(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE, our coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience continues. I have a long-time guest coming back, joining me in the next segment here. Jon Siegal is back, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Jon, it's good to see you, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, always great to be on. >> We last spoke about six months ago and here we are still at home. >> I know. >> But there has been no slowdown whatsoever in the last year. We were talking to you a lot about Edge last time but we're going to talk about PowerStore today. It's just coming up on its one year anniversary. You launched it right when the pandemic happened. >> That's right. >> Talk to me about what's happened in the last year with respect to PowerStore. Adoption, momentum, what's going on? >> Yeah, great, listen, what a year it's been, right? But certainly for PowerStore especially, I mean, customers and partners around the world have really embraced PowerStore, specifically really it's modern architecture. What many people may not know is this is actually the fastest ramping new architecture we've had in all of Dell's history, which is quite a history of course. And we saw 4 X quarter over quarter growth in the most recent quarter. And you know, in terms of shipments, we've shipped well over 400 petabytes of PowerStore, you know, so special thanks to lots of our customers around the world and industries like education, gaming, transportation, retail. More than 60 countries, I think 62 countries now. They include customers like Columbia Southern University, Habib Bank, Real Page, the University of Pisa and Ultra Leap, just to name a few. And to give you a sense of how truly game changing it's been in the market is that approximately 20% of the customers with PowerStore are new to Dell, new to Dell Technologies. And we've tripled the number of wins against some of our key competitors in just the last quarter as well. So look, it's been quite a year, like you said and we're not stopping there. >> Yeah, you must have to wear a neck brace from that whiplash of moving so quickly. (both laughing) But that's actually a good problem to have. >> It is. >> And curious about, is it 20% of the PowerStore customers are net new to Dell? >> Yeah. >> Interesting that you've captured that much in a very turbulent year. Any industries in particular that you see as really being transformed by the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think just like we're bringing a disruptive technology to market, there's a lot of industries out there that are disrupting themselves as well, right, and how they transform, particularly with, you know, in this new era during the pandemic. I think, I can give you a great example. One of the new capabilities of PowerStore is AppsON just for those that aren't familiar. AppsON is the ability for PowerStore to run apps directly on the appliance, good name, right? And it's thanks to a built-in VMware ESXi hypervisor. And where we've seen really good traction with AppsON, is in storage intensive applications at the edge. And that brings me to my example. And this one's in retail. And you know, of course just like every industry I think it's been up-ended in the past year. There's a large supermarket chain in northern China that is new to Dell. During the pandemic they needed to fast-track the development of a smart autonomous retail system in all their stores, so that their customers could make their purchases via smartphone app. And again, just limiting the essentially the person to person interaction during the pandemic and this required a significant increase in transaction processing to get to the store locations that they didn't have equipment for before, as well as support for big data analytics applications to understand the customer behavior that's going on in real-time. So the net result is they chose PowerStore. They were new to Dell and they deployed it in their stores and delivered a seamless shopping experience via smartphone apps. The whole shopping experience was completely revolutionized. And I think this is really a great example of again, how the innovations that are in PowerStore are enabling our customers to really rethink how they're transacting business. >> Well, enabling the supermarkets to be the edge but also in China where everything started, so much, the market dynamics are still going on, but how quickly were they able to get PowerStore up and running and facilitate that seamless smartphone shopping experience? >> It was only weeks, only weeks, weeks from beginning to getting them up to speed. I mean, we've had great coverage, great support. And again, they embraced, I mean, they happened to leverage the AppsON capabilities, so they were able to run some of their applications directly on the appliance and they were able to get that up and running very quickly. And they were already a VMware customer as well. So they were already familiar with some of the tools and the integration of the VMware. And again, that's also been a sweetspot for this particular offer. >> Okay, got it. So a lot in it's first year. You said 4 X growth, over 60 countries, 400 petabytes plus shipped, a lot of new net new customers. What is new? What are you announcing that's new and that's going to take that up even a higher level? >> That's right. We're always going to up the ante, right? We're always going to, we can't rest on our laurels for too long. Look, we're very excited to share what's new for PowerStore. And that is one of the reasons we're here of course. I can break it down into two key highlights. First is a major software update that brings more enterprise innovation, more speed, more automation in particular to both new and existing customers. And we're also excited to announce a new lower cost entry model for the PowerStore family called the PowerStore 500. And this offers an incredible amount of enterprise class storage capabilities, much of which I have talked about and will talk more about today, for the price. And the price itself is what's going to surprise some folks. It starts as low as 28,000 US street price which is pretty significant, you know, in terms of a game changer, we think, in this industry. >> So let's talk about the software update first. You've got PowerStore 2.0, happy birthday to your customers who are going to take advantage of this. >> That's right. >> Kind of talk me through what some of the technological advancements are that your customers are going to be able to leverage? >> That's a great point. Yeah, so from a software perspective I like how you said that, happy birthday, yeah so all of our, just to be clear from a software update perspective, all of our existing customers are going to get this as a simple free non-disruptive update. And this is a commitment we've had to our customers for some time. And really it's the mantra if you will, of PowerStore, which is all about ensuring that our customers can encounter our very flexible platform that will keep giving them the latest and greatest. So really a couple of things I want to highlight from PowerStore that are brand new. One is we're giving a speed boost to the entire PowerStore lineup. Customers now, existing customers, you get up to 25% faster, mixed workload performance which is incredible, right off the bat. Secondly, we're enabling our customers to take full advantage of NVME now across the data center with the option of running NVME over fiber channel. And this again requires just a simple software update and no additional hardware if they already have 32 gig capable switches and HBAs on-prem. We've also made our unique AppsON feature, which I just talked about in the China example, we've made that more powerful and with scale out. This means more aggregate power, more aggregate capacity and it makes it even more ideal now for storage intensive apps to run at the edge with PowerStore. Another capability that's been very popular with our customers is our data reduction specifically our intelligent Dido which is always on and automated. And now what it does is it enables customers to boost performance while still guaranteeing the four to one data reduction that we have, at the same time. So just to give a quick example, when the system is under extreme IO, duress if you will, it automatically prioritize that IO versus the DDUP itself and provides a 20% turbo boost if you will, of performance boost for the applications running. All this is done automatically, zero management effort, zero impact to the data reduction guarantee of four to one that we already have in place. And then the last highlight I'd like to bring up is, last but not least, is one we're really proud of is the ability for our customers to now take more cost advantage, if you will, cost effective advantage of SCM or storage class memory. PowerStore now differentiates between SCM drives and NVME drives within the same chassis. So they can use SCM as a high-performance layer, if you will with as few as one drive, right? So they don't have to populate the whole chassis, they can use just one SCM drive for cost-effectiveness, for embedded data access. And this actually helps reduce the workload latency by up to 15%. So, another great example on top of NVME that I already mentioned, of how PowerStore is leading the practical adoption of next generation technologies. >> Are you seeing with the lower cost PowerStore 500, is that an opportunity for Dell to expand into the midsize market and an opportunity for those smaller customers to be able to take advantage of this technology? >> Absolutely, yeah. So the PowerStore finder, which we're really excited about introducing does exactly what you just said, Lisa. It is going to allow us to bring PowerStore and the experience of PowerStore to a broad range of businesses, a much broader range of edge use cases as well. And we're really excited about that. It's an incredible amount of enterprise storage class performance, as I mentioned, and functionality for the price that is again, 28,000 starting. And this includes all of the enterprise software capabilities I've been talking about. The ability to cluster, four to one data reduction guarantee, anytime upgrades. And to put this in context, a single 2U appliance, the PowerStore 500 supports up to 2.4 million SQL transactions per minute. I mean, this thing packs a punch, like no other, right? And it's a great fit for stand-alone or edge deployments in virtually every industry, we've mentioned retail already also healthcare, manufacturing, education and more. It's an offering that's really ideal for any solution that requires an optimization of price/performance, small footprint and effortless automation. And I can tell you, it's not just customers that are excited about this, as you can imagine our channel partners, they can't wait to get their hands on this either. >> Was just going to ask you about the channel. >> It is going to help them reach new sets of customers that they never had before. You mentioned midsize, but also in addition to that, it's just going to open it up to all new sets of use cases as well. So I'm really excited to see the creativity from our channel partners and customers and how they adopt and use the PowerStore 500 going forward. