>> we'LL run. Welcome to this special. Keep conversation. We're here in Mountain View, California. The pure storage headquarters here in Castro Tree, one of the many buildings they have here as they continue to grow as a public company. Our next guest is Kicks Vice President of strategy Employee number six Pure. Great to see you. Thanks for spending time. Thanks for having me. So cloud is the big wave that's coming around the future itself here. Now, people really impacted by it operationally coming to the reality that they got to actually use the cloud of benefits for many, many multiple benefits. But you guys have major bones in storage, flash arrays continuing to take take territory. So as you guys do that, what's the cloud play? How to customers who were using pure. And we've heard some good testimonials Yet a lot of happy customers. We've seen great performance, Easy to get in reliability performances. They're in the storage side on premise. Right? Okay. Now Operations says, Hey, I build faster. Cloud is certainly path there. Certainly. Good one. Your thoughts on strategy for the cloud? >> Absolutely. So look for about ten years into the journey here, a pure. And a lot of what we did in the first ten years was helped bring flash onto the scene. Um, and you know what a vision when we started the company of the All Flash Data Center and I'd like to first of all, remind people that look, we ain't there yet. If you look at the analyst numbers, about a third of the storage sold this year will be flashed two thirds disk. So we still have a long way to go in the old flash data center and a lot of work to do there. But of course, increasingly customers are wanting to move, were close to the cloud. And I think the last couple of years have almost seen a pendulum swing a little bit more back to reality. You know, when I met with CEOs to three years ago, you often heard we're going all cloud. We're going to cloud first and, you know, now there a few years into it. And they've realized that that cloud is a very powerful weapon in their in their arsenal for agility, for flexibility. But it's not necessarily cheaper on DH. So I think the swing back to really believe in in hybrid is the model of the day, and I think that I think people have realised in that journey is that the club early works best when you build a nap for the cloud natively. But what if you have a bunch of on prime maps that are in traditional architecture? How do I get in the cloud? And so one of the things we really focused on is how we can help customers take their mission critical applications and move them seamlessly to the cloud without re architecture. Because for most customers, that's really going to start. I mean, they could build some new stuff in the cloud, but the bulk of their business, if they want to move substantial portions of the cloud, they've got to figure out how to move what they've got. And we think we really had value in that. >> And the economics of the cloud is undeniable. People who are born in the cloud will testify that certainly as you guys have been successful on premise with the cloud, how do you make those economics, he seem, was as well as the operations. This seems to be the number one goal when you talk about how important that is and how hard it is, because it sounds easy just to say it. But it's actually really difficult to have seamless operations on Prime because, you know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they all got computing storage in the cloud and you got story. John Premise. This equation is a really important one to figure out what the importance and how hard is it to some of things that you guys are doing to solve that. >> Yeah, So I heard two things that question one around costs and one around operations on. You know, the first thing I think that has been nice to see over the last couple of years as people realizing that both the cloud and on from our cost effective in different ways, and I think a little bit about the way that I think about owning a car. Owning a car is relatively cost effective for me, and there's times and taken uber is relatively cost effective. I think they're both cheap when you look it on one metric, though, about what I pay per mile, it's way more expensive to own a car to take a number look about acquisition cost. It's way more expensive. Car, right? And so I think both of them provide value of my lives in the way that hybrid does today. But once you start to use both than the operational, part of your question comes in. How do I think about these two different worlds? And I think we believe that that storage is actually one of the areas where these two worlds are totally different on dso a couple things we've done to find a bridge together. First off on the cost side, one of the things we realised was that people that are going to run large amounts of on prime infrastructure increasingly want to do it in the cloud model. And so we introduced a new pricing model that we call the S to evergreen storage service, which will essentially allows you to subscribe to our storage even in your own data center. And so you can have an optics experience in the cloud. You gotta monoprix experience on Prem and when you buy and yes, to those licenses are transferrable so you can start on Prem, Move your stories to the cloud with pure go back and forth tons of flexibility. From the operational point of view, I think we're trying to get to the same experience as well such that you have a single storage experience for a manageability and automation point of view across both. And I think that last word of automation is key, because if you look at people who are really invested in cloud, it's all about