>>Welcome everyone to the cubes, continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome one of our alumni to the program. Rob Lee, the CTO of pure storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >>Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for, thanks for having me. >>Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations on your appointment as a CTO >>Now, thank you very much. Very excited, very excited to be taking the reins and uh, for all the, all the great stuff that's ahead of >>A lot of great stuff. I'm sure. I also saw that once again, cure has been named a leader in several Gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid, seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age? Are they looking to solve? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think all in all, I think, um, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their, uh, understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, uh, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their it tools and, and what that means is, you know, not just, um, looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, uh, but really being able to make use of, uh, and, and make the most use out of each, uh, you know, each of the services and, uh, capabilities in the environments that they're operating in. And, uh, so a lot of times that means, um, you know, commonality in, in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, uh, it means the flexibility, uh, that, that commonality allows them, uh, in, in terms of planning and optionality to move, uh, parts of their application or environments, uh, between premise and cloud. >>Um, you know, and, and I think overall, you know, we, we look at this as, um, you know, really a couple, uh, specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, um, you know, I think they're, they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to, uh, in the cloud, into their own data center. Uh, and at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge, um, more of how they operate, uh, the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today, uh, and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. Uh, and then lastly, I'd say that, um, you know, as customers, I think, um, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot, uh, largely planted in, uh, developing and building, uh, some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures, uh, driven by containers and Kubernetes, um, you know, a, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or, or increasingly hybrid is, um, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. >>And that's certainly an area that, uh, you've seen pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. Um, one is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud, uh, model, uh, into their data center. Uh, two is, uh, being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today. Uh, and then three is building their new stuff, uh, and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem cloud, and across clouds. >>Um, talk to me about where cure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just started regulated. And so, uh, this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model, uh, into customer's data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, um, you know, uh, automation, um, simplicity of management, uh, delivering infrastructure as code. A lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment in many ways, as you know, um, this is a natural evolution of where pure has been a long road. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer likes simplicity into our products and, uh, enterprise data centers. And now we're just kind of expanding that, uh, to bring more of the cloud simplicity. And, um, you know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our, um, uh, our public cloud partners, such as AWS in embracing, um, their management models. >>And so you saw, um, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS outposts. Um, and, and that activity is certainly continuing on. So, so customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs, or whether they want, whether they want to, uh, simply use cloud providers, management plans and extend those onto their premise, um, have both options, uh, to do that. Um, you know, we're also as, you know, um, you know, uh, very committed to helping customers, uh, be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from other data center into the public cloud environments, uh, through products like cloud block store. Uh, this is, uh, an area where we've helped, uh, numerous customers, um, you know, take the existing applications, uh, and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run, uh, that they're used to in their data center, um, production environments, rich those now into public cloud environments, and whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. >>Um, and then thirdly, uh, with port works, right, this is where, you know, we're, we're really focused on helping customers, not just, uh, by providing them with the infrastructure, they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on. Uh, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, um, the data flow, um, operations such as backup tr migration, uh, that go along with that storage infrastructure, uh, as well as now application management capabilities, uh, which we recently announced, uh, during our launch event in September with quirks data services. Uh, so really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers, um, really, really looking, uh, to crack as they, um, I would say balance, uh, the cloud environments in their data center environments in this hybrid world. >>And I'm curious what you're seeing, you know, the focus being on data, >>Uh, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is, is kind of, um, you know, contains a lot of the, um, you know, the, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding of their customers, uh, you know, and or whether it's in product development faster time to market. Um, I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated, um, uh, realization appreciation of, for not just how valuable the data is, but, um, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? Uh, you know, customers that are realizing, Hey, if I'm collecting all this data, uh, in my on-prem location, um, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Um, maybe I need to kind of, uh, look at how I, how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services, uh, living over here and how do I bridge those two, um, uh, you know, two locations. I think you add on top of that, um, you know, newer, I would say realization of, uh, security and data governance, data, privacy concerns, and that certainly has customers. I think, um, you know, thinking a lot more thinking a lot more intently about, um, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data management, uh, governance and security strategies. >>Yeah. We've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in the threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word, and it's a matter of when versus if, as customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to persist for probably quite some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, um, I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when not if right. And I, and I think, um, you know, we're, we're really focused on helping customers, um, uh, plan for, and, uh, have, you know, planned for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security and have focused on preventing an attack and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, Hey, if something happens where, you know, as, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? Uh, and so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, um, you know, form a robust strategies for, um, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware sense. >>Um, we do this by, uh, through our safe mode, um, uh, features which are available across, uh, all of our products and, you know, quite simply this is, uh, our capability to take, um, read only snapshots and then couple them with, uh, a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down. And it takes the control of the snapshots away from, uh, not just customer admins, but potential, uh, ransomware or malware. Right. Um, you know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have, uh, hit the industry, um, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware, um, uh, pieces of software taking are going after the backups, they go off to the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stop that chain or in the security world world, what's called the kill chain. Uh, we stopped that chain, uh, right at, right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, um, you know, no customer admin, whether, uh, it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, um, has the, has the ability to remove that backup. And you know, that that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular, uh, and most, uh, quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >>That's key. I saw that, um, some was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it to becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators. And of course, a source of driving revenue ensuring that the data, the backups are protected and the ability to recover, um, quickly is there is that is table stakes. I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >>Absolutely. And I think, um, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's, um, protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, um, you know, infrastructure failures or, or, or whatnot, um, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back five, 10 years and people are really fixated on, Hey, how quickly can I back? You know, how quickly can I back this environment up and how can I do it in the most cost-effective manner. Now, people are much more focused on, Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is, uh, when, when something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online? Because, um, chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online servants, right? >>Chances are, you've got customers waiting for a, you've got SLS, you've got transactions that can't complete. If you don't get this environment back up. Uh, and we've seen this, uh, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think, um, that maturing understanding of what true data protection is, is something that, um, has a driven, you know, a new approach, uh, from customers to, and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. Uh, and B I think it is also, um, you know, uh, found a new place for, um, you know, performance and reliability and really all of the properties of, um, you know, Pierce products, uh, in, in this space. >>Last question about, for you, give me an example, and you can just mention it by industry, or even by use case of, of a joint AWS pure customer, where you're really helping them create a very successful, uh, enterprise grade hybrid cloud environment. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, you know, so, so we've got, uh, we've got countless customers that, um, you know, uh, I could point to, you know, I, I think, um, you know, I think one that I would, uh, or one space that were particularly successful in, uh, that I would highlight are, um, you know, SAS companies, right? So, so companies that are, um, you know, are building, um, you know, are building modern SAS applications. Uh, and in one, in one particular example I can think of is, um, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, um, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And, uh, certainly is looking to AWS looking to the public cloud environments, um, you know, as, as a, um, you know, as a great place to scale, but at the same time, um, you know, needs, um, more capabilities than, um, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, uh, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. >>They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, um, you know, uh, really provide the 24 by seven by 365, uh, around the world, uh, service that they have, especially dealing with, um, high load bursts in different geos and, and just a very, very dynamic global environment. Um, and so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, um, you know, help the customer, uh, with port works, uh, be able to provide these capabilities, um, by augmenting the compute that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer. Um, you know, with me, uh, the storage level, um, uh, uh, replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities and auto scaling performance management, um, all the capabilities that they need, uh, to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, um, you know, uh, on-premise on-premise data center locations as well. >>Um, so that's just one, uh, one of many examples, um, you know, but, but I think that's a, a great example where, you know, as, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. Uh, but then as you scale, uh, whether it's, uh, because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute, um, volume and capacity, um, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, um, you know, more, uh, connectivity, uh, to other sites other potentially, uh, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. Um, and that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic, uh, infrastructure layer such as port works, uh, is able to provide, uh, comes in very handy. >>Got it, Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re-invent talking about the pure AWS relationship what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then very fast paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >>Thanks for having me. >>Likewise. Good to see you too. Probably I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021.