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that it's going to open up. We've seen so many new things in the last year and such acceleration. What are some of the new use cases that this is going to help unlock value for? >> Yeah, again, I think it's going to come down a lot to the edge in particular, as well as mid-size, it can run, again, this can run storage, intensive applications. So it's really about coming down to a price point that I think the biggest example will be mid-sized businesses that now, it's now affordable to. That they weren't able to get this enterprise class capabilities in the past more than anything else. Cause it's all the same capabilities that I've mentioned but it allows them to run all types of things. It could be, they could run, new next-generation intensive data, intensive databases. They can run VDI, they can run SQL, it does, essentially more than anything else makes existing use cases more accessible to mid-sized businesses. >> Got it, okay. So, so much momentum going on in the first year. A lot of that you're souping it up with this your new software, we talked about the new mid-size enterprise version PowerStore 500. What else can we expect from PowerStore, the rest of calendar 2021? >> Yeah, I think lots of things. So first of all we're so pleased at the amount of commitment to innovation that we've had over the past year. We're going to continue to work very closely with VMware to drive more and more innovation and enhancements with capabilities like AppsON that I talked about, and VM-ware or (indistinct) which is a key enabler for that. We're also committed to continuing to lead the industry in the adoption of modern technologies. I gave some good examples today of NVME and AppsON and SCM, storage class memory, and customers can expect that continued commitment. Look, we've designed PowerStore from the ground up to be very flexible so that it can be enhanced and improved non-disruptively. And I think we did that with this release. We proved that and no one can predict the future, clearly, it's been a crazy year. And so businesses need storage that's going to be flexible with them and grow with them and evolve with them. And customers can expect that from PowerStore. And we plan on doing just that. >> So customers can, that are interested can go direct to Dell. They can also go through your huge channel, you said, in terms of those customers that are thinking about it maybe adding to the percentage of new customers. What's your advice on them in terms of next steps? >> Yeah, next steps is, you know, I got to say this, we've done, it's crazy, we've done over 20,000 demos of PowerStore in one year, no joke. And you know, it's a new world. And so the next step is to reach out to Dell. We'd love to showcase this through a demo, give them whether it's a remote experience that way or remote proof of concept but yeah, reach out to Dell, your local rep or local channel partner and we'd love to show you what's possible more than anything else and look, we're really proud of what we've accomplished here. Just as impressive as these updates, I must say, is that in many instances, the team that brought this to market, the engineering team, they did this just like we're doing today, right? Over Zoom, remotely, while balancing life and work. So I just also want to thank the team for their commitment to delivering innovation to our customers. It hasn't wavered at all and I want to thank our top notch team. >> Right, an amazing amount of work done. You've had a very busy year and glad that you're well and healthy and been as successful with PowerStore. We can't wait to see in the next year those numbers that you shared even go up even more. Jon, thank you for joining us >> Looking forward to it. and sharing what's new with PowerStore. We appreciate your time. >> Always a pleasure, Lisa. >> Likewise >> Look forward to talking to you soon. >> Yeah >> Take care. >> For Jon Siegal, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, a Digital Experience. (slow upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. >> Hi and welcome to CUBE's coverage of GitLab Commit 2020. We're here in San Francisco, actually, the first CUBE event of the year, and I'm Stu Miniman here with John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, one of our main CUBE hosts. John, always great to kick off the year with you, and of course, we're digging in on the developer world, cloud native. Nothing better than, you know, the opening keynote talks about, you know, there's a line we've been talking for years, software's eating the world and what are the ripples that are happening on. So, Tom, great to see you, and how come it's so cold here in San Francisco? I mean, I could be back in Boston. >> Coldest winter. I've spent summers here years ago, but it's not summer anymore. But Stu, it's football playoffs. Patriots aren't in, so sorry to hear that our Pats didn't make it. But great to see you. I think one of the things this year in 2020, a new decade, 10 years of theCUBE, looking back, we have been on all the major developer waves since 2010. We jumped on the Hadoop wave with Cloudera. We saw the beginning of that wave of OpenStack to cloud, Kubernetes, containers, the whole nine yards. We've been in the developer community. But this year, cloud native not only is going to continue that expansion of developer CUBE action, but the cross-connect with mainstream, and this is to me the biggest trend of the next 20 years is going to be the open systems model of cloud, just like the open systems interconnect in the '80s created a whole new computer industry, changed the landscape, changed the value proposition, this year, I think we're going to start to see real visibility of value creation where the developers are not just the cliche of the value proposition. That's the cliche. Oh yeah, developers (mumbles). No, no, this is a whole nother game change. With CloudScale, with data, with AI, you're seeing again the importance of this. I think cloud native represents to me that next generation, because with multicloud, there are new criterias out there for success, new requirements. Same game, writing software. Whole new dynamic. Networking, Stu. >> Yeah. >> Compute. >> Yeah, John, and I love actually, I think this was a great show to help us kick it off because you talked about those mega waves out there. We've been watching the growth of some of the huge platforms. AWS was on the keynote stage this morning, Google is doing the closing keynote, and of course one of the major acquisitions, you know, in the relatively recent past was Microsoft buying GitHub. And so we know that developers are so important, but the message we heard from GitLab is it's not about silos anymore. They said not only the dev, the sec, and the ops, but finance and marketing. Everyone needs to get on the same page. GitLab's vision, of course, is that everyone should be using the same tools. That was something that I heard, that we both heard last year at AnsibleFest, that if you're in the same tools, sharing the same information, in the same communication channels, you're going to be able to move fast, and that is what companies need to do. They need to be able to react fast. The business should be able to move. Those software cycles need to be shortened. And that's the mission and the big goal that GitLab has, and I think it's representative of the wave we've been seeing. >> Let's get into the keynote analysis, but before we get to that, I want to, you brought up a point about GitHub. I think there's a real dynamic of GitHub being acquired by Microsoft for many reasons. One is Microsoft's got this cloud called Azure, and not the only cloud in town. Amazon has AWS. And so multicloud is going to be a theme we're going to see more and more of. And so this idea of open and transparent community in open source is interesting in a world where everyone's siloing. I mean, let's face it, GitHub is owned by Microsoft. LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft. You're starting to see the walled garden world come back again where data is really valuable. And so what's interesting to see is you're seeing a company with GitLab, really one of the first ones to say, "Hey, you know what? "We're going to be anti-walled garden. "We're going to be open. "We're going to be transparent." And again, integrated platform. The cloud is demanding companies have integration requirements that are well above what we saw years ago, and this is now a new table stake. This to me is the real walkaway. What's your thoughts on the GitLab keynote and those industry dynamics? >> Yeah, some great points there, John. Right, first of all, open, fully open. You know, the CEO and the CMO, some of the things they were talking about is sometimes the team doesn't know who's doing the contribution because they're getting regular contribution. They said, "Hey, I didn't see them in the group." Oh wait, that's a customer, that's a partner, someone from the outside doing it. Fully open and transparent and remote. They now have over 1100 employees. Four years ago there were nine of them. And it is fully remote. Actually, do a little compare and contrast. Talk about Amazon. John, how many people do we know that have joined Amazon, and the first thing you do is you move to Seattle, because that's just where they have. Now, of course they've got multiple locations. They've got thousands of employees down in DC, in Massachusetts, in New York City, all over the place, but the core decision-making, even though they are very distributed, Seattle is where everything happens. That's where most of the people live. So GitLab, not only is the company remote, but that's the tooling that they've built really is to enable people to work wherever they are. From GitLab's standpoint, they said hey, we have, one of our software people, she lives in New Zealand, and she has her own power. She's completely off the grid except for her internet. As long as she has internet, she can contribute to the team and participate in the building of GitLab. So it's fascinating. You know, we've talked for years ago the future of work and how that happens. So the tooling as enablement not only to allow everybody to work together, but work together wherever they are and that remote capability, and it is very challenging. You know, we watched Zoom IPO last year, and they're trying to help with that whole wave, but we know that there's a challenging dynamic of being able to work wherever you are. >> So they brought up some stats, interesting. Scale and integration are a big theme. Looks like GitLab's getting it. They made some good calls. Have integration, very friendly integration, very open. And they're essentially consolidating a lot of the different tool chains out there. You look at Jenkins and other things out there, from continuous