[Music] welcome to thecube's coverage of pure accelerate 2021 i'm lisa martin pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni to the cube prakash darjee is here the vp and gm of the digital experience business unit at pure storage prakash it's great to have you back on the program yeah lisa thanks for having me it's been i don't know more than a year since i've seen the cube right pre-covered so it's been a little while recover copa remember those days well thank you for joining us virtually we appreciate that and also excited to hear some of the things that are going to be coming out at accelerate an event that i've covered in person several times so talk to me about this digital experience business unit this is relatively new what does it encompass what are you hoping to deliver from a portfolio perspective to your customers well what's interesting is it's new and it's not right because we've we've been as a company a sas company that happened to ship storage boxes on premise so we've had pure one which was largely used for monitoring and supporting our fleet like a sas company would do and customers had access to that as their single pane of class but as we expanded beyond just observability and monitoring we realized that we could use this observability to do more for customers and we introduced our pure as a service offering about three years ago now which customers just sign up for slas like you know they would on a cloud you sign up i want this performance i want this capacity it's storage so you know why don't you just sign up for what you need and we uh created the dx business unit the digital experience business units to bring those things together because frankly we're using pier one to monitor manage and allow customers to sign up for their slas in a very digital way and i guess the world's changed a little bit because you know previously you would you know call up your sales rep to do things and then it happened and i think a lot of people got a little bit of zoom fatigue um and therefore you know we see a lot of traction right now in terms of people just self-serving and going up and signing up for the slas they need talk to me about some of those slas that customers are signing up for what is it that they know with pure as a service for example in pure one that they can get well you want storage you want storage that's high performing you want storage that supports your applications you know number one thing with storage is you're signing up for capacity and performance right when you think storage you're like oh you know i need to store my videos or i need to store my apps or i need to store something and you know right now we've got customers and uh you know multiple hundreds of petabytes range right like big customers lots of storage um and we got small customers as well you know five to ten terabytes of storage as well so um but across that entire range in storage you're basically want to make sure you don't lose your data it's protected it's safe um the world's becoming a little less secure ransomware and attacks and all of those types of things so we've introduced concepts of ransomware assessment and capabilities like that but the performance of capacity are the two things you want to sign up for so what if you just said i want it this fast and i want this much space and all of the other technology problems you give to pure right because you know what you run out of space we'll ship the box we'll manage it you don't need to call us you don't need to order you don't need to do that so it's more than just a i think when people think about services they think about subscriptions right capex versus opex and sure there's an element to capex versus optics but that's not really what a service is that's just a subscription a service is hey i just want this performance in this capacity who's going to run it and operate it and manage it for me you know when you sign up for a sas service you don't really care when you sign up for salesforce how it runs who's running it etc you just want to manage your crm pipeline and you know we're bringing that same sas experience to storage you do expect that you bring up a good point when you're when you're talking about sas applications one of the things that we saw in the last year is this massive proliferation or acceleration of companies in every industry dependent on so many sas apps just for collaboration alone internally let alone externally brought up ransomware it's something i've been talking a lot about in the last year how that's been on the rise talk to me about you know as enterprise enterprises need storage to do more than just that talk to me about how you're working with customers to ensure that this data across the enterprise is secure well so it's interesting um when i talk to people and they ask me are you secure i'm like well that's kind of a silly question um because you know if you think about security there's always more you could do it's not am i secure it's how secure am i and you want to be the nsa where everything's under a lock and key you can do that and it's just going to be really expensive to do so the what we're the way we're approaching it is we're giving customers levels of ransomware that they can actually implement um for protection level zero right the simplest is make sure that i've got you know an air gap of my data and a copy of it to prevent you from altering it for up to 30 days or some time period which you know is the first level of threat that you know someone can't hold you hostage by encrypting your data those types of things and we've done that for our whole portfolio we provide that and we now even give customers an assessment to tell them you know whether they can go into our digital experience and do an assessment to see how secure are they but that's only the first step hackers are actually getting more sophisticated now on air gap and just saying well what if i do a time delayed encryption thing that overcomes the 30-day thing and you know like the world's evolving so the next level is a physical gap where you take it off the primary system and you actually put it on a secondary system your data well so you know your virtual air gaps one thing your physical distance provides another layer of security because now it's another physical asset with another copy of your data sure it costs more money because you're storing it twice so you have to decide based on the sensitivity of your information how many layers of security you want to build it you can even build in a third layer that says if something happens i don't want to pay the ransomware i just need to be able to recover quickly so let me have a rapid recovery sla and you know we use our flash play to deliver that because it's one of the you know fastest recovery products on the planet based on the performance threshold so you know we've seen a lot of companies now adopt and use flashblade is kind of that level three for rapid recovery in instead of paying for the insurance they're paying for the remediation you know what i mean so it's a different it's interesting how the landscape