automation. In one of the nice things I think that's made pure, so successful in on Prime Claude environments is this combination of simplicity and automation. You can't we automate what isn't simple to begin with on DH. So we started with simplicity. But as we've added rich FBI's, we're really seeing that become the dominant way that people administrated our storage. And so as we've gone to the cloud because it's the same software on both sides, literally the same integrations, the same AP calls everything works transparently across both places. >> That's a great point. We've been reporting on silicon ng on the Cube for years. Automation grave. You have to couple of manual taxes and automated, but the values and shifting and you guys in the storage business you know this data's data data is very valuable. You mentioned the car and Alice just take uber uber is an app. It's got Web services in the back end. So when you start thinking about cloud, you think you hear ap eyes You hear micro services as more and more applications going to need the data, they're going to need to have that in real time, some cases not near real time, either real time. And they're gonna need to have at the right time. So the role of data becomes important, which makes storage more important. So you automate the story, Okay, Take away that mundane tasks. Now the value shifts to making sure data is being presented properly. This is the renaissance of application development. Right now we're seeing this. How do you guys attack that market? How do you guys enable that? Mark, how do you satisfy that market? Because this is where the AP eyes could be connectors. This is where the data can be valuable. Whether it's analytic, score an app like uber. That's just, you know, slinging AP eyes together for a service that is now going to go public. Yeah, >> I think the mindset around data is one of the biggest differences between the old world in the New World. And if you think about the old world of applications. Yeah, monolithic databases that kind of privately owned their own data stores and the whole name of the game was delivering that as reliably as possible, kind of locking it down, making it super reliable. If you look at the idea of the Web scale application, the idea of an application is broken up into lots of little micro services, and those maker services somehow have to work together on data. And so what does it mean that the data level, it's not this kind of monolithic database anymore? It's got to be this open shared environment and, you know, as a result, if you look in the Web in Amazon's case, for example, the vast majority of applications are written on history object storage that's inherently shared. And so I think one of the bigger interesting challenges right now is how you get data constructs to actually go both ways. You know, if you want to take a non prime map that kind of is built around the database, you've got to figure out a way to move it to the cloud and ronit reliably on the flipside of the coin. If you want to build on Web skill tools and then be hybrid and run some of those things on Prem, well, you need an object store on prim and most people don't have that. And so you know, this whole kind of compatibility to make hybrid reality. It's forcing people on both sides of the weir to understand the other architecture er, and make sure they're compatible both ways >> and throw more complex into that equation. Is that skills, gaps? I know I know that cloud needed. But now men on premise so different skill got you guys had an announcement that's come out. So I want to ask you about your product announcement and your acquisitions. Go back to past six months. What's the most notable product announcements inequities that you guys have done? And what does that mean for pure and your customers? Yeah, >> absolutely. So I'll just kind of walk through it, So the first thing we announced was our new set of Cloud data services, and this was in essence, bringing our core software that runs on our purity. Operating environment right into the cloud. And so we call that cloud block store. And again, this is a lot of what I've been talking about, how you can take a tier one block storage application on Prem and seamlessly move it to the cloud along that same timeline. We also introduce something called P S O, which is the pure service orchestrator. And this was a tool set that we built specifically for the containers world for communities so that basically, in a container environment, our storage could be completely automated. It's been really fun watching customers use and just see how different that storage is in a container environment. You know, we look at our call home data with an R P. R. One application, and in our traditional on prime environment, the average array has about one administrative tasks per day. Make a volume. Delete something, Whatever. If you look in a container environment, that's tens of thousands, and so it's just a much more fluid environment, which there's no way a storage at Ben's going to do something ten thousand times a day they've got on, >> and that's where automation comes in. But what does that mean? the continuous station. That means the clients are using containers to be more flexible, they deploying more. What's the What's the inside of this container trend? >> You know, I think ultimately it's just a farm or fluid environment. It's totally automated, Andi. It's built on a world of share data. And so you need a shared, reliable data service that can power these containers, Um and then, you know, back to original question about about kind of product expansion. The next thing that we haven't announced last year was acquisition of a