integration and variety through now mainstream. They got 1100 employees, okay. They got a valuation of $2 billion. They just raised $436 million. They have cash on hand of 350 million and they're going to do revenue. So you have essentially scale in GitLab with an integration story which the cloud guys are being forced. That's my opinion. Do you agree with that and do you think that GitLab can continue the pace of growth given where they're at? >> Well, John, they have something that everybody wants. It's that recurring revenue. So in February 2020, they will have passed the 100 million of ARR, and they've announced that they're going to IPO later this year. We're going to have the CEO on later. I'm a little surprised how fast they are looking to IPO, John. We've seen so many companies that not only do they do big raises, but it's not $100 million, it's two or $300 million. You know, when do you have profitability? When do you go public? So I'm a little curious why there's almost a race for GitLab to go IPO. But absolutely they are catching a lot of these waves. When GitHub was taken off the table, boy did I see Google moving fast to work closer with them. It's no coincidence that Amazon is here, because there's been a little bit of concern from GitHub as to, oh, if I'm doing GitHub, does that mean that I'm kind of being pushed closer to Microsoft Azure, as you said, that cloud. I've read recently GitHub's trying to make sure that they stay independent. We know the GitHub team. And the other big thing we saw is GitLab, about three years ago, they really differentiated themself. They are not just a GitHub alternative. You talked about Jenkins. The CICD is a huge piece of what they're doing. The source code management and CICD, putting those together are the core of what they're doing, but they're trying to be a single tool chain. Boy, when I look at the, you know, the mesh of tooling that GitLab kind of is poking at a little bit, we know a lot of these companies. Some of them are public. Some of them are unicorns. You know, to say that, oh, well, we're going to all of your security chaining. We know how deep and gnarly the security world is. But GitLab, being open, they're going to partner with all of these environments. It's not that you can only use the GitLab pieces. But the audacious goal to say that they are going to be kind of the one tool chain to rule them all is a good goal. I'm hugely supportive my entire career of trying to get rid of silos. But we know that you're still going to have corner cases and use cases that I'm going to need to go deeper. I'm still going to use those best of breeds. And that's one of the things that we're going to look at this year, John, that platform, just like I could go all in on AWS, but I'm still going to use lots of tools on Amazon and I'm going to use other clouds. >> What's your take on, great analysis, by the way. What's your take on as cloud native becomes multicloud where you got edge developing, we got outposts. You're seeing Azure with their stuff. Outposts is Amazon. You now have more pressure on speed and agility than ever before. How does GitLab's story play well into that, and as enterprises have to be faster. Not just enterprises, service providers. There's other new companies doing more cloud and on-premises and edge, AKA multicloud, too. >> Yeah, so I actually, I loved the problem statement that they nailed with talking about the tool chain that's out there is they said more than 50% of devops time is wasted on logistics and repetitive tasks. And John, if you talk about multicloud, it's not just simple to say, "Oh, hey, I threw in a Kubernetes layer "and therefore I can move from my Auzre "to my GCP to my AWS." That's not how it works. I have all the underlying things. I have the interface. That tool and user interface knowledge is challenging to overcome. There are some tools like GitLab, of course, that help me span across those environments. HashiCorp is here at the show, a partner of GitLab. I was just meeting with them recently. And of course, they're going to spread across the multiple cloud environments. But that is really where the meat on the bone is, John, if you talk about multicloud and cloud native. Where are these pieces that can help customers make sure that I'm not too deeply locked into one environment and still being able to leverage the various services that I might want to use across multiple clouds. >> Yeah, I mean, to me, the big takeaway, Stu, on the keynote I made in my notes here is that what I was impressed with is, obviously the transparency that they have is, I love the openness. You know, I mean, this whole silo thing's definitely real. You're seeing more and more. So open and transparent's key. But when you look at what they really have here is the integration story, and cloud is forcing that, in my opinion. But they announced what they call a complete devops platform delivered as a single application, from manage, plan, create, verify, package, secure, release, configure, monitor, and defend. The spectrum of a devops platform. So that to me, I think, is the step that needs to be taken. The question I have is how real is it, in your opinion? Is that what a lot of other people are saying that they have? What's your analysis of that story, reality, legit, and what's their prospects? >> Yeah, well, definitely GitLab has great adoption. The two pieces is the SCM and the CI are the core of what they're doing, and they know that's where people usually kind of walk in the door. Then they kind of land and they look to expand from that. GitLab's made a number of acquisitions, and from 2020, they are going to really double down on making sure that they dig deeper into some of those environments, especially security, planning, and ops were the three priorities that they had there. So, you know, John, we know when you talk about you're trying to be all things to all people, there are going to be things that you will do well and things that you can do great, but, so it is an audacious goal, and with a broad community supporting it. >> Well, we know, you've reported on this and we've told stories about it is that if there's too many tools in an enterprise, you have this tool shed effect where there's no real platform around it, and I call it a tool shed, but if you have too many tools laying around, they're not cohesively integrated, that's a problem that becomes tool sprawl. So this has become an issue. We saw it in the big data world. We saw unification as a strategy for that. Databricks, for example, is a great example of one company that's taken advantage of that trend. Is there a tool problem in the dev space that GitLab's taken advantage of? >> Absolutely, John. And I think something we're going to dig in deep today, we've got a couple of practitioners on, we've got the partners, we've got the executive team from GitLab. John, thank you so much for helping me kick off GitLab Commit 2020 and a massive schedule of theCUBE coverage throughout the entire cloud native multicloud ecosystem. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the shows that we will be out in 2020 as well as a tremendous back catalog that you can search. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco it's theCUBE, covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of GitLab Commit 2020 here in San Francisco. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest off the keynote stage this morning, the co-founder and CEO of GitLab, Sid Sijbrandij. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> All right, so Sid, first of all congratulations, good energy here at the show, GitLab, definitely a company I hear lots about in my travels, so we were super excited to bring theCUBE here. So many different things on the momentum of the company, where you're going, but, I love when I have a founder on. Let's rewind a little bit as to kind of the core 'why' of the company and the skillset that that early team brought. >> Sure, the 'why' is, Demitri started GitLab in 2011. He was living in the Ukraine, he had two things he wanted to improve in life. He would like running water, he would like better collaboration software at work. And he started with what he perceived as the most important problem to solve, so he built GitLab to have that better collaboration software. I only saw it a year later, and I thought, this makes so much sense that the thing you collaborate with is also something you can collaborate on at its open source. >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause you say collaboration, and we saw through the Enterprise 2.0 wave and various communication technologies, I interviewed one of your partners Mattermost which is kind of related there. You get there to GitLab, which in the early days, I heard a lot about oh, is this a GitHub alternative? So how did the SCM piece end up there? >> Yeah, so we started with the SCM piece, that's what Demitri made first because he had a need for it. And it evolved, it's now a complete DevOps platform all the way from planning what you want to do on a high level to monitoring, releasing, securing what you've built. And that wasn't intuitive to us. And it came about because Demitri made Version Control, but he also made GitLabCI. That's two separate applications. And at a certain point, someone outside the company contributed a better version of GitLabCI, his name is Kamil, and we said that's amazing, we'll make that official, and do you want to join? And he joined and after a few months he said, I think we should combine the two in a single application. And my co-founder Demitri explained how he was wrong. These two are perfectly integrated, couldn't be any better. Custom-made PIs, same single sign-on, same idea of what a user can do. He also explained how he was wrong because everything in a DevOps tuning space was a point solution, people wanted to mix and match. And he kept pushing for it, and at a certain point, he said look, you might not believe that everything I say, but one thing is for sure, we'll be able to kind of ship at a faster rate if we combine it. And that was important to us, we're all about efficiency. But it turns out, he was also right about the benefits for the user. People reported like, it's so much easier having everything in a single interface, being on the same page with my other departments. And that's how we stumbled across this secret, like hey, this whole DevOps space, it started from just a few applications but now people are using 15, 20 different applications and the hand-offs between the applications were the problem. And that we could solve by bringing them together. So we doubled down on that strategy, so that's how that came about. >> Yeah, I mean there's no doubt that tool sprawl is a huge issue in the marketplace, yet when you talk to developers, when they learn a tool, they tend to really love it and they all go to bat as to, well, I sort it out and I found the best one for whatever piece of it. So how do you balance really building out a platform but if there's a piece of it that they still want to use they