(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, please stay welcoming back one of our alumni Murli Thirumale is here, the VP & GM of the Cloud Native Business Unit at Pure Storage, Murli, welcome back. >> Lisa, it's great to be back at theCUBE, looking forward to discussion. >> Likewise, so it's been about six months or so since the Portworx acquisition by Pure Storage, give us a lay of the land, what's been going on? What are some of the successes, early wins, and some of the lessons that you've learned? >> Yeah, this is my third time being in Cloud, being a serial entrepreneur. So I've seen this movie before, and I have to say that this is really a lot of good anticipation followed by actually a lot of good stuff that has happened since, so it's been really a great ride so far. And when, let me start with the beginning, what the fundamental goal of the acquisition were, right? The couple of major goals, and then I can talk about how that integration is going. Really, I think from our viewpoint, from the Portworx viewpoint, the goal of the acquisition, from our view, was really to help turbocharge in our growth, we had really a very, very good product that was well accepted and established at customers, doing well as far as industry acceptance was concerned. And frankly, we had some great reference customers and some great installs expanding pretty well. Our issue was really how fast can we turbocharge that growth because as everybody knows, for a startup, the expensive part of an expansion is really on the go-to-market and sales side. And frankly, the timing for this was critical for us because the market had moved from the Kubernetes' market, has moved from sort of the innovator stage to the early majority stage. So from the Pure side, I think this made a lot of sense for them, because they have been looking for how they can expand their subscription models, how they can move to add more value from the array based business that there really have been a wonderful disruptor and to add more value up the stack, and that was the premise of the acquisition. One of the things that I paid a lot of attention to, as anybody does in acquisitions, is not just the strategy but really to understand if there was a culture fit between the teams, because a lot of the times acquisitions don't work because of the poor culture fit. So now let me kind of fast forward little bit and say, "Hey, what we know looking back in about six to eight months into it, how has it turning out so far?" And things have been just absolutely wonderful. Let me actually start with the culture fit, because that often is ignored and is one of the most important parts, right? The resonance in the culture between the two companies is just off the charts, right? It actually starts with what I would call a dramatic kind of customer first orientation, it's something we always had at Portworx. I always used to tell our customers with a startup you end up kind of, you buy the product, but you get the team, right? That's what happens with early stage startups, but Pure is sort of the same way, they are very focused on customer. So the customer focus is a very very useful thing that pulls us together. The second thing that's been really heartwarming to see has been really the focus on product excellence. Pure made it's dramatic entry into the market using Flash, and being the best Flash-based solution, and now they've expanded into many, many different areas. And Portworx also had a focus on product excellence, and so that has kind of moved the needle forward for both of us. And then I think the third thing is really a focus on the team winning, and not just an individual, right? And look, in these COVID times, this has been a tough year for everybody, I think it's, to some extent, even as we onboard new people, it's the culture of the team, the ability to bring new people onboard, and buy the culture, and make progress, all of that is really a function of how well the team is, 'we' is greater than 'me' type of a model, and I think that both these three values of customer first, high focus on product excellence, and the value in the team, including the resellers and the customers as part of the team, has really been the cornerstone, I think, of our success in the integration. >> That's outstanding because, like you said, this is not your first rodeo launching, coming out of stealth and launching and getting acquired, but doing so during one of the most challenging times in the last 100 years in our history while aligning cultures, I think that says a lot about the leadership on the Portworx side and the Pure side. >> I have to say, right? This is one of those amazing things, many people now that having been acquired can say this, really, most of the diligence, the transactions, all of that were done over Zoom, right? So, and then of course, everything since then is we're still in Zoom paradise. And so I think it really is a testament to the modern tools and stuff that we have that enable that. Now, let me talk a little bit about the content of what has happened, right? So strategically, I think the three areas that I think we've had huge synergy and seeing the benefits are first and foremost on the product side. A little later, I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the announcements we're making, but essentially, Pure had this outstanding core storage infrastructure product, well-known in the industry, very much Flash-oriented, part of the whole all Flash era now. And Portworx really came in with the idea of driving Kubernetes and Cloud Native workloads, which are really the majority of modern workloads. And what we found since then is that the integration of having really a more complete stack, which is really centered around what used to be an IT infrastructure of purchase, and what is in fact, for Kubernetes, a more DevOps oriented purchase. And that kind of a combination of being able to provide that combo in one package is something that we've been working very hard on in the last six months. And I'll mention some of the announcements, but we have a number of integrations with FlashArray and FlashBlade and other Pure products that we're able to highlight. So product integration for sure has been an area of some focus, but against a lot of progress. The second one is really customer synergy. I kind of described to our team when we got acquired, I said it's, for us, it's, being acquired by Pure is like strapping a rocket ship to ourselves as a small company, because we now have access to a huge customer footprint. Pure has over 8,000 customers, hugely amazingly high, almost unbelievable NPS score with customers, one of the best in the IT industry. And I think we are finding that with the deployment of containers becoming more ubiquitous, right? 