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)

>>the cloud is evolving, you know, it's no longer just a set of remote services access through a public cloud Rather it's expanding to on premises to multiple premises across clouds and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one the opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this cube program. We're featuring pure storage and its latest innovations and bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them if you will. And today we have a two part program. First we're gonna hear from rob leaves the CTO of pure storage and then my colleague john Walls is gonna talk to scott. Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is rob lee CTO pure storage. Welcome rob. Good to see you. >>Good to see you again to dave >>Okay, so take us through the announcements from today at a high level what's most exciting about what you're delivering? Yeah, >>absolutely. So as you know, many announcements today, many things to discuss. But overall, uh you know, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. Right. We've always thought of the journey to modern data is being formed by by three pillars if you will. Certainly modernizing infrastructure modernizing operations uh and applications, uh today's announcements are really uh in that in that kind of middle category if like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. Right. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one. Probably people best know us for that. Today's announcements are really about uh tackling that operations, peace bring infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about pure fusion, for example, um you know that that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, uh products and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the application actions that they serve. Whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations or between the premise on premise environment, in the cloud environment. Um likewise, uh the application front, um you know, when we think about today's announcements uh in port works data services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate uh steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud native developers are using and relying on the database applications that are most popular and open source CAssandra Mongo so on and so forth. How do we make the run and operate pieces of those applications, a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed monitored for those app developers and so a ton of a ton of momentum is a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in pure one, um that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure, running the apps and bring those closer together. So when we think about um, you know, the visibility, we're now able to deliver for port works to apologies, allowing developers and devops teams to look at the entire uh tech stack, if you will of a container environment from the application to the containers to the kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes all the way down to the storage and be able to see everything that's going on root cause any sort of problems that come up again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. Um so that's really how I view it, uh and and like I said, it's really the next step in our journey of of helping customers modernize between infrastructure operations and and their applications. >>Okay, So, so you've got the control plane piece, which is all about the operating model. You've got pure one, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the port works piece, which brings sort of development and deployment together and both infrastructure as a code is code and better understanding that full stack of like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers all the way down. So the story says, I feel like it's not even storage anymore. I mean it's cloud, >>It is and you know, I talk a little bit because, you know, at the end of the day we deliver storage, but what customers are looking for is in what they value and what they care about is their data. Now, obviously the storage is in service of the data. Um what we're, what we're doing with today's announcements is again just making it extending, extending our reach, helping customers work over their data. Uh you know, a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage. But now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly? Get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. How >>does this news fit into pure evolution as a company? I mean I don't see it as a pivot because of pivots like, okay, we're gonna go from here and now we're >>doing this right? So >>it's it's more like a reinvention or progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >>Absolutely. Um you know, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's the next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. Right? You know, and again, I go back to um you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long, long term hath long term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data we got our starting infrastructure um and and just uh you know, if you want to do, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not gonna do it on decades old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first. That's how we got our start. Um you know, today's announcements are really the next couple of steps along that journey. Um how do we make, how do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate more automated in the hands of not just the devops teams, the I. T. Teams but the application developers, how do we, how do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why why is that important? Um It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds the traditional kind of measures bandwidth i obsolete and see that sort of thing. But they're looking for a speed of agility. Right? You look at the modern application space around how data is being processed. It's a very, very fast moving application space. Uh you know, the databases that are being used today may be different than the ones using being used three months from now or six months from now And so um developers, application teams are looking for, you know, a ton more flexibility, ton more agility than they were 35, 10, 15 years ago. Um The other aspect is simplicity and reliability, right? As you know, um that's a core component of uh you know of everything. We do our core products uh you know, uh you know, our arrays are storage appliances, um you know, we're very well known for the simplicity and reliability. We drive at the individual product level. Well as we scale and look at um you know, larger environments as we look at uh customers expectations for what they expect from a cloud like service. There is the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. Right. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud wants to be able to manage large fleets of uh infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver uh infrastructure services to their internal customers, want they want to be able to do it in a self service, policy driven, easy to control, easy to manage way. Um and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what what pure fusion is about, right, is allowing operators that control plane to specify those um those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Um Same thing with poor works, right. If we think about simplicity and reliability, uh containers, collaborative applications, microservices, a lot of benefits. They're very fast moving space, you can mix and match components put them together very easily. Um, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity because you have more moving parts and a greater need for reliability because well now you're not just serving one application, but You know, 30 or 40 working in unison and that's really what we're after with port works and port works data services in the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question um, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >>Right. Thanks for that rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. Virtually every infrastructure player now has an as a service offering and there are lots of claims out there about who was first, who is the best etcetera. What's up yours position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack and delivering subscription and, and as a service offerings in the storage industry? You certainly refers to with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as a service and Pure as a service. What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're leading the industry in this regard? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think first and foremost we think of everything we do, uh, you know, pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate uh in an average service model internally or whether it's pure taking on more of that run and operate uh as a service ourselves with pure as a service. Um and so, you know, the second part of your question, which is uh you know, what is it that that sets us apart, What are we doing differently? What gives us confidence that um you know, this is the right path? Well, you know, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a uh you know, a hotter topic in the industry um you know, of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. Right. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry. Um you know, who look at it as a little bit more of a, you know, a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T and CS and call it a service. Um what do I mean by that? Right. So, you know, if you look internally a pure everything we do, we think of as a service, we have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it uh in building out service offerings. Um, you know, when we think about why this is technology led, uh you know, I think of a service for something to be thought of as a service. Right. It's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need uh whether that's, you know, changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day one rigid kind of static swim lanes of Having the capacity plan or plan out what my use is gonna look like 18 months from now. Right. Um I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption. Right? Uh you know, it's it's not it's not a service if you're gonna make me do a data migration or take a downtown. Uh and so when I net all that out Right, what are the things that you need? The attributes you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product that that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolved able. Um you need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of, of needs, whether it's price performance, uh tears, uh you know, high performance capacity, lower cost price points. Um you need something that's got a rich set of capabilities, whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replication snapshots, uh ransomware protection, so you need that full suite of capabilities um but in order to deliver this to service and enable me as a customer to seamlessly grow and change, you know, that's got to be delivered in a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products uh and expect me to change and and move every every single time I have a a service to need change. And so when I net that out that puts us in a absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on to core product families, port works adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price, performance and service tiers. And we're able to do this on a very tight code base and and as you know, uh everything we do is completely not disruptive. So all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of strategic focus for us. >>So these offerings are all part of the services. Service driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >>Absolutely great. >>Um you talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern applications, modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure, what exactly does that mean? And how are you driving that? >>Well, I think um I think it means a couple different things, but if I had to let it out, it's it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. Um and if we look at why that is uh you know, when I talk to customers As they think about infrastructure largely they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support, which is often times the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve. So they're kind of balancing both worlds um and in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic meaning, you know, the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time. Um the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver uh has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up down, growing has to be a lot more elastic um and has much higher variance. Right? And what I mean by that is um you know, you look at a modern cloud, native microservices architecture type application, it's really, you know, 2030 40 different applications, all working in concert with one another under the hood, This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set right back in the day, um you know, you have an oracle application, you go design in an environment for that, right? It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own life cycle. Um these days with modern applications, uh you know, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them, uh you know, working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece. Um and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the changing events and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle and so that at the end of the day drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure, being able to use it for many different purposes, um much more agility, being able to adapt very, very quickly. Uh and much more variants are dynamic range, right? The ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure and this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >>Great, thank you for that. I really liked that answer because it's not just a bunch of, you know, slide wear mumbo jumbo, you actually put some substance on rob, we're gonna have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >>Thank you and >>look forward to having you back soon. Now in a moment, scott Sinclair, who's a senior analyst at enterprise Strategy Group, speaks with the cubes john walls to give you the independent analysts take you're watching the cube, your global leader in high tech coverage. >>Mhm.