can, how do you balance that? >> Yeah, you got to make sure that you don't lock people in. The last thing someone wants is that they have to use everything. So open APIs, many integrations, some of which we maintain ourselves with a Jenkins and a Jura and a GitHub. But also, you make sure that sometimes people care very much about the certain piece of frictionality. So with GitLab, if they don't like a certain piece, they can improve it, they can contribute back. And every month, 200 improvements come from our users. They had something in their old application that they really liked, and now they get to add that to GitLab, and that's how you kind of take away all the objections over time. >> Yeah. Love you to comment on just the explosive growth that you've been seeing, you're now over 1100 employees, you talked about how much outside contribution you're getting there, but the amount of features that you're adding, and you're releasing every month. How do you manage the growth of the company, the growth of the product, and make sure that the company doesn't lose focus? >> Yeah. I think that we've done a really good job of splitting up the tasks of making sure every team has a part of the product that they're responsible for. They don't have to go to five other teams to get sign-off. And if you Google GitLab categories, you can find out exactly which team is responsible for the back end, for the front end, who's the product manager, who's the product marketing manager, for a specific piece of functionality. So I think that's really helped us, making sure the teams can still ship and they're not bogged down because other people don't have time. >> Yeah, the mission is that everyone can contribute, and you're looking to really help companies solve one of the key problems of being a software company, which is reducing cycle time. How does that translate into growth and revenue for your business? >> Yeah, so that cycle, the time between planning to do something and getting it out to users, that's what companies need to become software companies. And they're seeing that they're able to do that faster with GitLab. And we've seen amazing growth, we just announced we're over 100 million ARR, we're seeing amazing growth in revenue, so we're more than doubling revenue every year, we've almost tripled the amount of people working at GitLab last year to keep up with that growth. >> Yeah, very interesting dynamic, you had a sizable round of funding towards the end of 2019, congratulations on the milestone, you said in February 2020 you hit 100 million dollars ARR. I guess the question, it's publicly stated that you're looking to IPO later this year. We've seen many unicorns out there delaying what they're doing, they wait until they have 300 million dollars in revenue. Is there a reason why you're charging towards an IPO? >> We want to become a public company sooner rather than later, because first of all, we think it fits us. We're a very transparent company, we don't mind sharing what we're about and what our financials are. The second thing is, I think one of the big things holding GitLab back is that we're not as well known. And becoming a public company will help spread awareness about what we can do. And that's one of the most important things we can do. So that's why we're going forward, we'll go public when we're ready, when the market is ready. We think that's this year, we might be wrong, we'll see how it ends up this year. But we're looking forward to that, and we're looking forward to being even more transparent, and also sharing our financials. >> Sid, one of the things you said, you're over 1000 employees, and you're completely remote, as far as we know, the largest company that is 100% remote. Talk a little bit about kind of the challenges from building a culture in that type of environment but it's also something that I think GitLab's helping to enable other companies along that same journey. >> Yeah, we're figuring out a lot of things you have to do to be all remote, and we're trying to share those lessons. And that's anything from working handbook first to communication styles and being intentional about informal communications. So if you Google GitLab all remote, you'll find tons of tips. And those are based not just on what we say, but what we do. We have a public handbook of over 3000 pages with all our internal processes. You can check what we really do to make this work. And I think it's going to be the future. In the future, companies who make digital products are going to be much more all remote. And we want to enable that trend. We think it's great for team members, we think it helps you reduce your commute time, it helps you to be able to intersperse what you do at the company with what you do in your private life, you're able to go the gym or the supermarket when it's not busy, and also it helps be more flexible. So its great for team members, it's also great for companies. You get to attract people wherever they are, get much more access to talent, and the talent that people can stay with you year over year. We have a 85% retention of people who stay with GitLab every year. >> Is that something you think that spans across whatever roles they are, lots of companies that I talk to they'll have their developing groups, will be highly distributed. We've seen global development work forces for decades now, but marketing roles or product teams often have been in regional offices, obviously if you've got sales forces, groups that often they will have regional offices. So is this specific for the digital and development type organizations, or is this something you think will span across other roles? >> When we graduated at Y Combinator, they told us all this work's for engineering. It maybe works for sales because they're close to the customer. It doesn't work for finance, it doesn't work for marketing. And I think we've proven that it does work. Our marketing team is all in on GitLab. But also, we've seen other marketing teams. There was a presentation today by someone who runs a marketing team, and they're using GitLab. Not just for the issues, but they're even version controlling, they're copying, they're messaging in GitLab, so, I think the time has come to accept that the tools have gotten so good, and people have gotten so knowledgeable that it works across all departments. >> Yeah, Sid, I'd like you to comment on your partner ecosystem, that you said everything's open, so therefore there's no lock-in. How do you build more community from your peers from the vendor ecosystem? >> Yeah, you see here today we have different vendors out that they get customers here that integrate with us. There's vendors here, we have an alternative in GitLab. But they have something that they think adds unique value, and we want to give them a podium. We want people to know that we're not locking them in. So we're very helpful, we're trying to be helpful, get them on our blog, get them media, because nobody wants to be locked into one solution. So that's a really important message that we're sending. >> All right. Sid, why don't you give the final word, you've said people, GitLab is not yet a household name, what do you want to make sure that people understand who GitLab is and why they're important for the future of software development? >> Yeah, so we're a complete DevOps platform delivered as a single application, and we help people go much faster. At Goldman Sachs they went for the most important application, they went from two weeks to get that out the door to two hours to get that out the door. That's the value we can bring, because you don't have to go to 15 point solutions to get your work done. Much better visibility, people can switch teams, you have a good overview of your security posture, your productivity. That's the value we're bringing. You can reduce people's, their licensing cost, their costs of integrating things, but most importantly we can help them go faster and get to revenue faster. >> Sid Sijbrandij, thank you so much for joining us on the program, really appreciate theCUBE coming to GitLab Commit. >> Awesome, thanks for coming. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, check out theCUBE.net for all the shows we will be at in 2020. Thank you for watching theCUBE.

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering get lab commit 20, 20 Raji you buy get lab. >>Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cubes coverage of get lab commit 2020. We're here in San Francisco. It's a little bit chilly but uh, my first guests, uh, on the program are used to the weather cause they're coming to us from Wisconsin. Uh, both from Northwestern mutual, uh, sitting to my left here is Kyle person who is a senior engineer and sitting to his left is Sean who is also a senior engineer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Alright. We thought, you know, both of us coming from colder climates that may be coming to San Francisco would be a little warmer, but they have hand warmers, they have warm drinks and it is the warmth of the community that will warm our innards. I'm short right there. It says get warm. That's what we're here to do. All right, Kyle, let's start with you. Northwestern mutual. I think most people are familiar with the organization, but give us a little bit of a, you know, how people should think of Northwestern mutual in 2020 and, uh, your roles. >>Yeah. So obviously we mean we're a large insurance company but also into financial services and products and we're really trying to become more of a digital company as well. We think that that's going to be a differentiator in the marketplace. You know, having apps that our customers can interact with, um, trying to speed up underwriting, things like that. So we're really just trying to be a technology company as much of an insurance company. Okay, >>great. And Sean, I understand you're, you're on the same team as Kyle helping you along with that digital transformation that that's been all the buzz for the last couple of years. Yeah. He can't get rid of me. We flew, you know, 1200 miles and I'm still sitting next to, uh, but yeah, at Northwestern mutual, I mean, going back a number of years now, the, the company started down this path of doing a digital transformation where we wanted to be, you know, a software company that is providing financial service and financial stability for our clients. So it was a big shift that we, we started, we knew we needed to modernize everything. So we started down that path. Great. So we had that. So Kyle, maybe if you, it can, you know, when did get lab enter the picture, what was kind of the initial use case and, uh, let's, let's go from there. >>Yeah, it was before my time. I'm, Chad has been there for a long time. Most of the ride, but uh, yeah, it's been several years and it's been, uh, you know, starting out with SCM, moving into CEI and then, you know, adopted sustainer journey that you hear about even in the keynote today. That's pretty much how we charted our course. Okay. >>So Sean, you've been there since the beginning of a, uh, to