80, 90% of customers in the enterprise are adopting Kubernetes and Containers. And therefore these 8,000 customers are a big huge target, they got a big target sign for both of us to be able to leverage. And so we've had a number of things that we're doing to address and use the Pure sales team to get access to them. The Pure channel of course is also part of that, Pure is 100% channel organization, which is great. So I think the synergy on the customer side with being able to have a solution that works for infrastructure and for DevOps has been a big area. In this day and age, Kubernetes is an area, for many of your listeners who are very, very familiar with Kubernetes, customers struggle, not just with day zero, but day one, day two, day three, right? It's how do you put it in production. And support, and integrating, and the use of Kubernetes and containers, putting that stack together is a big area. So support is a big area of pain for customers, and it's an area that, again, for a Portworx viewpoint, now we've expanded our footprint with a great support organization that we can bring to bear 24 by seven around the globe. Portworx is running on a lot of mission critical applications in big industries like finance and retail, and these types of things, really, support is a big area. And then the last thing I will just say is the use cases are usually synergistic, right? And we'll talk a little bit more about use cases as we go along here, but really there's legacy apps, right? In an interesting way, there's 80% of, IT spending is still on legacy apps, if you will, in that stack. However, 80% of all the new applications are being deployed on this modern app stack, right? >> Right. >> With all these open-source type of products and technologies. And most of that stack, most of the modern app stack is containerized. The 80, 85% of those applications really are where customers have chosen containers and Kubernetes as the as the mechanism to deliver those apps. And therefore Pure products like FlashBlade were very, very focused with fast recovery for these kind of modern apps, which are the stack of AI, and personalization, and all the modern digital apps. And I think those things can align well with the Portworx offering. So really around the areas of culture, customers, product synergy, support, and finally use cases, are all kind of been areas of huge progress for us. >> It also seems to me that the Portworx acquisition gives Pure a foray, a new buying center with respect to DevOps, talk to me a little bit about that as an opportunity for Pure. >> Yeah, the modern world is one where the enterprise itself has segmented into whole lot of new areas of spending and infrastructure ownership, right? And in the old days it used to be the network, storage, compute, and apps, sort of the old model of the world. And of course the app model has moved on, and then certainly there's a lot of different ways, web apps, the three tier apps, and the web apps, and so on. But the infrastructure world has morphed really into a bunch of other sub-segments, and some of it is still traditional hardware, but then even that is being cloudified, right? Because a lot of companies like Pure have taken their hardware array offerings and are offering that as a cloud-like offering where you can purchase it as a service, and in fact, Pure is offering a set of solutions called Evergreen that allow you to not even, you're just under subscription, you get your hardware refresh bundled in, very, very innovative. So you have now new buying centers coming in, in addition to the old traditional IT, there is sort of this whole, what used to be in the old ways called middleware, now has kind of morphed into this DevSecOps set of folks, right? Which is DevOps it's ITOps, and even security is a big part of that, the CISO Organization has that kind of segment. And so these buying centers often have new budgets, right? It turns out that, for example, to contrast, the Portworx budget really comes from entirely different budget, right? Our top two budget sources are usually CIO initiatives, they're not from the traditional storage budget, it comes from things like move to cloud or business transformation. And those set of folks, that set of customers, is really born in a different era, so to speak. You know, Lisa, they come, and I come from the old world, so I would say that I'm kind of more of an oldie, hopefully a Goldie, but an oldie. These folks are born in the post-DevOps, post-cloud, post-open-source world, right? They are used to brand new tools, get-ops, the way that everything's run on the cloud, it's on demand. So what we bring to Pure is really the ability to take their initiatives, which were around infrastructure, and cloudifying infrastructure to now adding two layers on top of that, right? So what Portworx adds to Pure is the access to the new automation layer of middleware. Kubernetes is nothing but really an automation of model for containers and for infrastructure now. And then the third layer is on top of us, is what I would call SaaS, the SaaSified layer, and as a service layer. And so we bring the opportunity to get those SaaS-like budgets, the DevOps budgets, and the DevOps and the SaaS kind of buyers, and together the business has very different models to it. In addition to not just a different technologies, the buying behavior is different, it's based on a consumption model, it's a subscription business. So it really is a change for new budgets, new buyers, and new financial models, which is a subscription model, which as you know, is valued much more highly by Wall Street nowadays compared to say some of the older hardware models. >> Well, Murli, when we talk about storage, we talk about data or the modern data experience. The more and more data that's being produced, the more value potentially there is for organizations, I think we saw, we learned several lessons in the last year, and one of them is that being able to glean insights from data in real-time or near real-time is, for many businesses, no longer a nice to have, it's really table stakes, it was for survival of getting through COVID, it is now in terms of identification of new business models, but it elevates the data conversation up to the C-suite, the board going, "Is our data protected? Is it secure? Can we access it?" And, "How do we deliver a modern data experience to our customers and to our internal employees?" So with that