architecture. So that was what Matt Burr had talked about on stage today. We are also excited to announce that we had that we had introduced AIRI AI-ready infrastructure along with Nvidia at their expo recently. We are excited to say that Cisco is now part of that AIRI infrastructure that Matt Burr had talked about on stage as well. So as you can tell, in a two and half year period we've come a really long way. We have a lot of customer adoption every quarter. We keep adding a ton of customers and we are mutually benefiting from this partnership. >> So I want to ask you about, follow up on the Oracle solution. Oracle would obviously say, "Okay, you buy our database, "buy our SAS, buy the Red Stack, "single throat to choke, "You're going to run better, "take advantage of all the hooks we have." You've heard it before. And it's an industry discussion. >> Rajiev: Of course. >> Customer have it, Oracle comes in hard. So what's the advantage of working with you guys, versus going with an all-Red Stack? Let's talk about that a little bit. >> Sure. Do you want to do it? >> I think if you look at the Oracle databases being deployed, this is a, this really powers many companies. This is really the IT platform. And one of the things that customers, or major customers standardize on this. Again, if they have a standardization from an Oracle perspective, they have a standardization from an infrastructure perspective. Just a database alone is not necessarily easy to put on a different infrastructure, manage them, operate them, go through lifecycle. So they look for a architecture. They look for something that's a overall platform for IT. "I want to do some virtualization. "I want to run desktop virtualization. "I want to do Oracle. "I want to do SAP." So the typical IT operates as more of "I want to manage my infrastructure as a whole. "I want to manage my database and data as its own. "I want its own way of looking." So while there are way to make very appliancey behaviors, that actually operates one better, the approach we took is truly delivering a architecture for data center. The fact that the network as well as the computer is so programmable it makes it easy to expand. Really brings a value from a complete perspective. But if you look at Pure again, their FlashArrays truly have world-class performance. So the customer also looks at, "Well I can get everything from one vendor. "Am I getting the best of breed? "Am I getting the world-class technology from "every one of those aspects and perspectives?" So we certainly think there are a good class of customers who value what we bring to the table and who certainly choose us for what we are. >> And to add to what Siva has just said, right? So if you looked at pre-Flash, you're mostly right in the sense that, hey, if you built an application, especially if it was mission-vertical application, you wanted it siloed, you didn't want another application jumping in and kind of messing up the performance and response times and all that good stuff, right? So in those kind of cases, yeah, appliances made sense. But now, when you have all Flash, and then you have servers and networking that can actually elaborates the performance of Flash, you don't really have to worry about mixing different applications and messing up performance for one at the expense of the other. That's basically, it's a win-win for the customers to have much more of a consolidated platform for multiple applications as opposed to silos. 'Cause silos are always hard to manage, right? >> Siva, I want to ask you, you know, Pure has been very bullish, really, for many years now. Obviously Cisco works with a lot of other vendors. What was it a couple years ago? 'Cause you talked about the significant resource investment that Cisco has been making for a couple of years now in Pure Storage. What is it that makes this so, maybe this Flash tech, I'm kind of thinking of the three-legged stool that Charlie talked about this morning. But what were some of the things that you guys saw a few years ago, even before Pure was a public company, that really drove Cisco to make such a big investment in this? >> I think they, when you look at how Cisco has evolved our data center portfolio, I mean, we are a very significant part of the enterprise today powered by Cisco, Cisco networking, and then we grew into the computer business. But when you looked at the way we walked into this computer business, the traditional storage as we know today is something we actually led through a variety of partnerships in the industry. And our approach to the partnership is, first of all, technology. Technology choice was very very critical, that we bring the best of breed for the customers. But also, again, the customer themself, speaking to us, and then our channel partners, who are very critical for our enablement of the business, is very very critical. So the way we, and when Pure really launched and forayed into all Flash, and they created this whole notion that storage means Flash and that was never the patterning before. That was a game-changing, sort of a model of offering storage, not just capacity but also Flash as my capacity as well as the performance point. We really realized that was going to be a good set of customers will absorb that. Some select workloads will absorb that. But as Flash in itself evolved to be much more mainstream, every day's data storage can be in a Flash medium. They realize, customers realized, this technology, this partner, has something very unique. They've thought about a future that was coming, which we realized was very critical for us. When we evolved network from 10-gig fabric to 40-gig to 100-gig, the workloads that are the slowest part of any system is the data movement. So when Flash became faster and easier for data to be moved, the fabric became a very critical element for the eventual success of