get lab usage? Pretty much it, it showed up a couple months before I got there. But, uh, going back to your early mid 22, yeah, 2015, uh, we had kind of a more of a pilot group of engineers that were, were starting out, you know, to get us down this path to where we wanted to go and they needed a new tool, something that worked better than what we currently had at an M and a, they settled on, on get lab because it provided, you know, one being open source was a huge selling point for us. Um, and it was just ever-growing. So it allowed our developers to really get going and get going much faster. Okay, great. And in the keynote, okay, Kyle, they were talking about how it's not just about the dev, the second the ops, but really not allowing everybody into the same tooling, even marketing and finance. What's kind of the breadth of the organization is it is mostly devs that dev and ops does security, you know, who, who's involved in using this tooling. >>It's everybody. We're a, we're figuring out our, you know, everyone's kinda got their own spin on things. So we're in that, um, classic position where I think we have the tooling sprawl that everyone talks about and we're, we're constantly evaluating, you know, how does Gilad fit into that picture? What do we bolt on? You know, we have the luxury of being able to integrate with other things as well. But then if certainly if we can get an economy of scale where we can just use get lab, it's to provide that seamless interface. That's something we always look to do too. All right. >>So Sean, my understanding is a NM is also using Coubernetties and that's something that you're involved in. So very money you bring us in people, you know, sometimes get misconstrued as to the scope and the purpose of, of Kubernetes. We've been at the cube con cloud date of con for a number of years, but uh, why don't you set the stage for us and kind of walk us through the, the what and the why of Kubernetes? Yeah. For us at least being able to leverage something like Kubernetes, which when you really back out and you know, do the 10,000 foot view, it's container management and being able to go into a more modern architecture. We're leveraging containers for pretty much whatever we can, or at least what makes sense. Um, and that's kind of how we started down the path with get lab moving into Kubernetes. You know, we were, we were trying to figure out like, where do we want to go so, you know, let's not just push the boat out a little, let's drop, kick the boat off the end of the pier and see where we end up. >>So we started working down that path of deploying get lab into Kubernetes cause it allowed us to easily expand and make the application highly available. So even if some easies go down in AWS, which knock on wood never happens. Uh, we're still good to go. Our users are, wouldn't even notice. Okay. Um, so you mentioned AWS. Is that your primary cloud, your only cloud? What, what is your cloud situation? Yeah, that's, that's a Northwestern mutual is public cloud. Okay, great. And speak a little bit to, you know, Amazon does have plenty of its own tooling. Uh, maybe a little bit about how get lab and, how those fit together for you. Um, well, I mean, we use get lab CIS specifically to be able to provision different services in one, not that we need as long as they fit near within our security requirements. And, you know, everything we do, we get vetted out through our internal processes, but it's really allowed our developers to move forward so much faster. >>You know, it's kind of gone are the days of, let me fill out a request for, you know, X, Y, Z and, you know, wait two as it goes through somebody's work queue and they eventually get around to it. Um, allowing our developers to just, you know, do their commits, get their, you know, peer review and just deploy and provision right away, allows us to get our applications to market just so much faster than even a few years ago. Alright. So Kyle, the two of you are presenting here at the show, uh, you know, we, we love, we heard GitLab talking on stages. You know, customers don't just use it, they commit, they add feedback in and they speak at the show. So maybe speak a little bit of, uh, you know, NMS, you know, involvement as to uh, you know, are you committing code and what, what are you speaking about? >>So we're here to speak about our journey on Kubernetes. I'm trans covering the application side and I'm going to talk about our, our dabble in Kubernetes CII. So we're, we're really looking to, um, we're looking for efficiencies I guess in, in density. That's a primary driver behind trying to explore the trail. But also, um, one of the things I'll talk about in the talk is, is boosting our security posture using Kubernetes. So a lot of times people are using API keys and they're getting stale and not being rotated. Uh, we can do some neat things with Kubernetes and it's native. I am offerings to boost our security posture by moving towards role based access and getting those credentials that are rotating and providing us, uh, you know, non stale sort of authentication credentials, things like that. >>Sean, yeah, pretty much covers it. Uh, uh, and beyond with the CIA, you know, being able to run and get lab itself within Qube and having the different components broken out and we're alive. It's, it, it's enabling us to limit any kind of attack plane that could exist. You know, it's, you have to get through a lot to even get to it. So it's really just been a huge, a huge plus for us. OK. I, I'd love to hear both. Both of you have been to these events a number of times. You're speaking to event. What, what, what's the value of coming to get loud commit? I mean, for me it's a, a huge networking thing and being able to relay our experiences that we've gone through to other people that are out in the community. I mean, I know lots of, you know, everyone wants to see, you know, what can you do in Kubernetes and like, here's some of the things that we've done. >>Here's some of the things that you know, works that didn't work. You know, we would recommend you going this kind of route if we were to start it over again. And beyond that, you know, meeting people from all over the world, like, uh, we were talking with some, uh, some guy, gentleman Nico from white duck who is from Germany. It's not something you get to do, you know, face to face all the time. Alright. Sean, can you share with our audience any of those? You know, if we could do it over again, we'd change something. Is it an organizational thing or technical piece or until don't don't use EFS for getting repo data. It will not end well for you can take away. All right. Kyle, how about you? You've been to a number of these shows, uh, you know, the networking, the piece or you know, what else, what, what, what, what for you personally and for NM, uh, you know, brings you back. >>Yeah. Networking is a big thing. I think it's also getting feedback on, you know, what we're doing. Does it make sense? Just like get lab is throwing things out there early, trying to tighten up that contribution loop. We want to get our ideas out there and then this is an opportunity for people to ask questions about our presentation. If maybe we're off in the wrong direction, maybe we can get that steered back on course. Um, you know, we're just really here to get the feedback. Yeah. I always love talking to people in the financial industry and you talk about open source, you know, if, if you went back, you know, five years ago, you'd probably get a little bit of sideways looks as to wait, you know, you're doing what, um, are we past that? Do do you feel are most people, uh, you know, really understanding where we are with, with cloud and open source in general that it, you know, it makes perfect sense for a financial institution to be part of it. >>I'd say at NM we, we've finally gotten past that curve and now we're, we're trying to, you know, make it even easier for our internal developers to easier participate in open source, you know, their internal products and contribute more to the community. Uh, we've completely done an about face from, you know, probably 15 years ago where it was open source. You wanted to, what to, yeah, let's go. How can we make things better? It's, it's all about, you know, our, our customers. So we want to make sure we create the best product and experience for them. That's awesome. Yeah, there's still some barriers there. I mean, it's all about managing risk, right? So you have to do things diligently and make sure that your bases are covered. And so it's not like it can be a free for all. We have to do our due diligence, but we, you know, we love to contribute. And we love to get up without their there as we can. All right. Well, Kyle and Sean, thank you so much for sharing with our audience. Best of luck with your presentations and, uh, have a great time at the show. Thank you. All right. Uh, thank you to, to NM for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.

>> 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)

>> (Narrator) Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer and you're watching The Cube, worldwide leader in tech coverage, and this is OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest Melvin Hillsman, who's the governance board member of OpenLab, which we got to hear about in the keynote on Monday. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Melvin, we were given, start us off with a little bit about your background, what brought you to the OpenStack community, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, yeah, so my background is in Linux system administration and my getting involved in OpenStack was more or less seeing the writing on the wall as it relates to virtualization and wanting to get an early start in understanding how things would pan out over the course of some years. So I probably started OpenStack maybe three or four so years ago. I was probably later to the party than I wanted to be, but through that process, started working at Rackspace first and that's how I really got more involved into OpenStack in particular. >> Yeah, you made a comment, though. The writing on the wall for virtualization. Explained that for a sec. >> So for me, I was at a shared hosting company and we weren't virtualizin' anything. We were using traditional servers, dedicated servers, installing hundreds of customers on those servers. And so, at one point, what we started doing was we would take a dedicated server, we would create a virtual machine on it, but we would use most of the resources of that dedicated server, and so what allowed that shared hosting was to tear stuff down and recreate it, but it was very manual process and so, of course, the infrastructure service and orchestration around that OpenStack was becoming the de facto standard and way of doing it, and so I didn't want to try to learn manually, or fix something up internally, I wanted to go where OpenStack was being highly developed a lot and people working on it in their day to day jobs, which is why I went to