modern data experience, and maybe the elevation about conversation lengths, talk to me about some of the things that you're announcing at Accelerate with respect to Portworx. >> Yeah, so there are two sets of announcements. To be honest actually, this is a pretty exciting time for us, we're in theCUBE Cone time and the Accelerate time. And so let me kind of draw a circle around both those sets of announcements, if you will, right? So let's start perhaps with just the sets of things that we are announcing at Accelerate, right? This is kind of the first things that are coming up right now. And I'll tell you, there are some very, very exciting things that we're doing. So the majority of the announcements are centered around a release that we have called 2.8, so Portworx says, "We've been in the market now for well over five years with the product that really has been well deployed in very large global 2K enterprises." So the three or four major announcements, one of them is what I was talking about earlier, the integration of true Kubernetes applications running on Pure Storage. So we have a Cloud Native, a Native implementation of Portworx running on FlashArray and FlashBlade, where essentially when users now provision a container volume to Portworx, the storage volumes are magically created on FlashArray and FlashBlade, right? It's the idea of, without having to interface, so a DevOps engineer can deploy storage as code by provisioning volumes using Kubernetes without having to go issue a trouble ticket or a service ticket for a PureArray. And Portworx essentially access a layer between Kubernetes and the PureArray, and we allow configuration of volumes on the storage volumes of the PureArray directly. So essentially now on FlashArray, these volumes now receive the full suite of Portworx Storage Management features, including Kubernetes DR, backup, security, auto scaling, and migration. So that is a first version of this integration, right? The second one, it's, I am, is a personal favorite of mine, it's very, very exciting, right? When we came into Pure, we discovered that Pure already had this software solution called Pure as a service, it was essentially a Pure1 service that allowed for continuous call home, and log and diagnostic information, really an awesome window for customers to be able to see what their array utilization is like, complete observability, end-to-end on capacity, what's coming up, and allowed for proactive addressing of outages, or issues, or being able to kind of see it before it happen. The good news now is Portworx is integrated with Pure1, and so now customers have a unified observability stack for their Kubernetes applications using Portworx and FlashArray and FlashBlade in the Pure1 portal. So we are in the Pure1 portal now really providing end-to-end troubleshooting of issues and deployment, so very, very exciting, something that I think is a major step forward, right? >> Absolutely, well that single pane of glass is critical for management, so many companies waste a lot of time and resources managing disparate disconnected systems. And again, the last year has taught us so many businesses, there wasn't time, because there's going to be somebody right behind you that's going to be faster and more nimble, and has that single pane of glass unified view to be able to make better decisions. Last question, really, before we wrap here. >> Yeah. >> I can hear your momentum, I can feel your momentum through Zoom here. Talk to me about what's next, 'cause I know that when the acquisition happened about, we said six months or so ago, you said, "This is a small step in the Portworx journey." So what's ahead? >> Lisa, great question. I can state 10 things, but let me kind of step up a little bit at the 10,000 foot level, right? In one sense, I think no company gets to declare victory in this ongoing battle and we're just getting started. But if I had to kind of say, "What are some of the major teams that we have been part of and have been able to make happen in addition to take advantage of?" Pure obviously took advantage of the Flash wave, and they moved to all Flash, that's been a major disruptor with Pure being the lead. For Portworx, it has been really the move to containers and data management in an automated form, right? Kubernetes has become sort of not just a container orchestrator looking North, but looking southbound, is orchestrating infrastructure, we are in the throws of that revolution. But if you think about it, the other thing that's happening is all of this is in the service of, if you're a CIO, you're in the service of lines of businesses asking for a way to run their applications in a multicloud way, run their applications faster. And that is really the, as a service revolution, and it feels a little silly to almost talk about it as a service in that it's this late in the Cloud era, but the reality is that's just beginning, right? As a service revolution dramatically changed the IaaS business, the infrastructure business. But if you look at it, data services as a, data as a service is something that is what our customers are doing, so our customers are taking Pure hardware, Portworx software, and then they are building them into a platform as a service, things like databases as a service. And what we are doing, you will see some announcements from us in the second half of this year, terribly exciting, I just can't wait for it, where we're going to be actually moving forward to allow our customers to more quickly get to data services at the push of a button, so to speak, right? So- >> Excellent. >> The idea of database as a service to offer messaging as a service, search as a service, streaming as a service, and then finally some ML kind of AI as a service, these five categories of data services are what you should be expecting to see from Portworx and Pure going forward in the next half. >> Big potential there to really kick the door wide open on the total adjustable market. Well, Murli, it's been great to have you on the program, I can't wait to have you on next 'cause I know that there's so much more, like I said, I can feel your momentum through our virtual experience here. Thank you so much for joining us and giving us the lay of the land of what's been happening with the Portworx acquisition and all of the momentum and excitement that is about to come, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. Cheers to a great reduced COVID second half of the year. >> Oh, cheers to that. >> Yeah cheers, thanks. >> From Murli Thirumale, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate. (bright upbeat music)