our customer. We realized a partnership with Pure, with all Flash and the faster network, and faster compute, we realized there is something unique that we can bring to bear for the customer. So our partnership minds had really said, "This is the next big one that we are going to "invest time and energy." And so we clearly did that and we continue to do that. I mean we continue to see huge success in the customer base with the joint solutions. >> This issue of "best of breed" versus a kind of integrated stacks, it's been around forever, it's not going to go away. I mean obviously Cisco, in the early days of converged infrastructure, put a lot of emphasis on integrating, and obviously partnerships. Since that time, I dunno what it was, 2009 or whatever it was, things have changed a lot. Y'know, cloud was barely a thought back then. And the cloud has pushed this sort of API economy. Pure talks about platforms and integrating through APIs. How has that changed your ability to integrate "best of breed" more seamlessly? >> Actually, you know, I've been working with UCS since it started, right? And it's perhaps, it was a first server system that was built on an API-first philosophy. So everything in the Cisco UCS system can be basically, anything you can do to it GUI or the command line, you can do it their XML API, right? It's an open API that they provide. And they kind of emphasized the openness of it. When they built the initial converged infrastructure stacks, right, the challenge was the legacy storage arrays didn't really have the same API-first programmability mentality, right? If you had to do an operation, you had a bunch of, a ton of CLI commands that you had to go through to get to one operation, right? So Pure, having the advantage of being built from scratch, when APIs are what people want to work with, does everything through rest APIs. All function features, right? So the huge advantage we have is with both Pure, Pure actually unlocks the potential that UCS always had. To actually be a programmable infrastructure. That was somewhat held back, I don't know if Siva agrees or not, but I will say it. That kind of was held back by legacy hardware that didn't have rest space APIs or XML or whatever. So for example, they have Python, and PowerShell-based toolkits, based on their XML APIs that they built around that. We have Python PowerShell toolkits that we built around our own rest APIs. We have puppet integration installed, and all the other stuff that you saw on the stage today. And they have the same things. So if you're a customer, and you've standardized, you've built your automation around any of these things, right, If you have the Intuit infrastructure that is completely programmable, that cloud paradigms that you're talking about is mainly because of programmability, right, that people like that stuff. So we offer something very similar, the joint-value proposition. >> You're being that dev-ops kind of infrastructure-as-code mentality to systems design and architecture. >> Rajiev: Yeah. >> And it does allow you to bring the cloud operating model to your business. >> An aspect of the cloud operating model, right. There's multiple different things that people, >> Yeah maybe not every single feature, >> Rajiev: Right. >> But the ones that are necessary to be cloud-like. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Dave: That's kind of what the goal is. >> Let's talk about some customer examples. I think Domino's was on stage last year. >> Right. >> And they were mentioned again this morning about how they're leveraging AI. Are they a customer of Flash tech? Is that maybe something you can kind of dig into? Let's see how the companies that are using this are really benefiting at the business level with this technology. >> I think, absolutely, Domino's is one of our top examples of a Flash tech customer. They obviously took a journey to actually modernize, consolidate many applications. In fact, interestingly, if you look at many of the customer journeys, the place where we find it much much more valuable in this space is the customer has got a variety of workloads and he's also looking to say, "I need to be cloud ready. "I need to have a cloud-like concept, "that I have a hybrid cloud strategy today "or it'll be tomorrow. "I need to be ready to catch him and put him on cloud." And the customer also has the mindset that "While I certainly will keep my traditional applications, "such as Oracle and others, "I also have a very strong interest in the new "and modern workloads." Whether it is analytics, or whether it is even things like containers micro-services, things like that which brings agility. So while they think, "I need to have a variety "of things going." Then they start asking the question, "How can I standardize on a platform, "on an architecture, on something that I can "reuse, repeat, and simplify IT." That's, by far, it may sound like, you know, you got everything kind of thing, but that is by far the single biggest strength of the architecture. That we are versatile, we are multi-workload, and when you really build and deploy and manage, everything from an architecture, from a platform perspective looks the same. So they only worry about the applications they are bringing onboard and worry about managing the lifecycle of the apps. And so a variety of customers, so what has happened because of that is, we started with commercial or mid-size customers, to larger commercial. But now we are much more in enterprise. Large, many large IT shops are starting to standardize on Flash tech, and many of our customers are really measured by the number of repeat purchases they will come back and buy. Because once they like and they bought, they really love it and they come back and buy a lot more. And this is the place where it gets very exciting for all of us that these customers come back and