>> Voiceover: Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at AWS re:Invent, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Justin Warren. This is day one of AWS re:Invent. Rob Lee is here, he's the Vice President and Chief Architect at Pure Storage. And he's joined by Rob Walters, who is the Vice President, General Manager of Storage as a Service at Pure. Robs, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us back. >> Yep, thank you. >> Dave: You're welcome. Rob, we'll start with, Rob Lee we'll start with you. So re:Invent, this is the eighth re:Invent, I think the seventh for theCUBE, what's happened at the show, any key takeaways? >> Yeah, absolutely it's great to be back. We were here last year obviously big launch of cloud data services, so it's great to be back a year in. And just kind of reflect back on how the year's gone for uptick at cloud data services, our native US. And it's been a banner year. So we saw over the last year CloudSnap go GA Cloud Block Store go GA and you know just really good customer uptake, adoption and kind of interest out of the gate. So it's kind of great to be back. Great to kind of share what we've down over the last year as well as just get some feedback and more interest from future customers and prospects as well. >> So Rob W, with your background in the cloud what's you take on this notion of storage as a service? How do you guys think about that and how do you look at that? >> Sure, well this is an ever more increasingly important way to consume storage. I mean we're seeing customers who've been you know got used to the model, the economic model, the as a service model in the cloud, now looking to get those benefits on-prem and in the hybrid cloud too. Which if you know, you look at our portfolio we have both there, as part of the Pure as a service. >> Right okay, and then so Pure Accelerate you guys announced Cloud Block Store. >> Yeah, that's when we took it GA. Right so we've been working with customers in a protracted beta process over the last year to really refine the fit and use cases for tier one block workloads and so we took that GA in Accelerate. >> So this is an interesting, you're a partner obviously with Amazon I would think many parts of Amazon love Cloud Block Store 'cause you're using EC2, you're front-ending S3 like you're helping Amazon sell services and you're delivering a higher level of availability and performance in certain workloads, relative to EVS. So there's probably certain guys at Amazon that aren't so friendly with you. So that's an interesting dynamic, but talk about the positioning of Cloud Block Store. Any sort of updates on uptake? What are customers excited about? What can you share? >> Yeah, no absolutely You know I'd say primarily we're most pleased with the variety of workloads and use cases that customers are bringing us into. I think when we started out on this journey we saw tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the AWS Echo system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud. What we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS, it's allowed customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flash arrays into. So that's their tier one mission critical environments, their VMware workloads, their Oracle workloads, their SAP workloads. They're also looking at us from everything from to do lift and shift, test and dev in the cloud, as well as DR right, and that again I think speaks to a couple things. It speaks to the durability, the higher level of service that we're able to deliver in AWS, but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and have it operate in exactly the same way on-prem and in the cloud. 'Cause look, if you're going to DR the last time, the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat, hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a DR failover. And so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness, you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases that customers are bringing us into. >> So you guys obviously a big partner of VMware, you're done very well in that community. So VMware cloud on AWS, is that a tailwind for you guys or can you take advantage of that at this point? >> Yeah no, so I think the way I look at it is both VMware, Pure, AWS, I think we're all responding to the same market demands and customer needs. Which at the end of the day is, look if I'm an enterprise customer the reality is, I'm going to have some of my workloads running on-premise, I'm going to have some of my workloads running in the cloud, I expect you the vendors to help me manage this diverse, hybrid environment. And what I'd say is, there are puts and takes how the different vendors are going about it but at the end of the day that's the customer need. And so you know we're going about this through a very targeted storage-centric approach because that's where we provide service today. You know and you see VMware going after it from the kind of application, hypervisor kind of virtualization end of things. Over time we've had a great partnership with VMware on-premise, and as both Cloud Block Store and VMware Cloud mature, we'd look to replicate the same motion with them in that offering. >> Yeah, I mean to to extent I mean you think about VMware moving workloads with their customers into the cloud, more mission critical stuff comes into the cloud, it's been hard to get a lot of those workloads in to date and that's maybe the next wave of cloud. Rob W., I have a question for you. You know Amazon's been kind of sleepy in storage over the, S3, EBS, okay great. They dropped a bunch of announcements this year and so it seems like there's more action now in the cloud. What's your sort of point of view as to how you make that an opportunity for Pure? >> The way I've always looked at it is, there's been a way of getting your storage done and delivered on AWS and there's been the way that enterprises have done things on-premise. And I think that was a sort of a longer term bet from AWS that that was the way things will tend to fall towards into the public cloud. And now we see, all of the hyperscalers quite honestly with on-prem, hybrid opportunities. With the like Outpost today, et cetera. The hybrid is a real things, it's not just something people said that couldn't get to the cloud, you know it's a real thing. So I think that actually opens up opportunity from both sides. True enterprise class features that our enterprise class customers are looking for in the cloud through something like CBS are now available. But I think you know at Amazon and other hyperscale are reaching back down into the on-prem environments to help with the onboarding of enterprises up into the cloud >> So the as a service side of things makes life a little bit interesting from my perspective, because that's kind of new for Pure to provide that storage as a service, but also for enterprises as you say, they're used to running things in a particular way so as they move to cloud they're kind of having to adapt and change and yet they don't fully want to. Hybrid is a real thing, there are real workloads that need to perform in a hybrid fashion. So what does that mean for you providing storage as a service, and still to Rob Lee's point, still providing that consistency of experience across the entire product portfolio. 'Cause that's quite an achievement and many other as storage providers haven't actually been able to pull that off. So how do you keep all of those components working coherently together and still provide what customers are actually looking for? >> I think you have to go back to what the basics of what customers are actually looking for. You know they're looking to make smart use of their finances capex potentially moving towards opex, that kind of consumption model is growing in popularity. And I think a lot of enterprises are seeing less and less value in the sort of nuts and bolts storage management of old. And we can provide a lot of that through the as a service offering. So had to look past the management and monitoring. We've always done the Evergreen service subscription, so with software and hardware upgrades. So we're letting their sort of shrinking capex budget and perhaps their limited resources work on the more strategically important elements of their IT strategies, including hybrid-cloud. >> Rob Lee, one of the things we've talked about in the past is AI. I'm interested in sort of the update on the AI workloads . We heard a lot obviously today on the main stage about machine learning, machine intelligence, AI, transformations, how is that going, the whole AI push? You guys were first, really the first storage company to sort of partner up and deliver solutions in that area. Give us the update there. Wow's it going, what are you learning? >> Yeah, so it's going really well. So it continues to be a very strong driver of our flash play business, and again it's really driven by it's a workload that succeeds with very large sums of data, it succeeds when you can push those large sums of data at high speed into modern compute, and rinse and repeat very frequently. And the fourth piece which I think is really helping to propel some of the business there, is you know, as enterprises, as customers get further on into the AI deployment journeys what they're finding is the application space evolves very quickly there. And the ability for infrastructure in general, but storage in particular, because that's where so much data gravity exists to be flexible to adapt to different applications and changing application requirements really helps speed them up. So said another way, if the application set that your data scientists are using today are going to change in six months, you can't really be building your storage infrastructure around a thesis of what that application looks like and then go an replace it in six months. And so that message as customers have been through now the first, first and a half iterations of that and really sort of internalize, hey AI is a space that's rapidly evolving we need infrastructure that can evolve and grow with us, that's helping drive a lot of second looks and a lot of business back to us. And I would actually tie this back to your previous question which is the direction that Amazon have taken with some of their new storage offerings and how that ties into storage as a service. If I step back as a whole, what I'd say is both Amazon and Pure, what we see is there's now a demand really for multiple classes of service for storage, right. Fast is important, it's going to continue to get more and more important, whether it's AI, whether it's low latency transactional databases, or some other workload. So fast always matters, cost always matters. And so you're going to have this stratification, whether it's in the cloud, whether its on flash with SCM, TLC, QLC, you want the benefits of all of those. What you don't want is to have to manage the complexity of tying and stitching all those pieces together yourself, and what you certainly don't want is a procurement model that locks you out or in to one of these tiers, or in one of these locations. And so if you think about it in the long term, and not to put words in the other Rob's mouth, where I think you see us going with Pure as a service is moving to a model that really shifts the conversation with customers to say, look the way you should be transacting with storage vendors, and we're going to lead the charge is class of service, maybe protocol, and that's about it. It's like where do you want this data to exist? How fast do you want it? Where on the price performance curve do you want to be? How do you want it to be protected? And give us room to take care of it from there. >> That's right, that's right. This isn't about the storage array anymore. You know you look at the modern data experience message this is about what do you need from your storage, from a storage attribute perspective rather than a physical hardware perspective and let us worry about the rest. >> Yeah you have to abstract that complexity. You guys have, I mean simple is the reason why you were able to achieve escape velocity along with obviously great product and pretty good management as well. But you'll never sub optimize simplicity to try to turn some knobs. I mean I've learned that following you guys over the years. I mean that's your philosophy. >> No absolutely, and what I'd say is as technology evolves, as the components evolve into this world of multis, multi-protocol, multi-tier, multi-class of service, you know the focus on that simplicity and taking even more if it on becomes ever more important. And that's a place where, getting to your question about AI we help customers implement AI, we also do a lot of AI within our own products in our fleet. That's a place where our AI driven ops really have a place to shine in delivering that kind of best optimization of price, performance, tiers of service, so on, so forth, within the product lines. >> What are you guys seeing at the macro? I mean that to say, you've achieved escape velocity, check. Now you're sort of entering the next chapter of Pure. You're the big share gainer, but obviously growing slower than you had in previous years. Part of that we think is this, part of your fault. You put so much flash into the marketplace. It's given people a lot of headroom. Obviously NaN pricing has been an issue, you guys have addressed that on your calls, but still gaining share much, much more quickly than most. Most folks are shrinking. So what are you seeing at the macro, what are customers telling you in terms of their long term strategy with regard to storage? >> Well, so I'll start, I'll let Rob add in. What I'd say is we see in the macro a shift, a clear shift to flash. We've called the shots since day one, but what I'd say is that's accelerating. And that's accelerating with pricing dynamics, with and you know we talked about a lot of the NaN pricing and all that kind of stuff, but in the macro I think there's a clear realization now that customers want to be on flash. It's just a matter of what's the sensible rate? What's the price kind of curve to get there? And we see a couple meaningful steps. We saw it originally with our flash array line taking out 15K spinning drives, 10K's really falling. With QLC coming online and what we're doing in FlashArray//C the 7200 RPM drive kind of in the enterprise, you know those days are numbered, right. And I think for many customers at this point it's really a matter of, okay how quickly can we get there and when does it make sense to move, as opposed to, does it make sense. In many ways it's really exciting. Because if you think about it, the focus for so long has been in those tier one environments, but in many ways the tier two environments are the ones that could most benefit from a move to flash because a couple things happen there. Because they're considered lower tier, lower cost they tend to spread like bunnies, they tend to be kind of more neglected parts of the environment and so having customers now be able to take a second look at modernizing, consolidating those environments is both helpful from a operational point of view, it's also helpful from the point of view of getting them to be able to make that data useful again. >> I would also say that those exact use cases are perfect candidates for an as a service consumption model because we can actually raise the utilization, actually helping customers manage to a much more utilized set of arrays than the over consumption, under consumption game they're trying to play right now with their annual capex cycles. >> And so how aggressive do you see customers wanting to take advantage of that as a service consumption model? Is it mixed or is it like, we want this? >> There's a lot of customers who are just like we want this and we want it now. We've seen a very good traction and adoption so yeah, it's a surprisingly large, complex enterprise customer adoption as well. >> A lot of enterprise, they've gotten used to the idea of cloud from AWS. They like that model of dealing with things and they want to bring that model of operating on site, because they want cloud everywhere. They don't actually want to transform the cloud into enterprise. >> No, exactly, I mean if I go back 20 plus years to when I was doing hands on IT, the idea that we as a team would let go of any of the widgetry that we are responsible for, never would have happened. But then you've had this parallel path of public cloud experience, and people are like well I don't even need to be doing that anymore. And we get better results. Oh and it's secure as well? And that list just goes on. And so now as you say, the enterprise wants to bring it back on-prem for all of those benefits. >> One of the other things that we've been tracking, and maybe it falls in the category of cloud 2.0 is the sort of new workload forming. And I'll preface it this way, you know the early days, the past decade of cloud infrastructures of service have been about, yeah I'm going to spin up some EC2, I'm going to need some S3, whatever, I need some storage, but today it seems like, there's all this data now and then you're seeing new workloads driven by platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, you know clearly throw in some ML tools like Databricks and it's driving a lot of compute now but it's also driving insights. People are really pulling insights out of that data. I just gave you cloud examples, are you seeing on-prem examples as well, or hybrid examples, and how do you guys fit into that? >> Yeah, no absolutely. I think this is a secular trend that was kicked off by open source and the public cloud. But it certainly affects, I would say, the entire tech landscape. You know a lot of it is just about how applications are built. If you about, think back to the late '80s, early '90s you had large monoliths, you had Oracle, and it did everything, soup to nuts. Your transactional system, your data warehouse, ERP, cool, we got it all. That's not how applications are built anymore. They're built with multiple applications working together. You've got, whether it's Kafka connecting into some scale out analytics database, connected into Cassandra, connected right. It's just the modern way of how applications are built. And so whether that's connecting data between SaaS services in the cloud, whether it's connecting data between multiple different application sets that are running on-prem, we definitely see that trend. And so when you peel back the covers of that, what we see, what we hear from customers as they make that shift, as they try to stand up infrastructure to meet those need, is again the need for flexibility. As multiple applications are sharing data, are handing off data as part of a pipeline or as part of a workflow, it becomes ever more important for the underlying infrastructure, the storage array if you will, to be able to deliver high performance to multiple applications. And so the era of saying, hey look I'm going to design a storage array to be super optimized for Oracle and nothing else like you're only going to solve part of the problem now. And so this is why you see us taking, within Pure the approach that we do with how we optimize performance, whether it's across FlashArray, FlashBlade, or Cloud Block Store. >> Excellent, well guys we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts with us. And have a good rest of re:Invent. >> Thanks for having us back >> Dave: All right, pleasure >> Thank you >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one. Dave Vellante for Justin Warren. You're watching theCUBE from AWS re:Invent 2019. Right back (electronic 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.