Rackspace. >> Okay, one of the things we look at, this is a community here, so it takes people from lots of different backgrounds, and some of them do it on their spare time, some of them are paid by larger companies to participate, so to tell us about OpenLab, itself, and how your company participates there. >> Sure, so I started, well I'm at Huawei now, but I was at Rackspace and that's kind of how I got more involved in the community and there I started working on testing things above the OpenStack ecosystem, so things that people want to build on top of OpenStack and during that process Huawei reached out to me and was like hey you know you're doing a great job here, and I was like yeah I would love to come and explore more of how we can increase this activity in the community at large. And so Oakland Lab was essentially born out of that, which the OpenStack community, they deliver the OpenStack API's, and they kind of stop there, you know. Everything above that is, you do that on your own, more or less, and so also, as a chair of the user committee, again, just being more concerned about the people who are using stuff, OpenLab was able, was available to facilitate me having access to hardware and access to people who are using things outside OverStack in use cases, et cetera, where we want to test out more integrated tools working with OpenStack and different versions of OpenStack. And so that's essentially what OpenLab is-- >> So in OpenLab, projects come together and it's basically, it's an Interop, boy, in the networking world, they've had the Interop plug and plug fest for a long time, but, in essence, projects come together and you integrate them and start, you invite them in and they integrate and start to test them. Starting with, I mean, I see, for this release, Terraform and Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so a lot of people want to to use Kubernetes, right? And as an OpenStack operator you essentially, you don't really want to go and learn all the bits of Kubernetes, necessarily, and so, but you want to use Kubernetes and you want to work seamlessly with OpenStack and you want to use the API's that you're used to using with OpenStack and so we work very heavily on the external cloud provider for OpenStack, enabling Cinder V3 for containers that you're spinning up in Kubernetes, so that they have seamless integration, you don't have to try to attach your volumes, they are automatically attached. You don't have to figure out what your load balancing is going to to look like. You use Octavia, which is load balancing service for OpenStack, very tightly integrated and things, you know, as you spin things up, they work as you as you would expect and so then all the other legacy applications and all the things you're used to doing with OpenStack, you bring on Kubernetes and you essentially do things the way you've been doing them before, with just an additional layer. >> Yeah, now I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the providers and the users, you know how do they get engaged, to and give us a little flavor around those. >> Yeah, so you get engaged, you go to OpenLabtesting.org and there's two options. One, is you can test out your applications and tools, by clicking get started, you fill that out. And what's great about open lab is that we actually reach out and we talk with you, we consult with you, per se, because we have a lot of variation in hardware that's available to us and so we want to figure out the right hardware that you need in order to do the tests that you want, so that we can get the output as it relates to that integration that will, of course, educate and inform the community at large of whether or not it's working and been validated. And, again, so as a person who wants to support OpenLab or for a provider, for example, who wants to support OpenLab, you click on the support OpenLab link, you fill out a form and you tell us you know, do you want to provide more infrastructure, do you want to talk with us about how clouds are being architected, integrations are being architected, things that you're seeing in the open source use cases that may not be getting the testing that they need and you're willing to work with engineers from other companies around that, so individual testers and then companies who may bring a number of testers together around a particular use case. >> Now, you're starting to publish some of the results of Interop testing and things like that. How is open lab, how does it produce its results, is it eventually going to be producing white papers and things like that or dashboards or what's your vision there? >> Yeah, so we produce a very archaic dashboard right now, but we're working with the CNCF to, if you go to CNCF.CI, and they have a very nice dashboard that kind of shows you a number of projects and whether or not they work together. And so it's open source, so what we want to do is work with that team to figure out how do we change the logos and the git repos, to how to driving those red and green, success or failure icons that are there, but they're relevant to the test that we're doing in OpenLab, so yeah. So we definitely want to have a dashboard that's very easy to decipher what tests are failing in or passing. >> Looking forward, what kinds of projects are you most interested in getting involved? >> Right now, very much Kubernetes, of course. We're really focusing on multi architecture, again, as a result of our work with Kubernetes and driving full conformance and multi architecture. That's kind of the wheelhouse at this time. We're open for folks to give us a lot of different use cases, like we were starting to look at some edge stuff, how can we participate there, we're starting looking at FPGA's and GPU's, so a lot different, we don't have a full integration in a lot of different areas, just yet, but we are having those conversations. >> So, actually, I spent a bunch of years, when I worked on the vendor side, living in an Interrupt lab, and the most valuable things were not figuring out what worked, but what broke, so what kind of things, you know, as you're working through this, what learnings back do you share with the community, both the providers and users? Big stumbling blocks that you can help people, give a red flag, or say you know, avoid these type of things. >> Yeah, exactly what you just said. You know, what's good is some of our stuff is geographically dispersed, so we can start to talk about if, what's the latency look like? You may, within that few square miles that you're operating and doing things, it works great, but when I'm sending something across the water how, is your product still moving quickly, is the latency too bad that we can't, I can't create a container over here because it takes too long, so one example of looking at something fail as it relates to that is we're talking with Octavia folks to see, if I spin up a lot of containers am I going to therefore create a lot of load balancers and if I create a lot of load balancers I'm creating a lot of VM's, or am I creating a lot of containers or are things breaking apart, so we need to dig a little bit further to understand what is and is not working with the integrations we're currently working on and then again we're exploring GPV, GPUs just landed more or less, that was a part of the keynote as well, and so now we're talking about, well, let's do some of that testing. The software, the code, is there but is it usable? And so that's one area we want to start playing around with. >> Okay, one of the other things in the keynote's got mentioned was Zul, the CIDT tool, how's that fitting into the OpenLab? >> Yeah, we use Zul as our gating, so what's great about Zul is that you can interac6t with projects from different SCM's, so we have some projects that live in github, some that utilize Garrote, some that utilize gitlab, and Zul has applicability where it can talk to different, it can talk across these different SCM's, and if you have a patch that depends on a patch in another another pod, so a patch on one project in one SCM can depend on a patch in another project, in a different SCM, and so what's great about Zul is that you can say, hey I'm depending on th6at, so before this patch lands, check to make sure this stuff works over there, so if it succeeds there and it's a dependency then you basically confirm that succeeds there and then now I can run the test here, and it passes here as well, so you know that you can use both of those projects together again, in an integration. Does it makes sense? Hopefully I'm making it very clear, the power there with the cross SCM integration. >> Yeah, Melvin, you've had a busy week, here, at the show. Any, you know, interesting things you learned this week or something that you heard from a customer that you thought, oh boy we got to, you know, get this into our lab or a road map or, you know-- >> The ARM story, the multi architecture is, I feel like that's really taking off. We've had discussions with quite a few folks around that, so yeah, that for me, that's the next thing that I think we're really going to concentrate a little bit harder on is, again, figuring out if there are some problems, because mostly it's been just x86, but we need to start exploring what's breaking as we add more to multi architecture. >> Melvin, no shortage of new things to test and play with, and every customer always brings some unique spins on things, so appreciate you giving us the update on OpenLab, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're Welcome. Thanks for having me. >> From John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to be you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Prince Martin with Dave The Who Vellante, and we're with David Hatfield, or Hat, the president of Purse Storage. Hat, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, great to be here. Thanks for being here. How fun is this? >> The orange is awesome. >> David: This is great. >> Super fun. >> Got to represent, we love the orange here. >> Always a good venue. >> Yeah. >> There's not enough orange. I'm not as blind yet. >> Well it's the Bill Graham, I mean it's a great venue. But not generally one for technology conferences. >> Not it's not. You guys are not conventional. >> So far so good. >> But then-- >> Thanks for keeping us out of Las Vegas for a change. >> Over my dead body I thin I've said once or twice before. >> Speaking of-- Love our customers in Vegas. Unconventional, you've said recently this is not your father's storage company. What do you mean by that? >> Well we just always want to do things a little bit less conventional. We want to be modern. We want to do things differently. We want to create an environment where it's community so our customers and our partners, prospective customers can get a feel for what we mean by doing things a little bit more modern. And so the whole orange thing is something that we all opt in for. But it's more about really helping transform customer's organizations think differently, think out of the box, and so we wanted