has evolved right and as the threat actors have access to more and more sophistication obviously that becomes a challenge but you bring up a good point and that is it's sort of it's not a matter of is it going to happen to us it's it's when and it's kind of that tolerance level based on the data but the modern data experience here's been talking about this obviously the modern data experience has changed a lot in the last year talk to us about what that is how does the modern data experience are pure one and pure as a service foundational to that and talk to me about the benefits in it for customers well so when we think about the modern data experience there's really three pillars we talk about in the modern day experience the first one is just innovation leadership pure's got a little bit of a history of redefining storage first of all flash first the unified fast fallen object you know we're on a third generation of qlc technology so we figure if we don't invent the future who else is going to you know we look around the landscape and there's a lot of data technology so we need to invent a future that people have a blueprint to copy like and that's that's our goal of modernizing the landscape you know we don't see a lot of original and innovative thought happening in the industry so we have to create the blueprint of the future right we pride ourselves on that innovation leadership um and evergreen which you know we've introduced is an innovation where you know if people buy a 500 terabytes of storage today they don't have to re-buy it every three to five years that innovation that we introduced is still unmatched in industry after we've been in industry for 10 years because companies haven't figured out how to copy it evergreen is still a differentiator it sounds like the modern data experience what you're looking to do is also define it with and for customers and have that be a unique differentiator for what care delivers 100 um so you know this innovation leadership's big um making sure that you can run your landscape like a cloud you know have a service catalog you know service catalog for developers as containers and you know we we lean very heavily into what we're doing for devops and developers not just storage administrators and you know part of the modern data experience is being cloud ready and container ready and then finally just having the best digital experience which you know pier one and peer piers of services foundational tube uh where customers can go in procure easy support easy and all of it starts with the data like if i was to say hey you're gonna get a get into a tesla right and you're gonna turn on the self-driving mode would you turn it on if you knew that there were zero miles clocked on the odometer right where no like yeah you're the first we haven't really trained this yet right no one would turn that on so for you to be able to offer a digital experience and a service experience to a customer it's all about miles driven and since we've introduced pier one five years ago you know now on a yearly basis we're collecting over 20 petabytes of data tons of signals training the algorithms around giving customers recommendations which we've been doing now customers can get performance recommendations and upgrade recommendations and now we've used the recommendations are such high fidelity that because of our miles driven we're using that internally to run and operate our services on behalf of customers and when companies think about disruptive events let me take my old portfolio and create a new one you're resetting the odometer at zero so without something like evergreen it makes no sense in terms of how do you get to as a service you can get to capex versus opex right and you know we were the first people to do that in storage with peers of service three plus years ago but we've moved beyond a financial offering now to talk about you know how do you run and operate performance and capacity slas well your point is so much more that customers need especially as there's more and more data being generated um you know the edge is exploding iot devices are exploding and there's more challenges that customers have to do but it's also being able to get those fast insights from data to be able to make those data-driven decisions which it sounds like what you're doing from all of the mileage that pure1 and pure as a service have so talk to me about some of the things that are being announced with respect to the digital experience of pure one at accelerate so there's three primary announcements um we've moved beyond observability first to do assessments so you know we can now say you know instead of just monitoring and watching what's going on we can give you a threat level assessment specific to ransomware that's a new capability we're introducing we've also been you know in monitoring monitoring storage and monitoring virtual machines for a while but we've if you take a look at how people deploy on storage they deploy vms and they deploy containers we've seen very little like they also have bare metal right but between those three now you cover how people are using storage from a deployment model and we've brought container monitoring into pier one for end-to-end traceability monitoring for you know both your container landscape as well as your storage landscape underneath with our flash frame flash plate so you know this observability and assessment space has a lot of new capabilities we're bringing the second piece is recommendations so previously we've had this data and customers could go into pure one and use the data they could simulate adding performance they could simulate adding capacity they could simulate moving this workload from here to here but now instead of you doing it we've we've created a recommendation engine where we'll tell you what to do because we actually tracked you know how much time is spent with people trying to figure out what to do there were times when storage admins were in the products like let me try moving it from here to here and see what would happen let me try moving it from here to here if you've got thousands of volumes and hundreds of arrays and that type of thing um you could spend weeks trying to figure out what to do by running permutational combinatorics so instead we've used our ai engine now to simulate taking into account customer preference load capacity previous buying patterns etc to create high fidelity recommendations for performance capacity placing new workloads workflow rebalancing and even for pure as a service which sla should i sign up for when you go to amazon one of the biggest problems on the on the cloud is too much choice there's like 300 items on the service catalog even in storage there's like i don't know 20 30 options of should i pick this storage type or this storage type for that storage type how do you even know um because we've been the miles driven analogy because we now know how customers have been deploying you can choose your workloads and based on what we've seen based on the wisdom of what we've collected across all the other customers we can