tell us what they want. Whether we build automation or build management architecture, our customer speaks to us and says, "You guys better get together and do this." That's where we want to see our partners come to us and say, "We love this architecture but we want these features in there." So our feedback and our evolution really continues to be a journey driven by the demand and the market. Driven by the customers who we have. And that's hugely successful. When you are building and launching something into the marketplace, your best reward is when customer treats you like that. >> So to basically dovetail into what Siva was talking about, in terms of customers, so he brought up a very valid point. So what customers are really looking for is an entire stack, an infrastructure, that is near invisible. It's programmable, right? And it's, you can kind of cookie-cutter that as you scale. So we have an example of that. I'm not going to use the name of the customer, 'cause I'm sure they're going to be okay with it, but I just don't want to do it without asking their permission. It's a healthcare service provider that has basically, literally dozens of these Flash techs that they've standardized on. Basically, they have vertical applications but they also offer VM as a service. So they have cookie-cuttered this with full automation, integration, they roll these out in a very standard way because of a lot of automation that they've done. And they love the Flash tech just because of the programmability and everything else that Siva was talking about. >> With new workloads coming on, do you see any, you know, architectural limitations? When I say new workloads, data-driven, machine intelligence, AI workloads, do we see any architectural limitations to scale, and how do you see that being addressed in the near future? >> Rajiev: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. So basically, let's start with the, so if you look at Bare Metal VMs and containers, that is one factor. In that factor, we're good because, you know, we support Bare Metal and so does the entire stack, and when I say we, I'm talking about the entire Flash tech servers and storage and network, right. VMs and then also containers. Because you know, most of the containers in the early days were ephemeral, right? >> Yeah. >> Rajiev: Then persistent storage started happening. And a lot of the containers would deploy in the public cloud. Now we are getting to a point where customers are kind of, basically experimenting with large enterprises with containers on prem. And so, the persistent storage that connects to containers is kind of nascent but it's picking up. So there's Kubernetes and Docker are the primary components in there, right? And Docker, we already have Docker native volume plug-ins and Cisco has done a lot of work with Docker for the networking and server pieces. And Kubernetes has flex volumes and we have Kubernetes flex volume integration and Cisco works really well with Kubernetes. So there are no issues in that factor. Now if you're talking about machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, right? So it depends. So for example, Cisco's servers today are primarily driven by Intel-based CPUs, right? And if you look at the Nvidia DGXs, these are mostly GPUs. Cisco has a great relationship with Nvidia. And I will let Siva speak to the machine learning and artificial intelligence pieces of it, but the networking piece for sure, we've already announced today that we are working with Cisco in our AIRI stack, right? >> Dave: Right. >> Yeah, no, I think that the next generation workloads, or any newer workloads, always comes with a different set of, some are just software-level workloads. See typically, software-type of innovation, given the platform architecture is more built with programmability and flexibility, adopting our platforms to a newer software paradigm, such as container micro-services, we certainly can extend the architecture to be able to do that and we have done that several times. So that's a good area that covers. But when there are new hardware innovations that comes with, that is interconnect technologies, or that is new types of Flash models, or machine-learning GPU-style models, what we look at from a platform perspective is what can we bring from an integrated perspective. That, of course, allows IT to take advantage of the new technology, but maintain the operational and IT costs of doing business to be the same. That's where our biggest strength is. Of course Nvidia innovates on the GPU factor, but IT doesn't just do GPUs. They have to integrate into a data center, flow the data into the GPU, run compute along that, and applications to really get most out of this information. And then, of course, processing for any kind of real-time, or any decision making for that matter, now you're really talking about bringing it in-house and integrating into the data center. >> Dave: Right. >> Any time you start in that conversation, that's really where we are. I mean, that's our, we welcome more innovation, but we know when you get into that space, we certainly shine quite well. >> Yeah, it's secured, it's protected, it's move it, it's all kind of things. >> So we love these innovations but then our charter and what we are doing is all in making this experience of whatever the new be, as seamless as possible for IT to take advantage of that. >> Wow, guys, you shared a wealth of information with us. We thank you so much for talking about these Cisco-Pure partnership, what you guys have done with FlashStack, you're helping customers from pizza delivery with Domino's to healthcare services to really modernize their infrastructures. Thanks for you time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> For Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.

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