to create a venue that forced people to think differently, and so the last three years, one was on Pier 48, we transformed that. Last year was in a big steelworkers, you know, 100 year old steel manufacturing, ship building yard which is now long since gone. But we thought the juxtaposition of that, big iron rust relative to what we're doing from a modern solid state perspective, was a good metaphor. And here it's about making music, and how can we together as an industry, develop new things and develop new songs and really help transform organizations. >> For those of you who don't know, spinning disk is known as spinning rust, right? Eventually, so very clever sort of marketing. >> The more data you put on it the slower it gets and it gets really old and we wanted to get rid of that. We wanted to have everything be online in the data center, so that was the point. >> So Hat, as you go around and talk to customers, they're going through a digital transformation, you hear all this stuff about machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, what are the questions that you're getting? CEO's, they want to get digital right. IT professionals are wondering what's next for them. What kind of questions and conversations are you having? >> Yeah, I think it's interesting, I was just in one of the largest financial services companies in New York, and we met with the Chief Data Officer. The Chief Data Officer reports into the CEO. And he had right next to him the CIO. And so they have this development of a recognition that moving into a digital world and starting to harness the power of data requires a business context. It requires people that are trying to figure out how to extract value from the data, where does our data live? But that's created the different organization. It drives devops. I mean, if you're going to go through a digital transformation, you're going to try and get access to your data, you have to be a software development house. And that means you're going to use devops. And so what's happened from our point of view over the last 10 years is that those folks have gone to the public cloud because IT wasn't really meeting the needs of what devops needed and what the data scientists were looking for, and so what we wanted to create not only was a platform and a tool set that allowed them to bridge the gap, make things better today dramatically, but have a platform that gets you into the future, but also create a community and an ecosystem where people are aware of what's happening on the devop's side, and connect the dots between IT and the data scientists. And so we see this exploding as companies digitize, and somebody needs to be there to help kind of bridge the gap. >> So what's your point of view and advice to that IT ops person who maybe really good at provisioning LUNS, should they become more dev like? Maybe ops dev? >> Totally, I mean I think there's a huge opportunity to kind of advance your career. And a lot of what Charlie talked about and a lot of what we've been doing for nine years now, coming up on nine years, is trying to make our customers heroes. And if data is a strategic asset, so much so they're actually going to think about putting it on your balance sheet, and you're hiring Chief Data Officers, who knows more about the data than the storage and infrastructure team. They understand the limitations that we had to go through over the past. They've recognized they had to make trade offs between performance and cost. And in a shared accelerated storage platform where you have tons of IO and you can put all of your applications (mumbles) at the same time, you don't have to make those trade offs. But the people that really know that are the storage leads. And so what we want to do is give them a path for their career to become strategic in their organization. Storage should be self driving, infrastructure should be self driving. These are not things that in a boardroom people care about, gigabytes and petabytes and petaflops, and whatever metric. What they care about is how they can change their business and have a competitive advantage. How they can deliver better customer experiences, how they can put more money on the bottom line through better insights, etc. And we want to teach and work with and celebrate data heroes. You know, they're coming from the infrastructure side and connecting the dots. So the value of that data is obviously something that's new in terms of it being front and center. So who determines the value of that data? You would think it's the business line. And so there's got to be a relationship between that IT ops person and the business line. Which maybe here to for was somewhat adversarial. Business guys are calling, the clients are calling again. And the business guys are saying, oh IT, they're slow, they say no. So how are you seeing that relationship changing? >> It has to come together because, you know, it does come down to what are the insights that we can extract from our data? How much more data can we get online to be able to get those insights? And that's a combination of improving the infrastructure and making it easy and removing those trade offs that I talked about. But also being able to ask the right questions. And so a lot has to happen. You know, we have one of the leaders in devops speaking tomorrow to go through, here's what's happening on the software development and devops side. Here's what the data scientists are trying to get at. So our IT professionals understand the language, understand the problem set. But they have to come together. We have Dr. Kate Harding as well from MIT, who's brilliant and thinking about AI. Well, there's only .5% of all the data has actually been analyzed. You know, it's all in these piggy banks as Burt talked about onstage. And so we want to get rid of the piggy banks and actually create it and make it more accessible, and get more than .5% of the data to be usable. You know, bring as much of that online as possible, because it's going to provide richer insights. But up until this point storage has been a bottleneck to making that happen. It was either too costly or too complex, or it wasn't performing enough. And with what we've been able to bring through solid state natively into sort of this platform is an ability to have all of that without the trade offs. >> That number of half a percent, or less than half a percent of all data in the world is actually able to be analyzed, is really really small. I mean we talk about, often you'll here people say data's the lifeblood of an organization. Well, it's really a business catalyst. >> David: Oil. >> Right, but catalysts need to be applied to multiple reactions simultaneously. And that's what a company needs to be able to do to maximize the value. Because if you can't do that there's no value in that. >> Right. >> How are you guys helping to kind of maybe abstract storage? We hear a lot, we heard the word simplicity a lot today from Mercedes Formula One, for example. How are you partnering with customers to help them identify, where do we start narrowing down to find those needles in the haystack that are going to open up new business opportunities, new services for our business? >> Well I think, first of all, we recognize at Pure that we want to be the innovators. We want to be the folks that are, again, making things dramatically better today, but really future-proofing people for what applications and insights they want to get in the future. Charlie talked about the three-legged stool, right? There's innovations that's been happening in compute, there's innovations that have been happening over the years in networking, but storage hasn't really kept up. It literally was sort of the bottleneck that was holding people back from being able to feed the GPUs in the compute that's out there to be able to extract the insights. So we wanted to partner with the ecosystem, but we recognize an opportunity to remove the primary bottleneck, right? And if we can remove the bottleneck and we can partner with firms like NVIDIA and firms like Cisco, where you integrate the solution and make it self driving so customers don't have to worry about it. They don't have to make the trade offs in performance and cost on the backend, but it just is easy to stamp out, and so it was really great to hear Service Now and Keith walk through is story where he was able to get a 3x level improvement and something that was simple to scale as their business grew without having an impact on the customer. So we need to be part of an ecosystem. We need to partner well. We need to recognize that we're a key component of it because we think data's at the core, but we're only a component of it. The one analogy somebody shared with me when I first started at Pure was you can date your compute and networking partner but you actually get married to your storage partner. And we think that's true because data's at the core of every organization, but it's making it available and accessible and affordable so you can leverage the compute and networking stacks to make it happen. >> You've used the word platform, and I want to unpack that a little bit. Platform versus product, right? We hear platform a lot today. I think it's pretty clear that platforms beat products and that allows you to grow and penetrate the market further. It also has an implication in terms of the ecosystem and how you partner. So I wonder if you could talk about platform, what it means to you, the API economy, however you want to take that. >> Yeah, so, I mean a platform, first of all I think if you're starting a disruptive technology company, being hyper-focused on delivering something that's better and faster in every dimension, it had to be 10x in every dimension. So when we started, we said let's start with tier one block, mission critical data workloads with a product, you know our Flash Array product. It was the fastest growing product in storage I think of all time, and it still continues to be a great contributor, and it should be a multi-billion dollar business by itself. But what customers are looking for is that same consumer like or cloud like experience, all of the benefits of that simplicity and performance across their entire data set. And so as we think about providing value to customers, we want to make sure we capture as much of that 99.5% of the data and make it online and make it affordable, regardless of whether it's block, file, or object, or regardless if it's tier one, tier two, and tier three. We talk about this notion of a shared accelerated storage platform because we want to have all the applications hit it without any compromise. And in an architecture that we've provided today you can do that. So as we think about partnering, we want to go, in our strategy, we want to go get as much of the data as we possibly can and make it usable and affordable to bring online and then partner with an API first open approach. There's a ton of orchestration tools that are out there. There's great automation. We have a deep integration with ACI at Cisco. Whatever management