company called Story Juice, and we've subsequently brought out as a product that we call Object Engine. And this is all about a new type of data moving into the club, which is backup data and facilitating in this backup process. You know, in the past, people moved from tape back up to the space back up and, you know, we saw kind of two new inflection points here. Number one the opportunity Use flash on Prem. So the people have really fast recoveries on prep because in most environments now, space recovery just aren't fast enough, and then using low cost object storage in the cloud for retention. So the combination of flash on Prem and Object Storage in the Cloud can completely replace both disc and tape in the back of process >> case. I won the competition because you guys came in really with the vision of all Flash Data Center. You now have a cloud software that runs on Amazon and others with words. No hardware, he just the blocks are great solution. How have the competition fallen behind you guys really kind of catapulted into the lead, took share certainly from other vendors. In my public, someone predicted that pure would never make it to escape velocity. Some other pundits and other CEOs of tech company said that you guys achieve that, but their success now You guys go the next level. What is the importance of that ability you have? And what's the inability of the competition? So, you know, I like >> to joke with folks. When we started the company, I think flashes. It's an excuse, you know, We just tried to build a better storage company and we went out and I talkto many, many, many customers, and I found in general they didn't just not like their stories products they didn't like the companies that sold it to them, and so we tried to look at that overall experience. And, you know, we, of course, innovated around flash use. Consumer fresh brought the price down so I could actually afford to use it with the duplication. But we also just looked at that ownership experience. And when I talk to folks in the history, I think now we might even be better known for are evergreen approach that even for Flash. And it's been neat to watch customers now that even the earliest your customers or two or three cycles of refreshing they've seen a dramatic difference in just the storage experience that you can essentially subscribe to. A known over time through many generations of technology. Turn as opposed to that cycle of replacing a raise >> share a story of a custom that's been through that's reached fresh cycles from their first experience to what they're experienced. Now what what? Some of the experiences like any share some some insight. >> Yeah, so, you know, one of one of the first customers that really turn us on to this. That scale was a large telco provider, and they were interesting they run, you know, hundreds of here wanna raise from from competitors and you know, they do a three year cycle. But as they really like, looked at the cost of that three or cycle. They realized that it was eighteen months of usable life in those three years because it took him nine months to get the dirt on the array. And then when they knew the end was coming, it took him nine months to get the data off the array. And so parade it was cost him a million dollars just in data migration costs alone. Then you've wasted half of your life of the array, and so add that up over hundreds of raising your environment. You can quickly get the math. >> It's just it's a total cost of ownership, gets out of control, right? And >> so as we brought in Evergreen, there's just an immediate roo. I mean, it was accost equation. It was, you know, on parity with flash disk anyway. But if you look at all those operational savings, itjust is completed. And so I think what we started with Evergreen, we realised it was much more of a subscription model where people subscribe to a service with us. We updated. Refresh the hardware over time and it just keeps getting better over time. Sounds >> a lot like the cloud, right? And so we really your strategies bring common set of tools in there and read them again. That kind of service that been Kia. >> Yeah, I think you know another thing that we did from Day one was like, We're never gonna build a piece of on prime management software. So are on print. Our management experience from Day one was pure one, which is our SAS base management platform. You know, it started out as a call home application, but now is a very full featured south space management experience. And that's also served us well as you go to the cloud, because when you want to manage on permanent cloud together, we're about to do it from then the cloud itself >> tell about the application environment you mentioned earlier hybrid on multi class here. Ah, a lot of pressure and I t to get top line revenue, not just cost reduction was a good benefits you mentioned certainly gets their attention. But changing the organization's value proposition to their customers is about the experience either app driven or some other tech. This is now an imperative. It's happening very fast. Modernisation Renaissance. People call it all these things. How you guys helping that piece of the >> puzzle? Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, for most customers, as they start toe really getting their mindset, that technology is there. Differentiation speed into Julia there, developers becomes key. And so you know, modern CEO is much less about being a cost cutting CEO today, and much more about that empower in Seo and how you can actually build the tools and bring them there for the ordination. Run faster. And a lot of that is about unlocking consumption. And so it's been it's been fun to see some of the lessons of the cloud in terms of instant consumption, agility growth actually come to the mindset of how people think about on Primus. Well, and so a lot of what we've done is tried Teo armed people on prom with those same capabilities so that they can easily deliver storage of service to their customers so folks can consume the FBI without having to call somebody to ask for storage. So things could take seconds, not weeks of procurement, right? And then now, as we bridge those models between on permanent cloud, it becomes a single spot where you can basically have that same experience to request storage wherever it may be. In the organization, >> the infrastructures code is really just, you know, pushing code not from local host or the machine, but to cloud or on prim and just kind of trickle all the way through. This is one of the focuses we're hearing in cloud native conversations, as you know, words like containers We talked briefly about you mentioned in the activities. Hi, Cooper Netease is really hot right now. Service meshes Micro services state ful Data's stateless data. These air like really hyped up areas, but a lot of traction force people take a look at it. How do you guys speak to the customers when they say, hey, kicks? We love all the pure stuff. We're on our third enter federation or anything about being a customer. I got this looming, you know, trend. I gotto understand, and either operationalize or not around. Cooper Netease service mesh these kinds of club native tools. How do you guys talk to that customer. What's the pitch? That's the value proposition. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, your your new Kupres environment is the last place you should consider a legacy Storage, You know, all all joking aside, we've We've been really, I think possibly impressed around how fast the adoption it started around containers in general. And Cooper, that is, You know, it started out as a developer thing. And, you know, we first saw it in our environment. When we started to build our second product up your flash blade four, five years ago, the engineering team started with honors from Day one. It was like, That's interesting. And so we started to >> see their useful. We have containers and communities worker straight, pretty nights. And >> so, you know, we just started to see that grow way also started to see it more within analytics and a I, you know, as we got into a I would area and are broader push around going after Big Gate and analytics. Those tool chains in particular, were very well set up to take advantage of containers because they're much more modern. That's much more about, you know, fluidly creating this data pipeline. And so it started in these key use cases. But I think you know, it's at a point right now where every enterprises considering it, there's certainly an opportunity in the development environment. And, you know, despite all of that, the folks who tend to use these containers, they don't think about storage. You know that if they go to the cloud and they start to build applications, they're not thinking many layers down in the organization. What the story is that supports me looks like. And so if you look at a storage team's job or never structure seems job is to provide the same experience to your container centric consumers, right? They should just be able Teo, orchestrate and build, and then stories should just happen underneath. >> I told Agree that I think that success milestone. If you could have that conversation that he had, you know you're winning what they do care about. We're hearing more of what you mentioned earlier about data pipeline data they care about because applications will be needing data. But it's a retail app or whatever. I might need to have access to multiple data, not some siloed or you know, data warehouse that might have little, you know. Hi, Leighton. See, they need data in the AP at the right moment. This has been a key discussion. Real time. I mean, this is the date. It's It's been a hard problem. Yeah. How do you guys look at that solution opportunity for your customers? I >> think one of the insights we had was that fundamentally folks needed infrastructure that cannot just run one tool or another tool, but a whole bunch of them. And, you know, you look at people building a data pipeline there, stitching together six, eight, ten tools that exist today and another twenty that don't exist tomorrow. And that flexibility is key, right? A lot of the original thought in that space was going to pick the right storage for this piece of the write stories for that piece. But as we introduced our flash blade product, we really position it as a data hub for these modern applications. And each of them requires something a little different. But the flexibility and scale of flash played was able to provide everything those applications needed. We're now seeing another opportunity in that space with Daz and the traditional architecture. You know, as we came out with envy me over fabrics within our flash ray product line. We see this is a way to really take Web scale architecture on Prem. You know, you look Quinn's within Google and Amazon and whatnot, right? They're not using hyper converge there, not using Daz disc inside of the same chassis that happens. We're on applications. They have dedicated in frustration for storage. That's simply design for dedicated servers. And they're connected with fast Internet, you know, networking on demand. And so we're basically trying to bring that same architecture to the on prime environment with nd me over fabric because they need me over fabric can make local disc feel like you know as fun. >> But this is the