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by, Pure Storage. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and we are sportin' some. >> You can't see mine-- >> Who are you? >> Because it's chilly-- >> Who are you? >> I'm a symbol. (laughing) >> I don't know, there's a name for that. I'm formally known as Prince. Dave and I are here with Rob Lee, the VP and chief architect at Pure Storage. Hey Rob, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, thanks for having me. >> You're sporting a lot of gray. >> We won't make a comment. >> I don't see any orange. >> I don't have a symbol or T-shirt either. >> I can't believe you haven't been kicked out. Like they didn't just actually eject you. Going to have to fix that. So, you've been at Pure for about five years now. You were one of the founders of FlashBlade. Here we are, third annual Accelerate, packed house this morning in the keynote session. What are some of your observations about the growth that you've seen at this company? >> Well you know, it's really been amazing. When I joined Pure, we were about 150 employees. I joined as part of the founding team for FlashBlade. One of the first two or three people. In fact, my first day on the job was takin' monitors out of boxes and settin' up desks. Since then, we've obviously grown tremendously from 150 employees to over 2,300. But more importantly, what we've been able to grow in terms of customers. So we've went from that tiny size to over 4,800 customers today. From the FlashBlade side of the house, it's been a really, really fun ride. The first couple of years of my time at Pure was spent really heads down building the product, figuring out how do we repeat some of the core philosophies and values that we've brought to FlashArray into FlashBlade and take that product into new markets. We brought that product out and launched it at our first Accelerate conference three years ago. So that first year was really about getting it up to market, growing that customer base. Last year, you saw us take it into a lot of more kind of newer and emerging workloads, analytics, AI, so and so forth. And this past year has really been spent just doubling down on that and not only building a lot more expertise within the company about understanding where that direction of the market is going, but also translating that experience that we're gathering, working with customers on the leading edge of all of those industries into helping our customers, our new and perspective customers. Figure out how do they deploy those solutions into their environments and be maximally successful. So it's really been a very, very exciting ride. >> So Rob, you're the sort of the resident AI expert inside of Pure and I'm sure there are many, but you're on theCUBE now (laughing) so we want to attack that a little bit. AI seems to be this emerging technology that's a horizontal layer of tech that cuts across virtually every industry and every application, but it's application seems to be narrow, whether it's facial recognition or natural language processing, supply chain optimization. So what's Pure's point-of-view on AI, artificial intelligence. I'm not crazy about the name. I like machine intelligence better personally, but what's your point-of-view on the AI space and how it will get adopted. Maybe some of the barriers to that adoption? >> Sure, well so I think. So I share the same distaste for the term mostly because I think it's overused and it's misused in many ways. I think if you look at AI at its heart, it's really about gathering more intelligence and more value from data. Now, more recently, technology advances mostly in compute and algorithms have caused and created an explosion in subsets of AI particularly machine learning or deep learning. And that's really what's driving a lot of these new applications. You mentioned a few, image recognition, voice recognition, so on and so forth. But really what it is, is, it's re-highlighting the focus on the fact that organizations, for decades, have been gathering and collecting and storing and paying to store volumes and volumes of data. But they haven't been able to get the maximum value out of it. And I think one of the most chilling statistics I've seen is that, over 80% of data that's gathered, is unstructured data, but if you look at all of that unstructured data, less than 1% is actually analyzed. What that means is that 99% of data that people have been collecting over the last several decades, they haven't been able to extract maximum value out of it. And I think what we're seeing is that the recent advances in hardware technology, software technology, algorithms to drive a lot of these deep learning type of applications. Even though the applications may be very focused in terms of the types of data they work with, image recognition, object recognition, emotion detection, so on and so forth. It's really bringing the spotlight back across organizations onto how do we get more information out of all of our data. And in a lot of cases, conversations that we get into with customers that start out with the glitzy use cases, the object detection demos. When we start peeling into, so what is it, how are you going to deploy this into your organization, how are you going to translate this into better customer outcomes. We're actually finding ways to apply more traditional data analysis techniques to get better and more information out of people's data. And they may be everything from relational databases to big data analytic stacks. So again, I think the bigger movement here is that recent advances in technology have really re-highlighted the focus on organizations getting more out of their data of all forms. >> When you think about the top market cap companies, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, et cetera. They seem to be companies that have mastered or at least are ahead of the pack in terms of machine intelligence. You guys recently conducted a study with MIT. What do you see from that study and the conversations with customers in terms of the incumbence being able to close that gap? >> So, I think there are a couple of really interesting points that came up out of the MIT survey. One is that the prevalence and demand for AI on particularly machine learning applications is both broad-based across all industries, but it's also huge. I think one of the stats that I saw was that over 80% of organizations expect to deploy into production some form of AI or machine learning technology into their companies by 2020. I think the other thing that wasn't in that survey, but was instead, of remarks that Andrew Ng actually from Google made was that, the rapid pace of development in AI research and particularly the algorithm side in terms of different training frameworks and the way that people are working with data, that the rapid advance on that is actually democratizing entry into the AI space. I don't remember the exact quote, but he said something to the effect of, as algorithm research advances, it's easier and easier for new entrants to get into machine learning, to get into data science and make a bigger and bigger impact. And I think that the other thing that we've learned from the large incumbence, is that in many cases, and I think actually Google is the one that came out and said this, they said, the reason why Google is at the head of the pack, if you will in terms of data intelligence and machine intelligence, in some respect, they got their lead by having the most advanced algorithms, most advanced software engineers. But they maintain their lead because they have the most data. Basically the take away point there is having a lot of data trumps having the best algorithm, and we expect that to continue as AI research and algorithms continue to evolve. So I think it's really in many ways, it's much more a democratized landscape than previous approaches to. >> And a lot of that makes sense because the incumbence. You use that word, I like that word. They're going to buy AI from technology suppliers, and then they're going to apply it to their business. At the same time, data generally is not at the core of their business. It tends to be either humans or maybe the bottling plant or some other manufacturing assets or whatever it is. So they have to figure out the data model, and that study suggested that while they were optimistic about AI, they were struggling with trying to figure out how to apply it and the skill sets, et cetera. Maybe share some of your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely. I think one of the things that study really highlighted was that while there was a tremendous excitement and demand from the upper levels of management, the CIO, the kind of see-swee to deploy AI technologies, that there was an increasing and growing disconnect between the policy decision makers, the executive management and the people that are actually doing the work. And I think that disconnect with this technology set is... We see it on a day-to-day basis. We see it with customers that we talk to. I think that a lot of that disconnect actually comes from poor infrastructure planning. One of the things that we see is that many companies go and get really excited about the promise of the AI technology, the promise of hey, I could deploy this solution, I could understand my customers better, great, let's go do it. And they go off and they hire a bunch of data scientists without investing in or thinking about the infrastructure that they're going to put into place to make those data scientists productive. One of the things that I think there was an article in Financial Times that actually looked at hiring and retention for data scientists. And what they found was that the lack of infrastructure, the lack of automation was materially contributing to frustration in terms of data scientists being able to do their jobs. To the point where even those really, really hard to hire data scientists, it's becoming difficult to retain them if you're not giving them, if you're not equipping them with the tools to do their jobs efficiently. So this is an area where there's a growing disconnect between the decision makers that are saying, hey we've got to go that way. Their understanding of the tool sets and the automation of the infrastructure required to get there, and their staffs and their employees that are actually responsible for getting them there, and this is a scenario where as we, one of the exciting parts of my job at Pure is, I get to talk to a lot of customers that are on the bleeding edge of implementing these technologies. One of the things that we get to do by working with each of these customers by understanding what works, what doesn't work, we could help kind of bridge that gap. >> I'll take the bait. (laughs) >> What does that infrastructure for AI look like? I mean it's kind of self-serving. But, describe it. >> Sure. Well, so, I think at the heart of it, it's all about simplicity, it's all about removing friction in bottle necks. There's a Harvard business review article a while ago that looked at data science in general, where time is spent, where resources are spent. And they came up with a statistic that said, more than 80% of the data scientist's time is spent not doing data science, it's actually spent preparing data, moving data, copying data, doing basic data wrangling, data management tasks, and the other 20% is spent complaining about the first 80%. (laughing) >> So I think what we see, Pure helping with, what we see kind of the ideal kind of infrastructure to enable these types of projects, is an infrastructure that is simple, easy to work with, easy to manage. But more importantly, you heard Charlie and Kix during the keynote talk today, talk about data-centered architecture. You heard them talk about the importance of building an architecture, building a practice, building a set of processes around the idea that data is very, very difficult to move. You want to move it as few times as possible. You want to manage it as little as possible. And that really, really applies in a lot of these AI applications. To give you a very, very quick example, if you take a look at an AI pipeline to do something like training and object detection system for self-driving cars, that pipeline, that simple sentence may encapsulate 30 or 40 different applications. You've got video coming off of video cameras that have to be adjusted somewhere. That video has to be cut, downsized, rendered, cut into still images. Those still images have to be warped, noise filters applied, color filters applied. If you play this out, in most cases, there's 30, 40 different applications that are at play here. And without an infrastructure to make it easy to centralize the data management portion of that, you've also potentially got 30 or 40 different data silos. And so when we look at how to make projects successful, and we look at how do you make infrastructure that helps data science teams spend more time doing data science and less time copying data around, tracking where it is, so and so forth. That's all part of what we see as a larger data strategy. >> Oh, sorry Rob. So one of the customers that was shared on stage this morning, Paige AI, how they're leveraging not just pure technology but also really kind of taking what used to be and still is for a lot of organizations, an analog process of actually looking at cancer pathology slides and digitizing that and taking it forward. Did you see in the study any leading industries that are maybe better positioned to align the (mumbling) with the ITDs to take advantage of AI faster? Are there any industries that kind of jumped out in the study as maybe those that are going to be leading edge? >> So I think the thing that actually jumped out was that how broad-based across industries really the AI applications are. I think if you look at specific types of data sets or specific-use cases, if you look at image detection for example. Yes I think you can drive that into specific industries. I think you're going to see a lot in healthcare, in manufacturing, certainly self-driving cars is a big one. I think if you look at natural language processing or speech detect, that sort of thing. A lot of customer service that's being put into use in a lot of automating a lot of chat bots, a lot of customer service kind of call center type applications. So I think if you look at a particular application or at a particular data set or data type, you can drive that to industries that are likely to lead the charge. But what was interesting to me was if you consider all of the machine-learning approaches, all of the AI kind of interests, how broad-based across all industries that was. >> I know we're out of time, but we'd be remiss if we didn't ask you what you guys are doing internally. You're not just selling a infrastructure for AI, you're AI practitioners as well. Can you briefly describe what you're doing? >> Sure, sure. So I think the most interesting application of AI that we've got internally is really the AI engine that powers Meta which is our Pure1 hosted kind of-- (cell phone ringing) (laughing) Our Pure1 offering that helps us predictively and proactively manage customer arrays. We started Pure1 as a remote support offering since the beginning of Pure, since we first shipped FlashArray, and we did it originally to get to the point where we could better understand arrays. The more arrays that we shipped in the field, we want the marginal cost of support, the marginal kind of effort, if you will, to understand that the arrays behavior to decrease with the number of arrays that we ship. And we want our understanding of the array's behavior of the customer use case, of the workload behavior to increase with the number of arrays that we ship. And we started off by using more traditional AI techniques. Basic language processing, basic statistics, so on and so forth. What we've since done is built a machine-learning engine behind it so that we can make more intelligent inferences, more intelligent decisions. And so you've seen this come out as, in the form of tools that we've released as such as Will It Fit, so we can now take a look at an array, and we can say, okay well you've got this many workloads you've got this many VMs sitting on this array and on this volume. What would it look like to put double that? What can you expect in terms of capacity of utilization? What can you expect in terms of performance? We can also take that to a hypothetical kind of hypothesis analysis to different harbor platforms. We can say hey you've got this workload running on a X50 today, what would it look like to double that workload and move it to an X70? What would that look like? And again, a lot of those inferences, we can do that without exactly tracking and exactly testing that workload because we have a broad-based set of data points across our entire fleet. >> Too complicated for humans to do all that. It really is. >> Yes, it really is. >> But generating workload DNA. >> Exactly, exactly. And more importantly, to get to Dave's point, more importantly, doing it an automated way so that you don't have to put an army of human beings, an army of administrators behind it to calculate it by hand. >> Well Rob thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us what's goin' on from your perspective. Go get some orange. (laughing) >> Thanks for having me. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. We are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018 in San Francisco. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer just a set of remote services accessed through a public cloud. Rather, it's expanding to on-premises, to multiple premises, across clouds, and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one. The opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this CUBE program where we're featuring Pure Storage in its latest innovations in bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them, if you will. And today, we have a two-part program. First, we're going to hear from Rob Lee who's the CTO of Pure Storage and then my colleague John Walls is going to talk to Scott Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group. Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage. Welcome, Rob, good to see you. >> Good to see you again too, Dave. >> So take us through the announcements from today at a high level. What's most exciting about what you're delivering? >> Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, many announcement today, many things to discuss. But overall, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. We've always thought of the journey to modern data as being formed by three pillars, if you will, certainly, modernizing infrastructure, modernizing operations and applications. And today's announcements are really in that kind of middle category of, like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one, probably, people best know us for that and today's announcements are really about tackling that operations piece, bringing infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about Pure Fusion, for example, that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, products, and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly-integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the applications that they serve, whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations, or between the premise, on-premise environment and the cloud environment. Likewise, on the application front, when we think about today's announcements in Portworx Data Services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud-native developers are using and relying on, the database applications that are most poplar in open source, Cassandra, Mongo, so on and so forth, how dow we make the run and operate pieces of those applications a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed, monitored for those app developers? And so a ton of momentum. It's a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in Pure One, that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure running the apps and bring those closer together? So when we think about the visibility, we're now able to deliver for Portworx topologies allowing developers and DevOps teams to look at the entire tech stack, if you will, of a container environment from the application to the containers, to the Kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes, all the way down to the storage, and be able to see everything that's going on, the root cause of any sort of problems that come up, that again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. So that's really how I view it and like I said, that's really the next step in our journey of helping customers modernize between infrastructure, operations, and their applications. >> Okay, so you got the control plane piece which is all about the operating model, you've got Pure One, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the Portworx piece which brings sort of development and deployment together in both infrastructure as code and better understanding of that full stack of, like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers, all the way down to the storage. So I feel like it's not even the storage anymore. I mean, it's cloud. (chuckling) >> It is and you know, I chuckle a little bit because at the end of the day, we deliver storage but what customers are looking for is, and what they value and what they care about is their data. Now obviously, the storage is in service of the data and what we're doing with today's announcements is, again, just making it, extending our reach, helping customers work with their data a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage but now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly, get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. >> How does this news fit into Pure's evolution as a company? I mean, I don't see it as a pivot because a pivot's like, okay, we're going to go from here and now we're doin' this? >> Rob: Yeah, we were doing this, now we're doing that, right. >> And so it's more like a reinvention or a progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >> Absolutely. You know what, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's a next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. And again, I go back to, you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long-term path, long-term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data. We got our start in infrastructure and just, you know, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not going to do it on decades-old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first, that's how we got our start. Today's announcement are really the next couple of steps along that journey. How do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate, more automated in the hands of not just the DevOps teams, the IT teams, but the application developers? How do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why is that important? It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds, the traditional kind of measures, bandwidth, iOps, latency, that sort of thing, but they're looking for speed of agility. You look at the modern application space around how data's being processed, it's a very, very fast-moving application space. The databases that are being used today may be different than the ones being used three months from now or six months from now. And so developers, application teams are looking for a ton more flexibility, a ton more agility than they were three, five, 10, 15 years ago. The other aspect is simplicity and reliability. As you know, that's a core component of everything we do. Our core products, you know, our arrays, our storage appliances, we're very well-known for the simplicity and reliability we drive at the individual product level. Well, as we scale and look at larger environments, as we look at customers' expectations for what they expect from a cloud-like service, there's the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud, wants to be able to manage large fleets of infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver infrastructure services to their internal customers, they want to be able to do it in a self-service, policy-driven, easy to control, easy to manage way and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what Pure Fusion is about is allowing operators that control plane to specify those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Same thing with Portworx, if we think about simplicity and reliability, containers, cloud-native applications, micro services, a lot of benefits there. A very fast-moving space, you can mix and match components, put them together very easily, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity 'cause you have more moving parts, and a greater need for reliability because, well now, you're not just serving one application but 30 or 40 working in unison. And that's really what we're after with Portworx and Portworx Data Services and the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >> Right, thanks for that, Rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. So virtually every infrastructure player now has an as-a-service offering and there're lots of claims out there about who was first, who's the best, et cetera. What's Pure's position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack in delivering subscription and as-a-service offerings in the storage industry. You certainly were first with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as-a-service and Pure as-a-service? What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're lead in the industry in this regard? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think of, first and foremost, we think of everything we do at Pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate in an as-a-service model internally, or whether it's Pure taking on more of that run and operate as-a-service, ourselves, with Pure as a service. And so the second part of your question which is what is it that sets us apart, what are we doing differently, what gives us confidence that this is the right path, well, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a, you know, a hotter topic in the industry of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology-led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry who look at it as a little bit more of a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T(s) and C(s) and you call it a service. And what do I mean by that? So, you know, if you look internally at Pure, everything we do we think of as a service. We have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it and building out service offerings. When we think about why this is technology-led, I think of a service. For something to be thought of as a service, it's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need, whether that's changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day-one, rigid kind of static some lands of having the capacity planned or plan out what my user's going to look like 18 months from now. I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption, right? You know, it's not a service if you're going to make me do a data migration or take a down time. And so when I net all that out, what are the things that you need the attributes that you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product set that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolvable. You need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of needs, whether it's price performance, tiers, you know, high performance capacity, lower cost, price points. You need something that's got a rich set of capabilities whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replications, snapshots, ransomware protection. So you need that full suite of capabilities but in order to deliver it as a service and enable me, as a customer, to seamlessly grow and change, that's got to be delivered on a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products (chuckling) and expect me to change and move every single time that I have a service need change. And so when I net that out, that puts us in an absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on two core product families, Portworx adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price performance and service tiers, and we're able to do this on a very tight code base. And as you know, everything we do is completely non-disruptive so all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of a strategic focus for us. >> So these offerings, they're all part of the service-driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >> Absolutely, yep. >> Great. You talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern application, the modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure. What exactly does that mean and how are you driving that? >> Well, I think it means a couple of different things, but if I were to net it out, it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. And if we look at why that is, you know, when I talk to customers, as they think about an infrastructure, largely, they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today, and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support which is oftentimes the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve, so they're kind of balancing both worlds. And in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic, meaning the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time, the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up, down, growing, it has to be a lot more elastic, and has much more variance. And what I mean by that is you look at a modern, cloud-native, micro services architecture-type application, it's really, you know, 20, 30, 40 different applications all working in concert with one another under the hood. This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set. Back in the day, you have an Oracle application, you go design an environment for that. It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own lifecycle. These days with modern applications, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece, and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward, as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the change in demands and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle. And so that, at the end of the day, drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure being able to use it for many different purposes, much more agility being able to adapt very, very quickly, and much more variance or dynamic range, the ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure. And this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >> Great, thank you for that. I really like that answer because it's not just a bunch of slideware mumbo-jumbo. You actually put some substance on it. Rob, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> And look forward to havin' you back soon. Now, in a moment, Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group speaks with theCUBE's John Walls to give you the independent analyst's take. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in high tech coverage. (techno music) >> Agility is what all digital organizations strive for, and for almost the entirety of the enterprise storage industry, agility and storage aren't words you'd often hear together. Since the founding of Pure Storage, we've been laser focused on taking what's painful about traditional enterprise storage and making it better. We imagined a world where consumers self-service the provisioning of their storage resources to match the performance and data protection capabilities that their applications require. No endless back and forth between application owners and storage teams, just true on-demand self-service. At the same time, imagine all of the complex storage management operations required to make this possible being automated through software. From the placement of the initial workload to storage adjusting with the unpredictable needs of an application and seamlessly migrating and rebalancing the fleet as needed, all with zero down time and no manual intervention. And finally, imagine almost limitless scale that adjusts to meet your business' data management needs over time. This is what we believe the future of enterprise storage looks like. >> Today, we are announcing Pure Fusion, a leap forward in enterprise storage, marrying the best parts of the public cloud with the storage experience and capabilities you've come to expect from Pure. By bringing the simplicity and scalability of the cloud operating model with on-demand consumption and automated provisioning, organizations can deliver an enterprise-grade managed, self-service storage model that unifies fleets of arrays and optimizes storage pulls on the fly. End users will be able to rapidly consume volumes, file systems, and advanced data services like replication without waiting for backend manual work making storage hardware truly invisible. And organizations will be able to scale seamlessly across block, file, and object workloads, leveraging the power of the entire Pure Storage family, including FlashArray, Pure Cloud Block Store, FlashBlade, and Portworx. (electronic music) >> It is time to take a look at what Pure's up to from a slightly different perspective. To help us do that is Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. And Scott, thanks for joining us here, on theCUBE. Good to see ya today. >> Great to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this. First, we'll get to the announcement in just a little bit. First off, in terms of Pure's strategy, as you've been watching this company evolve over years now, how has it evolved? And then we'll go to the announcements and how that fits into the strategy. But first off, let's just take them from your point of view where have they been and how are they doin'? >> You know, many people know of Pure or maybe they don't know of their history as an all-Flash array. I think Pure has always been, ever since they entered the IT industry as a pioneer, they're one of the early ones that said look, we're going all in on the all-Flash array business and a focus on Flash technology. Then they were early pioneers in things like Evergreen and things like storage-as-a-service capabilities for on-premises storage. And the entire time, they've had a really almost streamline focus on ease of use which, you know, from the outside, I think everyone talks about ease of use and making things simple for IT, but Pure has really made that almost like core as part of not only their product and their design but also part of their culture. And one of the things, and we'll get into this a little bit as we talk about the announcements, but, you know, if you look at these announcements and where Pure's going, they're trying to expand that culture, that DNA around ease of use or simplicity, and expanding it beyond just storage or IT operations, and really trying to see okay, how do we make the entire digital initiative process or the larger IT operations journey simpler. And I think that's part of where Pure is going is not just storage but focusing more on apps, operations, and data, and making it easier for the entire experience. >> So how do the announcements we're talking about, well, there're three phases here, and again, we'll unpack those separately, but in general, how do the announcements then, you think, fit into that strategy and fit into their view and your view, really, of the market trends? >> I think one of the big trends is, you know, IT in terms for most businesses is, it's not just an enabler anymore. IT's actually in the driver's seat. We see in our research at ESGU, we just did this study and I'm going to glance over my notes as I'm kind of talking, but we see one of the things is more than half of businesses are identifying some portion of their revenue is coming from digital products or digital services. So data is part of the revenue chain for a majority of organizations according to what we're seeing in our research. And so what that does is it puts IT right in that core, you know, that core delivery model of where the faster IT can operate, the faster organizations can realize these revenues opportunities. So what is that doing to IT organizations? Well first off, it makes their life a lot harder, it makes demands continue to increase. But also, this old adage or this old narrative that IT's about availability, it's about resiliency, it's about keeping the lights on and ensuring that the business doesn't go down, well none of that goes away. But now, IT organizations are being measured on their ability to accelerate operations. And in this world where everything's becoming more, you know, more complex, there're more demands, organizations are becoming more distributed, application demands are becoming more diverse and they're growing in breadth. All of this means that more pressure is falling not only on the IT operations but also on the infrastructure providers like Pure Storage to step up and make things even simpler with things like automation and simplification which, you know, we're going to talk about, but to help accelerate those operations. >> Yeah, I mean, if you're DevOps these days, I mean, and you're talkin' about kind of these quandaries that people are in, but what are these specific challenges do you think, on the enterprise level here, that Pure is addressing? >> Well so for example, you talked about developers and driving into that in particular, I want to say let's see, glance at my notes here, about two-thirds of organizations say they're under pressure to accelerate IT initiatives due to pressures specifically from DevOps teams as well as line of business teams. So what does that mean? It means that as organizations build up and try to accelerate either their revenue creation via the creation of software or products, or things of that, that drive, that support a DevOps team, maybe it's improving customer experience for example, as well as other line of business teams such as analytics and trying to provide better insights and better decision making off of data, what that means is this traditional process of IT operations of where you submit a trouble ticket and then it takes, after a few days, something happens and they start doing analysis in terms of basically what ends up being multiple days or multiple weeks, to end up to basically provision storage, it just takes too long. And so in these announcements what we're seeing is Pure delivering solutions that are all about automating the backend services and delivering storage in a way that is designed to be easily and quickly consumed by the new consumers of IT, the developers, the line of business teams via APIs where you can write to a standard API and it goes across basically lots of different technologies and happens very quickly where a lot of the backend processes are automated, and essentially, making the storage invisible to these new consumers. And all of that just delivers value because what these groups are doing is now they can access and get the resources that they need and they don't have to know about what's happening behind the scenes which, candidly, they don't really know much about, right now, and they don't really care. >> Right. (chuckling) That's right. Yeah, what I don't see, what I don't know won't hurt me. And it can, as we know, it can. So let's look at the announcements. Pure Fusion, I think we were hearing about that just a little bit before, earlier in the interview that Dave was conducting, but let's talk about Pure Fusion and your thoughts on that. >> Pure Fusion is what I was talking about a little bit where they're abstracting a lot of the storage capabilities and presenting it as an API, a consistent API that allows developers to provision things very quickly and where a lot of the backend services are automated and, you know, essentially invisible to the developer. And that is, I mean, it addresses where, you know, I kind of talk about this with some of the data that we just, you know, some of our research stats that we just discussed, but it's where a lot of organizations are going. The bottom line is, we used to, in a world where IT services weren't growing as fast and where everything had to be resilient and available, you could put a lot of personnel power or personal hours focused on okay, making sure every box and everything was checked prior to doing a new implementation.and all that was designed to reduce risk and possibly optimize the environment and reduce cost. Now in this world of acceleration what we've seen is organizations need faster responsiveness from the IT organization. Well that's all well and good, but the problem is it's difficult to do all those backend processes and make sure that data's fully being protected or making sure that everything is happening behind the scenes the way it should be. And so this is, again, just mounting more and more pressure. So with things like Pure Fusion what they're doing is they're essentially automating a lot of that on the backend and really simplifying it and making it so storage, or IT administrators can provide access to their line of business, to development teams to leverage infrastructure a lot faster while still ensuring that all those backend services, all those operations still happen. Portworx Data Services also announced and we're hearing it from Dave, for that perspective may be a game-changer in terms of storage. So your take on that and Portworx? >> You know, I really like Portworx. I've been following them ever since prior to the acquisition. One of the things that they were very early on is understanding the impact of micro services on the industry and really, the importance of designing infrastructure around for that environment. I think what they're doing around data services is really intriguing. I think it's really intriguing, first off, for Pure as a company because it elevates their visibility to a new audience and a new persona that may not have been familiar with them. As organizations are looking at, you know, one of the things that they're doing with this data services is essentially delivering a database-as-a-service platform where you can go provision and stand up databases very quickly and again, similar to we talked about fusion, a lot of those backend processes are automated. Really fascinating, again, aligns directly with this acceleration need that we talked about. So, you know, a huge value, but it's really fascinating for Pure because it opens them up to, you know, hey, there's this whole new world of possible consumers that where they're, that they can get experience to really, the ease of use that Pure is known for a lot of the capabilities that Portworx is known for, but also just increase really the value that Pure is able to deliver to some of these modern enterprises. >> And just to add, briefly, on the enhancements that Pure One also being announced today. Your take on those? >> I like that as well. I think one of the things if I kind of go through the list is a lot of insights and intelligence in terms of new app, sizing applications for the environment if I remember correctly, and more, you know, better capabilities to help ensure that your environment is optimized which candidly is a top challenge around IT organizations. We talk about, again, I keep hitting on this need to move faster, faster, faster. One of the big disconnects that we've seen and we saw it very early when organizations were moving to, for example, public cloud services, is this disconnect towards for this individual app, how many resources do I really need and I think that's something that, you know, vendors like Pure need to start integrating more and more intelligence. And that's, my understanding is they're doing with Pure One which is really impressive. >> I hope it's all it takes. Scott, we appreciate the time. Thank you for your insights into what has been a big day for Pure Storage. But thank you again for the time. Scott Sinclair at the Enterprise Strategy Group, senior analyst, there. Let's go back to Dave Vellante now with more on theCUBE. (electronic music) >> Thanks for watching this CUBE program made possible by Pure Storage. I want to say in summary, you know, sometimes it's hard to squint through all the vendor noise on cloud and as-a-service, and all the buzz words, and acronyms in the marketplace. But as I said at the top, the cloud is changing, it's evolving, it's expanding to new locations. The operating model is increasingly defining the cloud. There's so much opportunity to build value on top of the massive infrastructure build-out from the hyperscalers to $100 billion in CapEx last year, alone. This is not just true for technology vendors, but organizations are building their own layer to take advantage of the cloud. Now, of course, technology's critical so when you're evaluating technology solutions, look for the following. First, the ability of the solution to simplify your life. Can it abstract the underlying complexity of a cloud, multiple clouds, connect to on-prem workloads in an experience that is substantially identical, irrespective of location? Does the solution leverage cloud-native technologies and innovations and primitives and APIs or is it just a hosted stack that's really not on the latest technology curve, whether that's processor technology or virtualization, or machine learning, streaming, open source tech, et cetera? Third, how programmable is the infrastructure? Does it make developers more productive? Does it accelerate time to value? Does it minimize rework and increase the quality of your output? And four, what's the business impact? Will customers stand up and talk about the solution and how it contributed to their digital transformation by flexibly supporting emerging data-intensive workloads and evolving as their business rapidly changed? These are some of the important markers that we would suggest you monitor. Pure is obviously driving hard to optimize these and other areas, so watch closely and make your own assessment as to how, what they and others are building will fit into your business. Now as always, this content is available on demand on theCUBE.net, so definitely check that out. This I Dave Vellante for John Walls and the entire CUBE team, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (soft electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's The Cube covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Good morning. From Austin, Texas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is our second day. We just came from a very cool, interesting, keynote, Dave whenever there's astronauts my inner NASA geek from the early 2000s. She just comes right back up Leland Melvin was on >> Amazing, right? >> With a phenomenal story. Talking about technology and the feeling of innovation but also a great story of inspiration from a steam perspective science, technology, engineering, arts, math, I loved that and, >> Dave: And fun >> Very fun. But also... >> One of the better talks I've ever seen >> It really was. It had so many elements that I think you didn't have to be a NASA fan or a NASA geek or a space geek to appreciate the all of the lessons that Leland Melvin learned along the way that he really is inspiring, everybody the audience to take note of. It was I thought it was... >> And incredibly accomplished, right? I mean scientist, MIT engineer, played in the NFL, went to space, he had some really fun stuff when they were, you know, messing around with with gravity. >> Lisa: Yes. >> I never knew you could do that. He had like this water. >> Lisa: Water, yeah. >> Bubble. >> I'd never seen that before and they were throwing M&M's inside (laughter) and he, you know consumed it choked on it, which is pretty funny. >> Yeah, well it was near and dear to me. I worked with NASA my first job out of grad school. >> Dave: Really? >> I did, and managed biological pilots that flew on the space shuttle and the mission that the he talked about that didn't land, Colombia. That was the mission that I worked on. So when he talked about that countdown clock going positive. I was there on the runway with that. So for me, it just struck a chord of, >> Dave: so this is of course the 50th anniversary of the moonwalk. And you know I have this thing about watches, kind of like what you have with shoes (chuckles) >> Lisa: Hey, handbags. >> Is that not true? Oh, It's handbags for you? (laughing) >> Dave: I know this really that was a terrible thing for me to say. >> That's okay. >> Dave: You have great shoes so I just I just assumed that not good to make assumptions. So I bought a moon watch this year which was the watch that Neil Armstrong used to not the exact one but similar one, right? >> Lisa: Yeah. And it actually has an acrylic face because they're afraid if it cracked in space you'd have glass all over the place. [Lisa] Right. So that's a little nostalgia there. >> Well one of the main things too as you look at the mission that President John F. Kennedy established in the 60's for getting a man in space in that 10-year period. That being accomplished and kind of a parallel with what Pure Storage has done in its first 10 years of tremendous innovation. This keynote again Day 2, standing room only at least about 3000 people or so here. Storage as James Governor said, your friend and also who keynoted after Leland this morning you know, (mumbles) Software's eating