and orchestration tools that our customer wants to use, we want to make those available. And so, as you look at our Flash Array, Flash Deck, AIRI, and Flash Blade technologies, all of them have an API open first approach. And so a lot of what we're talking about with our cloud integrations is how do we actually leverage orchestration, and how do we now allow and make it easy for customers to move data in and out of whatever clouds they may want to run from. You know, one of the key premises to the business was with this exploding data growth and whether it's 30, 40, 50 zettabytes of data over the next you know, five years, there's only two and a half or three zettabytes of internet connectivity in those same period of time. Which means that companies, and there's not enough data platform or data resources to actually handle all of it, so the temporal nature of the data, where it's created, what a data center looks like, is going to be highly distributed, and it's going to be multi cloud. And so we wanted to provide an architecture and a platform that removed the trade offs and the bottlenecks while also being open and allowing customers to take advantage of Red Shift and Red Hat and all the container technologies and platform as a service technologies that exist that are completely changing the way we can access the data. And so we're part of an ecosystem and it needs to be API and open first. >> So you had Service Now on stage today, and obviously a platform company. I mean any time they do M and A they bring that company into their platform, their applications that they build are all part of that platform. So should we think about Pure? If we think about Pure as a platform company, does that mean, I mean one of your major competitors is consolidating its portfolio. Should we think of you going forward as a platform company? In other words, you're not going to have a stovepipe set of products, or is that asking too much as you get to your next level of milestone. >> Well we think we're largely there in many respects. You know, if you look at any of the competitive technologies that are out there, you know, they have a different operating system and a different customer experience for their block products, their file products, and their object products, etc. So we wanted to have a shared system that had these similar attributes from a storage perspective and then provide a very consistent customer experience with our cloud-based Pure One platform. And so the combination of our systems, you hear Bill Cerreta talk about, you have to do different things for different protocols to be able to get the efficiencies in the data servers as people want. But ultimately you need to abstract that into a customer experience that's seamless. And so our Pure One cloud-based software allows for a consistent experience. The fact that you'll have a, one application that's leveraging block and one application that's leveraging unstructured tool sets, you want to be able to have that be in a shared accelerated storage platform. That's why Gartner's talking about that, right? Now you can do it with a solid state world. So it's super key to say, hey look, we want consistent customer experience, regardless of what data tier it used to be on or what protocol it is and we do that through our Pure One cloud-based platform. >> You guys have been pretty bullish for a long time now where competition is concerned. When we talk about AWS, you know Andy Jassy always talks about, they look forward, they're not looking at Oracle and things like that. What's that like at Pure? Are you guys really kind of, you've been also very bullish recently about NVME. Are you looking forward together with your partners and listening to the voice of the customer versus looking at what's blue over the corner? >> Yes, so first of all we have a lot of respect for companies that get big. One of my mentors told me one time that they got big because they did something well. And so we have a lot of respect for the ecosystem and companies that build a scale. And we actually want to be one of those and are already doing that. But I think it's also important to listen and be part of the community. And so we've always wanted to the pioneers. We always wanted to be the innovators. We always wanted to challenge conventions. And one of the reasons why we founded the company, why Cos and Hayes founded the company originally was because they saw that there was a bottleneck and it was a media level bottleneck. In order to remove that you need to provide a file system that was purpose built for the new media, whatever it was going to be. We chose solid state because it was a $40 billion industry thanks to our consumer products and devices. So it was a cost curve where I and D was going to happen by Samsung and Toshiba and Micron and all those guys that we could ride that curve down, allowing us to be able to get more and more of the data that's out there. And so we founded the company with the premise that you need to remove that bottleneck and you can drive innovation that was 10x better in every dimension. But we also recognize in doing so that putting an evergreen ownership model in place, you can fundamentally change the business model that customers were really frustrated by over the last 25 years. It was fair because disk has lots of moving parts, it gets slower with the more data you put on, etc., and so you pass those maintenance expenses and software onto customers. But in a solid state world you didn't need that. So what we wanted to do was actually, in addition to provide innovation that was 10x better, we wanted to provide a business model that was evergreen and cloud like in every dimension. Well, those two forces were very disruptive to the competitors. And so it's very, very hard to take a file system that's 25 years old and retrofit it to be able to really get the full value of what the stack can provide. So we focus on innovation. We focus on what the market's are doing, and we focus on our customer requirements and where we anticipate the use cases to be. And then we like to compete, too. We're a company of folks that love to win, but ultimately the real focus here is on enabling our customers to be successful, innovating forward. And so less about looking sidewise, who's blue and who's green, etc. >> But you said it before, when you were a startup, you had to be 10x better because those incumbents, even though it was an older operating system, people's processes were wired to that, so you had to give them an incentive to do that. But you have been first in a number of things. Flash itself, the sort of All-Flash, at a spinning disk price. Evergreen, you guys set the mark on that. NVME you're doing it again with no premium. I mean, everybody's going to follow. You can look back and say, look we were first, we led, we're the innovator. You're doing some things in cloud which are similar. Obviously you're doing this on purpose. But it's not just getting close to your customers. There's got to be a technology and architectural enabler for you guys. Is that? >> Well yeah, it's software, and at the end of the day if you write a file system that's purpose built for a new media, you think about the inefficiencies of that media and the benefits of that media, and so we knew it was going to be memory, we knew it was going to be silicon. It behaves differently. Reads are effectively free. Rights are expensive, right? And so that means you need to write something that's different, and so you know, it's NVME that we've been plumbing and working on for three years that provides 44,000 parallel access points. Massive parallelism, which enables these next generation of applications. So yeah we have been talking about that and inventing ways to be able to take full advantage of that. There's 3D XPoint and SCM and all kinds of really interesting technologies that are coming down the line that we want to be able to take advantage of and future proof for our customers, but in order to do that you have to have a software platform that allows for it. And that's where our competitive advantage really resides, is in the software. >> Well there are lots more software companies in Silicon Valley and outside Silicon Valley. And you guys, like I say, have achieved that escape velocity. And so that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Well thank you, we're just getting started, and we really appreciate all the work you guys do. So thanks for being here. >> Yeah, and we just a couple days ago with the Q1FY19, 40%, you have a year growth, you added 300 more customers. Now what, 4800 customers globally. So momentum. >> Thank you, thank you. Well we only do it if we're helping our customers one day at a time. You know, I'll tell you that this whole customer first philosophy, a lot of customers, a lot of companies talk about it, but it truly has to be integrated into the DNA of the business from the founders, and you know, Cos's whole pitch at the very beginning of this was we're going to change the media which is going to be able to transform the business model. But ultimately we want to make this as intuitive as an iPhone. You know, infrastructure should just work, and so we have this focus on delivering simplicity and delivering ownership that's future proofed from the very beginning. And you know that sort of permeates, and so you think about our growth, our growth has happened because our customers are buying more stuff from us, right? If you look at our underneath the covers on our growth, 70 plus percent of our growth every single quarter comes from customers buying more stuff, and so, as we think about how we partner and we think about how we innovate, you know, we're going to continue to build and innovate in new areas. We're going to keep partnering. You know, the data protection staff, we've got great partners like Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik that are out there. And we're going to acquire. We do have a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be able to go do that. So we're going to listen to our customers on where they want us to do that, and that's going to guide us to the future. >> And expansion overseas. I mean, North America's 70% of your business? Is that right? >> Rough and tough. Yeah, we had 28%-- >> So it's some upside. >> Yeah, yeah, no any mature B2B systems company should line up to be 55, 45, 55 North America, 45, in line with GDP and in line with IT spend, so we made investments from the beginning knowing we wanted to be an independent company, knowing we wanted to support global 200 companies you have to have operations across multiple countries. And so globalization is always going to be key for us. We're going to continue our march on doing that. >> Delivering evergreen from an orange center. Thanks so much for joining Dave and I on the show this morning. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks Dave, nice to see you guys. >> We are theCUBE Live from Pure Accelerate 2018 from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back with our next guests.