shift that's really going on here. This is a complete re architecture of computing and storage. Resource is >> absolutely, you know, and I think the thing that's changing it is that need for consolidation. In the early days, I might have said, Okay, I'm gonna deploy. I don't know, two hundred nodes of the Duke and all just design a server for her dupe with the right amount of discontent and put him over in those racks, and that will be like this. Then I'LL design something else for something else. Right now, people are looking for defining Iraq. They can print out, over and over and over and over again, and that rack needs to be flexible enough to deliver the right amount of storage to every application on demand over and >> over. You know, one trend I want get your reaction to a surveillance because this kind of points that value proposition functions have been very popular. It's still early days on what functions are, but is a tell sign a little bit on where this is going to your point around thinking, rethinking on Prem not in the radical wholesale business model change, but just more of operating change. I was deployed and how it works with the cloud because those two things, if working together, make server Lis very interesting. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just a further form of abstraction, ultimately from the underlying hardware. And so you know, if you think about functions on demand or that kind of thing, that's absolute, something that just needs a big shared pool of storage and not to have any persistent findings to anything you know, Bill, to get to the storage needs, do its task, right? What it needs to and get out of the way. Right? >> Well, VP of strategy. A big roll. You guys did a good job. So congratulations being the number six employees of pure. How's the journey been? You guys have gone public, Still growing. Been around for it on those ten years. You're not really small little couple anymore. So you're getting into bigger accounts growing. How's that journey been for you? >> It's so it's been an amazing right. That's why I'm still here, coming in every day, excited to come to work. I think they think that we're the proudest of is it still feels like a small company. It still feels with, like we have a much aggression and much excitement to go out for the market everyday, as we always have the oranges very, very strong. But on the flip side, it's now fun that we get to solve customer problems at a scale that we probably could have even imagined in the early days. And I would also say right now it really feels like there's this next chapter opening up. You know, the first chapter was delivering the all flashes, and we're not even done with that yet. But as we bring our software to the cloud and really poured it natively be optimized for each of the clouds. It kind of opens up. Our engineers tto be creative in different ways. >> Generational shift happening. Seeing it, you know again. Application, modernization, hybrid multi clouded. Just some key pillars. But there's so much more opportunity to go. I want your thoughts. You've had the luxury of being working under two CEOs that have been very senior veterans Scott Dietzen and Charlie. What's it like working with both of them? And what's it like with Charlie? Now it's What's the big mandate? What what's the Hill you guys are trying to climb? Share some of the vision around Charlene's? Well, >> I'd say the thing that binds both Scott and truly together in DNA is that they're fundamentally both innovators. And, you know, if you look at pure, we're never going to be the low cost leader. We're not going to be. The company tells you everything, so we have to be the company that's most innovative in the spaces we playing. And so you know, that's job number one. It pure after reliability. So let's say that you remember, too. But that's key. And I think both of both of our CEOs have shared that common DNA, which is their fundamentally product innovators. And I think that's the fun thing about working for Charlie is he's really thoughtful about how you run a company of very large scale. How you how you manage the custom relationship to never sacrifice that experience because that's been great for pure but ultimately how you also, unlike people to run faster and a big organization, >> check every John Chambers, who Charlie worked with Cisco. With the back on the day, he said, One of the key things about a CEO is picking the right wave the right time. What is that way for pure. What do you guys riding that takes advantage of? The work still got to do in the data center on the story side. What's the big wave? >> So, you know, look, the first way was flash. That was a great way to be on and before its not over. But we really see a and an enormous opportunity where cloud infrastructure mentality comes on. And, you know, we think that's going to finally be the thing that gets people out of the mindset of doing things the old way. You know, you fundamentally could take the lessons we learned over here and apply it to the other side of my hybrid cloud. Every talks about hybrid cloud and all the thought processes what happens over the cloud half of the hybrid. Well, Ian from half of the hybrid is just as important. And getting that to be truly Cloudera is a key focus of >> Arya. And then again, micro Services only helped accelerate. And you want modern story, your point to make that work absolutely kicks. Thanks for spending time in sparing the insides. I really appreciate it. It's the Cube conversation here of Pure stores. Headquarters were in the arcade room. Get the insights and share in the data with you. I'm job for your Thanks for watching this cube conversation