tell you which service instance type you need so this recommendation approach is big and then the last one is self-service so customers now can control and set their reserved instances expand set their renewals we've even introduced a partner persona where partners can manage things on behalf of a customer and see transparency in billing and order traffic so all of those things that you're used to in kind of a commerce and a cloud experience we've brought that to traditional storage so some pretty big changes there and i like how how here has always been very bold in defining its differentiators using its own data to make better decisions as you you said customers have a ton of choice which is great it's also challenging at the same time for them to be able to understand objectively what is it that my environment needs talk to me a little bit about some of the changes that you saw in the last year as companies shifted almost overnight to a remote working situation can't get into my data center what are some of the ways in which pure has helped organizations with the advancements that you've made in your services portfolio well so the first thing we did and we did this kind of literally i think last february when you know everything immediately went into lockdown we introduced a zero touch provisioning category you don't want people in the data data data center right you like you need to obviously if there's physical stuff you have to rack stack and cable but beyond that everything else should be zero touch and so we've introduced zero patch provisioning capability immediately and some of like the largest uh one of the largest you know video conferencing providers on the planet um happened to call us immediately saying look we can't even get stuff to keep up with the demand and overnight we were able to go ahead and work with them to you know get them the efficiency that they needed so you know if i take a look at our supply chain throughout covid we were able you know to meet most shipments in some four days throughout covid even in a globally disrupted supply chain because of the agility and the flexibility we have in our portfolio and frankly just a phenomenal supply chain team as well so you know that that approach has engendered a ton of trust whenever you do anything like you know in this environment covid pandemic etc people are under stress it creates stress for human beings it even creates stress for families right have two small children it creates stress [Music] what do you how do you get through that stress all the things that are unnecessary are things you just forget about and to get the things that are necessary done you go to the people you trust so that's a great that's a great point you bring up about trust because that is table stakes for an organization to trust its partners or its customers to be able to trust that it's going to deliver what it needs it's no longer a nice to have i think this one of the things that coveted clement has shown us is that it's absolutely essential last question progression i want to get to you is let's talk about ai ops for a second we're seeing more and more organizations turning to ai ops for more intelligent operations what is it what are some of the benefits that pure can deliver in that response well look i have a lot of opinions on aiops but the first one is like saying aaiops now was like saying web 2.0 a few years ago right um it's a hot term everyone likes to talk about it and very few people actually do anything real ai right it's like well let me tell you something so as you think about aiops today you need to first get the data in the miles driven manner the second thing you need to do is you could use that data and create a ton of recommendations that you tell send to customers and you will be the equivalent of facebook ads right like click click click click click some of these are relevant some of these aren't right if all you do is create recommendations you're creating a spam flow to your customers the number one thing to really make it learning based is if someone rejects a recommendation you now have to collect that and train your algorithms to say you know what this person doesn't need that right and maybe the other person accepted that same recommendation and they do so the time isn't just about data collection and miles driven but the amount of recommendations that customers accept and reject can train and personalize how you do your ai operations and i feel like this economy because aiops is hot everyone's just like i have ai ops and it's just so facetious you need to think about how you're going to continually evolve and train and learn and who's going to train the way you train support is support personnel and bug fixes you need to monitor how your support personnel fixes things to be able to replicate and have higher efficiencies and support so even small customers can get the same level of support as the large customers because you know it's not like the big guys get 50 people and the small guys only get one right you need to use software as the great equalizer and the same thing goes in sales when you're approaching customers with offers and recommendations or when customers whether they need performance or capacity the fidelity matters and data and technology will only go so far you need to use the human feedback loop to train your ai if you don't do that you're missing the concept of machine learning agreed to last question since we have about 30 seconds left or so talk to me about how pure is going to continue to utilize ai and to your point not just throw out recommendations but actually have learning going on so that the right relevant offers for example can be delivered to the right customer at the right time well we pride ourselves on simplicity and customer first right our net promoter score is you know one of the top trust scores in the industry and because of that we've got a very vibrant and active customer community that goes into you know pure one on a daily basis to monitor the landscape to see what's going on to create support cases whatever it may be and because of that we're going to continue engaging and learning from our customers and you know i think you can't do it without the trust and you know a large portion of our business is large sas providers so you know you think about you know very very large sas companies we service them because of our evergreen model and now bringing this level of predictability creates a level of efficiency for sas companies um that means they could do more with less and that's what this industry is about well said prakash thank you so much for joining me at your our coverage of accelerate excited to see what's going on with the modern data experience how you're getting in there and working and partnering with customers using the data to learn and tweak and improve uh excited to hear some of the other stuff that comes up but i appreciate you joining me this morning thanks for having me lisa i enjoy the conversation excellent for prakash darjee i'm lisa martin you're watching thecube's coverage of pure accelerate 2021.