the world storage is eating the world we have to have secure locations to store all this data so that we can extract maximum value from it. So nice parallel between the space program and Pure Storage. >> James is really good, isn't he? I mean he had to follow Leland and I mean again one of the better talks I've ever heard, but James is very strong, he's funny, he's witty he's he cuts to the chase. >> Lisa: Yes. >> He always tells it like it is. He's a very Monkchips is very focused on developers and they do a really good job there, one of the things he talked about was S3 and how Amazon uses this working backwards methodology which maybe a lot of people don't know about but what they do is they write and rewrite and rewrite and vet and rewrite the press release before they announce the product and even before they develop the products they write the press release and then they work backwards from there. So this is the outcome that we are trying to achieve, and it's very disciplined process that they use and as he said they may revise it hundreds and hundreds of times and he put up Andy Jassy's quote from 2004, around S3. That actually surprised me. 2000...Maybe I read it wrong. >> Lisa: No, it was 2004. >> Because S3 came out after EC2 which was 2006 so I don't know. Maybe I'm getting my dates wrong or I think James actually got his dates wrong but who knows, maybe you know what? Maybe he got a copy of that from the internal working document, working backwards doc that could be what it was but again the point being they envisioned this simple storage that developers didn't have to think about >> Lisa: Right. >> That was virtually unlimited in capacity, highly available and you know, dirt cheap which is what people want and so he talked about that and then he gave a little history of the Dell technology families and I tweeted out this in a funny little you know basically pivotal VM ware EMC and Dell and their history Dell was basically IPO 1984 and then today. There was a few things in between I know but he's got a great perspective on things and I think it resonated with the audience then he talked a lot about Kubernetes jokingly tongue-in-cheek how Kubernetes everybody thought was going to kill VMware but his big takeaway was look you got all these skills of (mumbles) Skills, core database skills, I would even add to that you know understanding how storage works and I always joke if your career is based on managing lawns you might want to rethink your career. But his point was which I liked was look all those skills you've learned are valuable but you now have to step up your game and learn new skills. You have to build on top of those skills so the history you have and the knowledge that you've built up is very valuable but it's not going to propel you to the next decade and so I thought that was a good takeaway and it was an excellent talk. >> So looking back at the conversations yesterday the press releases that came out the advancements of what Pure is doing, with AWS, with Nvidia, with the AI data-hub for example, delivering more of their portfolio as a service to allow businesses whether it's a law-firm like we talked to yesterday utility or Mercedes AMG Petronas Motor-sport, to be able to access data securely, incredibly quickly, recover it restore it absolutely critical and really can be game-changing depending on the type of organization. I want to get your perspectives on some of the things you heard anecdotally yesterday after we wrapped in terms of the atmosphere, the vibe, the thoughts on Pure's next 10 years. >> Yeah, so several things, just some commentary so it's always good at night you go around you get a lot of data we sometimes call it metadata. I think one of the more interesting announcements to me was the block-storage on AWS. I don't necessarily think that this is going to be a huge product near term for Pure in terms of meaningful revenue, but I think it's interesting that they're embracing the trend of the Cloud and are actually architecting Cloud solutions using Amazon services and blending in their own super gluing their own, I mean it's not really superglue but blending in their own software for their customers to extend. Now, you know some of the nuances I don't think they are going to have they have better right performance I think they'll have better read performance clearly they have better availability I think it's going to be a little bit more expensive. All these things are TBD that's just my take based on looking at what I've seen and talking to some people but to me the important thing is that Pure's embracing that Cloud model. Historically, companies that are trying to defend an existing business, they retreat. You know, they denigrate they don't embrace. We know that Pure's going to make more money on pram than it does in the Cloud. At least I think. And so it's to their advantage for companies to stay on-prem but at the same time they understand that trend is your friend and they're embracing that so that was kind of one thing. The second thing I learned is Charlie Giancarlo spent a lot of time with them last night as did you. He's a bit of a policy wonk in very certain narrow areas. He shared with me some of the policy work that he's done around IP protection and not necessarily though on the side that you would think. You would think that okay IP protection that's a good thing but a lot of the laws that were trying to be promoted for IP protection were there to help big companies essentially crush small companies so he fought against that. He shared with me some things around net neutrality. You would think you know you think you know which side of net neutrality he'd be on not necessarily so he had some really interesting perspectives on that. We also talked to and I won't share the name of the company but a very large financial institution that's that's betting a lot on Pure was very interesting to me. This is one of the brand names everybody would know it if you heard it. And their head of storage infrastructure was here, at the show. Now I know this individual and this person doesn't go to a lot of shows >> Maybe a couple a year. >> This person chose to come to this show because they're making an investment in Pure. In a fairly big way and they spent a lot of time with Pure management, expressing their desires as part of an executive form that Pure holds they didn't really market that a lot they didn't really tell us too much about it because it was a little private thing but I happen to know this individual and and I learned several things. They like Pure a lot, they use it for a lot of their workloads, but they have a lot of other storage, they can't necessarily get rid of that other storage for a lot of reasons. Inertia, technical debt, good tickets at the baseball game, all kinds of politics going on there. I also asked specifically about some hybrid companies products where the the cost structure's a little bit better so this gets me to flash array C and we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about this about his flash prices come down and it and opens up new markets. I got some other data yesterday and today that you know that flash array C is not going to be quite priced we don't think as well as hybrid arrays closing the gap it's between one and one and a quarter, one and a half dollars per gigabyte whereas hybrid arrays you are seeing half that, 70 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes as low as 60 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes higher, sometimes high as a dollar but the average around 65-70 cents a gigabyte so there's still a gap there. Flash prices have to come down further. Another thing I learned I'm going to just keep going. >> Lisa: Go ahead! >> The other thing I learned is that China is really building a lot of fab capacity in NAND to try to take out the thumb-drive market-place so they are going to go after the low-end. So companies like Samsung and Toshiba, Toshiba just renamed the company, I can't remember the name of the company but Micron and the NAND flash NAND manufacturers are going to have to now go use their capacity and go after the enterprise because China fab is going to crush the low-end and bomb the low-end pricing. Somebody else told me about a third of flash consumption is in China now. So interesting things going on there. So near term, flash array C is not going to just crush spinning disk and hybrid, it's going to get closer and it's going to slowly eat away at that as NAND prices come down it really could more rapidly eat away at that. So I just learned some other stuff too but I'll take a breath. (laughter) >> So one of the things I think we are resounding with it we heard not just yesterday on the program day but even last night at the executive event we were at is that from this large financial services company that you mentioned, Pure storage is a strategic partner to many organizations from small to large that is incredibly valued to your point the Shuttleman only goes to maybe a couple of events a year and this is one of them? >> Dave: Right. >> This is a company that in its first 10 years has embraced competition head on and I loved how you talked about yesterday 10 years ago they just drove a truck through EMC's market and sort of ripping and replacing. They're bold but they're also doing it in a way that's very methodical. They're working on bringing you know changing companies' perspectives of even backup data as becoming an asset to put it on flash. Because if you can't rapidly restore that, if there's an outage whether it is an attack or it's unintentional human related, that data can't be recovered quickly, you're in a big big problem. And so them as a strategic component of this isn't in any industry I think it was a very resounding sentiment that I heard and felt yesterday. >> Yeah, this ties into tam expansion of what we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about new workloads with AI as an example flash or AC lowering prices will open up those some of those new workloads data protection backup is clearly an opportunity and I think it's interesting, you're seeing a lot of companies now announce a lot of vendors announce flash based recovery systems I'll call them recovery systems because I don't even consider them backup anymore it's not about backup, it's about recovery. Oracle was actually one of the first to use that kind of concept with the zero data loss recovery appliance they call it recovery. So it's all about fast and near instantaneous recovery. Why is that important? It's because it's companies move toward a digital transformation and what does that mean? And what is a digital business? Digital business is all about how you use data and leveraging data in new ways to create new value to monetise or cut cost. And so being able to have access to that data and recover from any inaccess to that data in a split-second is crucial. So Pure can participate in that, now Pure's not alone You know, it's no coincidence that Veritas and Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik they work with Pure, they work with HPE. They work with a lot of the big players and so but so Pure has to you know, has some work to do to win its fair share. Staying on backup for a moment, you know it's interesting to see, behind us, Veritas and Veeam have the biggest sort of presence here. Rubrik has a presence here. I'm sure Cohesity is here maybe someway, somehow but I haven't seen them >> I haven't either. >> Maybe they're not here. I'll have to check that up, but you know Veeam is actually doing very well particularly with lower ASPs we know that about Veeam. They've always come at it from the mid-market and SMB. Whereas Cohesity and Rubrik and Veritas traditionally are coming at it from a higher-end. Certainly Cohesity and Rubrik on higher ASPs. Veeam's doing very well with Pure. They're also doing very well with HPE which is interesting. Cohesity announced a deal with HPE recently I don't know, about six months ago somebody thought "Oh maybe Veeaam's on the outs." No, Veeam's doing very well with HPE. It's different parts of the organization. One works with the server group, one works with the storage group and both companies are actually doing quite well I actually think Veeam is ahead of the curve 'cause they've been working with HPE for quite some time and they're doing very well in the Pure base. By partnering with companies, Pure is able to enter that market much in the same way that NetApp did in the early days. They have a very tight relationship for example with Commvault. So, the other thing I was talking to Keith Townsend last night totally not secretor but he's talking about Outpost and how Amazon is going to be challenged to service Outpost Outpost is the on-prem Amazon stack, that VMware and Amazon announced that they're co-marketing. So who is going to service outpost? It's not going to be Amazon, that's not their game in professional service. It's going to have to be the ecosystem, the large SIs or the Vars the partners, VMware partners 'cause that's not Vmwares play either. So Keith Townsend's premise, I'd love to have him on The Cube to talk about this, is they're going to have trouble scaling Outpost because of that service issue. Believe it or not when we come to these conferences, we talk about other things than just, Pure. There's a lot of stuff going on. New Relic is happening this week. Oracle open world is going on this week. John Furrier just got back from AWS Bahrain, and of course we're here at Pure Accelerate. >> We are and this is our second day of two days of coverage. We've got Coz on next who I think has never been on The Cube. >> Dave: Not to my knowledge. >> We've got Kix on later. A great lineup, more customers Rob Lee is going to be on. So we're going to be digging more into Pure's Cloud strategy, the next ten years, how they're going to accelerate that and pack it into the next couple of years. >> I'll tell you one of the things I want to do, Lisa. I'll just call it out. An individual from Dell EMC wrote a blog ahead of Pure Accelerate I think it was last week, about four or five days ago and this individual called out like one, two, three, four.... five things that we should ask Pure so we should ask them, we should ask Coz we should ask Kix. There was criticism, of course they're biased. These guys they always fight. >> Lisa: Naturally. >> They have these internecine wars. >> Lisa: Yep. >> Sometimes I like to call them... no I won't say it. So scale out, question mark there we want to ask Coz about that and Kix. Pure uses proprietary flash modules. They do that because it allows them to do things that you can't do with off-the-shelf flash. I want to ask and challenge them that. I want to ask about their philosophy on tiering. They don't really believe in tiering, why not? I want to understand that better. They've made some acquisitions, Compuverde is one acquisition, it's a file system. What does that mean for flash play? >> Now we didn't hear anything about that yesterday, so that's a good point that we should dig into that. >> Yeah, so we'll bring that up. And then the Evergreen competitors hate Evergreen because Pure was first with it they caught everybody off guard. I said it yesterday, competitors hate Evergreen because competitors live off of maintenance and if you're not on their maintenance they just keep jacking up the maintenance prices and if you don't move to the new system, maintenance just keeps getting more and more and more and more expensive and so they force you, you're locked in. Force you to move. Pure introduced this different model. You pay for the CapEx up front and then, you know, after three years you get a controller swap. You know, so... >> To your point competitors hate it, customers love it. We heard a lot about that yesterday, we've got a couple more customers on our packed program today, Dave so let's get right to it! >> Great. >> Let's wrap up so we can get Coz on stage. >> Dave: Alright, awesome. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube from Pure Accelerate 2019, day two. Stick around 'Coz' John Colgrove, CTO, founder of Pure, will be on next. (upbeat 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's continuing coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate 2018, I'm Lisa Martin, sporting the clong and apparently this symbol actually has a name, the clong, I learned that in the last half an hour. I know, who knew? >> Really? >> Yes! Is that a C or a K? >> Is that a Prince orientation or, what is that? >> Yes, I'm formerly known as. >> Nice. >> Who of course played at this venue, as did Roger Daltry, and The Who. >> And I might have been staff for one of those shows. >> You could have been, yeah, could I show you to your seat? >> Maybe you're performing later. You might not even know this. We have a couple of guests joining us. We've got Matt Burr, the GM of FlashBlade, and Rob Ober, the Chief Platform Architect at NVIDIA. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on. >> So, lots of excitement going on this morning. You guys announced Pure and NVIDIA just a couple of months ago, a partnership with AIRI. Talk to us about AIRI, what is it? How is it going to help organizations in any industry really democratize AI? >> Well, AIRI, so AIRI is something that we announced, the AIRI Mini today here at Accelerate 2018. AIRI was originally announced at the GTC, Global Technology Conference, for NVIDIA back in March, and what it is is, it essentially brings NVIDIA's DGX servers, connected with either Arista or Cisco switches down to the Pure Storage FlashBlade, so this is something that sits in less than half a rack in the data center, that replaces something that was probably 25 or 50 racks of compute and store, so, I think Rob and I like to talk about it as kind of a great leap forward in terms of compute potential. >> Absolutely, yeah. It's an AI supercomputer in a half rack. >> So one of the things that this morning, that we saw during the general session that Charlie talked about, and I think Matt (mumbles) kind of a really brief history of the last 10 to 20 years in storage, why is modern external storage essential for AI? >> Well, Rob, you want that one, or you want me to take it? Coming from the non storage guy, maybe? (both laugh) >> Go ahead. >> So, when you look at the structure of GPUs, and servers in general, we're talking about massively parallel compute, right? These are, we're now taking not just tens of thousands of cores but even more cores, and we're actually finding a path for them to communicate with storage that is also massively parallel. Storage has traditionally been something that's been kind of serial in nature. Legacy storage has always waited for the next operation to happen. You actually want to get things that are parallel so that you can have parallel processing, both at the compute tier, and parallel processing at the storage tier. But you need to have big network bandwidth, which was what Charlie was eluding to, when Charlie said-- >> Lisa: You like his stool? >> When Charlie was, one of his stools, or one of the legs of his stool, was talking about, 20 years ago we were still, or 10 years ago, we were at 10 gig networks, in merges of 100 gig networks has really made the data flow possible. >> So I wonder if we can unpack that. We talked a little bit to Rob Lee about this, the infrastructure for AI, and wonder if we can go deeper. So take the three legs of the stool, and you can imagine this massively parallel compute-storage-networking grid, if you will, one of our guys calls it uni-grid, not crazy about the name, but this idea of alternative processing, which is your business, really spanning this scaled out architecture, not trying to stuff as much function on a die as possible, really is taking hold, but what is the, how does that infrastructure for AI evolve from an architect's perspective? >> The overall infrastructure? I mean, it is incredibly data intensive. I mean a typical training set is terabytes, in the extreme it's petabytes, for a single run, and you will typically go through that data set again and again and again, in a training run, (mumbles) and so you have one massive set that needs to go to multiple compute engines, and the reason it's multiple compute engines is people are discovering that as they scale up the infrastructure, you actually, you get pretty much linear improvements, and you get a time to solution benefit. Some of the large data centers will run a training run for literally a month and if you start scaling it out, even in these incredibly powerful things, you can bring time to solution down, you can have meaningful results much more quickly. >> And you be a sensitive, sort of a practical application of that. Yeah there's a large hedge fund based in the U.K. called Man AHL. They're a system-based quantitative training firm, and what that means is, humans really aren't doing a lot of the training, machines are doing the vast majority if not all of the training. What the humans are doing is they're essentially quantitative analysts. The number of simulations that they can run is directly correlative to the number of trades that their machines can make. And so the more simulations you can make, the more trades you can make. The shorter your simulation time is, the more simulations that you can run. So we're talking about in a sort of a meta context, that concept applies to everything from retail and understanding, if you're a grocery store, what products are not on my shelves at a given time. In healthcare, discovering new forms of pathologies for cancer treatments. Financial services we touched on, but even broader, right down into manufacturing, right? Looking at, what are my defect rates on my lines, and if it used to take me a week to understand the efficiency of my assembly line, if I can get that down to four hours, and make adjustments in real time, that's more than just productivity, it's progress. >> Okay so, I wonder if we can talk about how you guys see AI emerging in the marketplace. You just gave an example. We were talking earlier again to Rob Lee about, it seems today to be applied and, in narrow use cases, and maybe that's going to be the norm, whether it's autonomous vehicles or facial recognition, natural language processing, how do you guys see that playing out? Whatever be, this kind of ubiquitous horizontal layer or do you think the adoption is going to remain along those sort of individual lines, if you will. >> At the extreme, like when you really look out at the future, let me start by saying that my background is processor architecture. I've worked in computer science, the whole thing is to understand problems, and create the platforms for those things. What really excited me and motivated me about AI deep learning is that it is changing computer science. It's just turning it on its head. And instead of explicitly programming, it's now implicitly programming, based on the data you feed it. And this changes everything and it can be applied to almost any use case. So I think that eventually it's going to be applied in almost any area that we use computing today. >> Dave: So another way of asking that question is how far can we take machine intelligence and your answer is pretty far, pretty far. So as processor architect, obviously this is very memory intensive, you're seeing, I was at the Micron financial analyst meeting earlier this week and listening to what they were saying about these emerging, you got T-RAM, and obviously you have Flash, people are excited about 3D cross-point, I heard it, somebody mentioned 3D cross-point on the stage today, what do you see there in terms of memory architectures and how they're evolving and what do you need as a systems architect? >> I need it all. (all talking at once) No, if I could build a GPU with more than a terabyte per second of bandwidth and more than a terabyte of capacity I could use it today. I can't build that, I can't build that yet. But I need, it's a different stool, I need teraflops, I need memory bandwidth, and I need memory capacity. And really we just push to the limit. Different types of neural nets, different types of problems, will stress different things. They'll stress the capacity, the bandwidth, or the actual compute. >> This makes the data warehousing problem seem trivial, but do you see, you know what I mean? Data warehousing, it was like always a chase, chasing the chips and snake swallowing a basketball I called it, but do you see a day that these problems are going to be solved, architecturally, it talks about, More's laws, moderating, or is this going to be this perpetual race that we're never going to get to the end of? >> So let me put things in perspective first. It's easy to forget that the big bang moment for AI and deep learning was the summer of 2012, so slightly less than six years ago. That's when Alex Ned get the seed and people went wow, this is a whole new approach, this is amazing. So a little less than six years in. I mean it is a very young, it's a young area, it is in incredible growth, the change in state of art is literally month by month right now. So it's going to continue on for a while, and we're just going to keep growing and evolving. Maybe five years, maybe 10 years, things will stabilize, but it's an exciting time right now. >> Very hard to predict, isn't it? >> It is. >> I mean who would've thought that Alexa would be such a dominant factor in voice recognition, or that a bunch of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition. I wonder if you guys can comment, right? I mean. >> Strange beginnings. (all laughing) >> But very and, I wonder if I can ask you guys ask about the black box challenge. I've heard some companies talk about how we're going to white box everything, make it open and, but the black box problem meaning if I have to describe, and we may have talked about this, how I know that it's a dog. I struggle to do that, but a machine can do that. I don't know how it does it, probably can't tell me how it does it, but it knows, with a high degree of accuracy. Is that black box phenomenon a problem, or do we just have to get over it? >> Up to you. >> I think it's certain, I don't think it's a problem. I know that mathematicians, who are friends, it drives them crazy, because they can't tell you why it's working. So it's a intellectual problem that people just need to get over. But it's the way our brains work, right? And our brains work pretty well. There are certain areas I think where for a while there will be certain laws in place where you can't prove the exact algorithm, you can't use it, but by and large, I think the industry's going to get over it pretty fast. >> I would totally agree, yeah. >> You guys are optimists about the future. I mean you're not up there talking about how jobs are going to go away and, that's not something that you guys are worried about, and generally, we're not either. However, machine intelligence, AI, whatever you want to call it, it is very disruptive. There's no question about it. So I got to ask you guys a few fun questions. Do you think large retail stores are going to, I mean nothing's in the extreme, but do you think they'll generally go away? >> Do I think large retail stores will generally go away? When I think about retail, I think about grocery stores, and the things that are going to go away, I'd like to see standing in line go away. I would like my customer experience to get better. I don't believe that 10 years from now we're all going to live inside our houses and communicate over the internet and text and half of that be with chat mods, I just don't believe that's going to happen. I think the Amazon effect has a long way to go. I just ordered a pool thermometer from Amazon the other day, right? I'm getting old, I ordered readers from Amazon the other day, right? So I kind of think it's that spur of the moment item that you're going to buy. Because even in my own personal habits like I'm not buying shoes and returning them, and waiting five to ten times, cycle, to get there. You still want that experience of going to the store. Where I think retail will improve is understanding that I'm on my way to their store, and improving the experience once I get there. So, I think you'll see, they need to see the Amazon effect that's going to happen, but what you'll see is technology being employed to reach a place where my end user experience improves such that I want to continue to go there. >> Do you think owning your own vehicle, and driving your own vehicle, will be the exception, rather than the norm? >> It pains me to say this, 'cause I love driving, but I think you're right. I think it's a long, I mean it's going to take a while, it's going to take a long time, but I think inevitably it's just too convenient, things are too congested, by freeing up autonomous cars, things that'll go park themselves, whatever, I think it's inevitable. >> Will machines make better diagnoses than doctors? >> Matt: Oh I mean, that's not even a question. Absolutely. >> They already do. >> Do you think banks, traditional banks, will control of the payment systems? >> That's a good one, I haven't thought about-- >> Yeah, I'm not sure that's an AI related thing, maybe more of a block chain thing, but, it's possible. >> Block chain and AI, kind of cousins. >> Yeah, they are, they are actually. >> I fear a world though where we actually end up like WALLE in the movie and everybody's on these like floating chez lounges. >> Yeah lets not go there. >> Eating and drinking. No but I'm just wondering, you talked about, Matt, in terms of the number of, the different types of industries that really can verge in here. Do you see maybe the consumer world with our expectation that we can order anything on Amazon from a thermometer to a pair of glasses to shoes, as driving other industries to kind of follow what we as consumers have come to expect? >> Absolutely no question. I mean that is, consumer drives everything, right? All flash arrays were driven by you have your phone there, right? The consumerization of that device was what drove Toshiba and all the other fad manufacturers to build more NAM flash, which is what commoditized NAM flash, which what brought us faster systems, these things all build on each other, and from a consumer perspective, there are so many things that are inefficient in our world today, right? Like lets just think about your last call center experience. If you're the normal human being-- >> I prefer not to, but okay. >> Yeah you said it, you prefer not to, right? My next comment was going to be, most people's call center experiences aren't that good. But what if the call center technology had the ability to analyze your voice and understand your intonation, and your inflection, and that call center employee was being given information to react to what you were saying on the call, such that they either immediately escalated that call without you asking, or they were sent down a decision path, which brought you to a resolution that said that we know that 62% of the time if we offer this person a free month of this, that person is going to view, is going to go away a happy customer, and rate this call 10 out of 10. That is the type of things that's going to improve with voice recognition, and all of the voice analysis, and all this. >> And that really get into how far we can take machine intelligence, the things that machines, or the humans can do, that machines can't, and that list changes every year. The gap gets narrower and narrower, and that's a great example. >> And I think one of the things, going back to your, whether stores'll continue being there or not but, one of the biggest benefits of AI is recommendation, right? So you can consider it userous maybe, or on the other hand it's great service, where a lot of, something like an Amazon is able to say, I've learned about you, I've learned about what people are looking for, and you're asking for this, but I would suggest something else, and you look at that and you go, "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for". I think that's really where, in the sales cycle, that's really where it gets up there. >> Can machines stop fake news? That's what I want to know. >> Probably. >> Lisa: To be continued. >> People are working on that. >> They are. There's a lot, I mean-- >> That's a big use case. >> It is not a solved problem, but there's a lot of energy going into that. >> I'd take that before I take the floating WALLE chez lounges, right? Deal. >> What if it was just for you? What if it was just a floating chez lounge, it wasn't everybody, then it would be alright, right? >> Not for me. (both laughing) >> Matt and Rob, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing some of your insights and we should have a great rest of the day at the conference. >> Great, thank you very much. Thanks for having us. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, we're live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Stick around, we'll be right back after a break with our next guest. (electronic music)