 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and I've been running the last several weeks a CXO series where I've talked to CEOs, CIOs, CISOs, to really try to understand the impact of COVID-19. As you know, we really dug into the budget outlook, et cetera. Well, Kathy Southwick is here. She's a CUBE alum and the CIO of Pure Storage. Kathy, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on theCUBE. It's great to see you again, Dave. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. So, you know, my first question to leaders is, when you started to get visibility, that there was going to be this crisis, what was your first move? You know, the first move for probably most organizations and especially for ours was to really assess the current state of our organization and appear in how we support the business. So we went into a lot of pre-planning, a lot of looking out and saying, if things were to happen in a quarter, in two quarters, three quarters, what would we need to be prepared for? So we spent a lot of time going and looking at our BCP, our DR plans to say, what would we need to execute on? And we actually started, similar to how you met with Mike Fitzgerald last week from our supply chain, we actually started pulling triggers to get ourselves prepared and look across both our application side as how we evaluate availability, our partners that we use, both on-prem and off-prem. And we started to also look at just kind of the current state of how do our employees currently work? And we do have a fair amount of our employees who are very productive and successful working remote. So we knew we needed to make sure that we continued to provide that level of service across the board. There was really a lot of pre-planning, a lot of looking at what are we currently doing and what do we need to make sure that we're prepared for in the unknown that we were all facing? And I want to ask you about the kind of work from home piece of that. But before I do, help us understand, you know, you're right, I did talk to Mike Fitzgerald and it sounded like you guys maybe had an early warning system because you obviously have a supply chain, you're sourcing components from all over the world. Do you feel like you had kind of an early warning to this and maybe more than many organizations? Yeah, I think we've probably had an equivalent to others. I think the difference was that we are a small nimble organization, our IT is very lean and we immediately move towards kind of executing plans. So there isn't a lot of approval cycles or, you know, red tape to go through. We're really empowered at the organization level to make the decisions that we think are necessary to help our business be successful. So that was really the forefront was see what needs to happen and then actually start doing. So don't just think about it, plan to do the analysis over and over, but actually start executing. And I think you would have seen that across all of Pure that we immediately started mobilizing teams, our supply chain, both from an internal, what do we consume, whether it's laptops, devices for employees, et cetera, or it was the products that we need to provide our customers and what they needed to do. So I think it has to do with more of how our company cultures and how we operate very much make it happen for our customers. And that means that all of us need to be constantly prepared for what needs to happen and within our respective teams to support our customers. So I want to break this talk down. It's a people process and tech. We always talk about the big three. Let's start with the people. Obviously your first concern was the health and well-being and safety of your people. But as Sanjay Poonan told me, once we figured that out, it's like, get to work. We got to be productive. So maybe talk about the people situation. California was kind of hit early, but I imagine you've got a remote workforce as well. Paint a picture for the people resource, if you would. Yeah, no, it's a great point that Sanjay made. You're absolutely right. The people was, it's kind of you look at this as it's people in the safety and health and then what do we have to do to provide the necessary tools for our customers? And so we immediately, as in front of the employee lens, we immediately start doing things like interactions with our employees. I'll say on a very regular basis. So we do a daily stand up in IT at the leadership level, then each of the organizations, they're also holding those. And a big part that is not, how's your work going? It's, how are you doing? How's your family doing? How are the things that you need to have in your own personal space to be able to be productive? Because if you don't have those things then people actually can't do the work. So try to be very flexible. We've got people who are working different shifts, meaning that they normally be in the office Monday through Friday, but they're trying to balance those home things with homeschooling children now and all those different aspects. So it's really been about, take care of the people first. We've done some fun things like doing little exercises where we have a challenge every day, some type of challenge that we're asking our employees to do just to kind of keep the health and mind part of it healthy and then go right into the work. And then you're right. You then get to that, okay, we've got, I think our employees have all settled down to this, whatever this new norm is. And people are now becoming very focused on, how do I make sure I hit my deliverables? And they're so focused on helping our business that they are, it's literally about, we actually had to tell some people to kind of back off, take some time off because 24 seven became 24 seven for everyone instead of having some rotations because people just didn't want others to have to wait for responses. All right, Kathy, well, let's turn to the next P which is the process. So what kind of changes did you have to make in order to support this whole work from home notion? You know, we're very fortunate. As I had mentioned earlier, we already have a fair amount of our employees that were very successful working remote. So we had already the tools in place, the capabilities in place, what we really did was a lot of validation of what we had, was it going to really be sufficient? So things like checking, do we have the right VPN? Do we have enough network bandwidth connections, et cetera. So for the most part, all of that has worked pretty well. I'll knock on wood, but it's gone pretty well. And we've had some challenges with some of the new hires coming in because we still are bringing onboarding new employees and there are some locations around the world where there are some logistical challenges of going to certain countries. But other than that, we've actually, the plans that a lot of the planning the team had done has really paid off for them as we move forward. So we've been very successful from that perspective. And I definitely want to ask you about the technology, but before I do, I want to talk about the macro. So we've been reporting that when we came into this year the consensus for IT spending was a plus 4% through COVID and other research and surveys that we've done with our data partner, ETR, we've kind of settled in at a negative 4% for the year, which would be a lot worse were it not for the work from home offset. And about 20% of the organizations that we talked to said they're increasing spending about 35% said, hey, no change. And then of course, there are a lot of industries, airlines, others affected by supply chains, et cetera, which are way, way down to hospitality, et cetera. Now that's the macro. Pure is not a bellwether for the macro because you guys are a high growth company, but what's your budget situation kind of coming into the year and has there been any change? Yeah, I feel very fortunate. We've been very supported from our business. We actually made some changes to all say double down on some investments in IT this year. So our budget coming into this year was already increased and that was to deal with just opportunities that we saw better alignment with the business, better strategic partnership in different areas of our business and how we support them from the customer side. And then also how do we want to think about areas of like our employee experience? So we actually had made this an investment year for IT. Right now, we're still on track for that. I would say that we've done a little bit of some reprioritization of some initiatives that we wanted to do versus things that we're now wanting to make sure we can care for. So I think about like collaboration tools. Do we want to expand any of that portfolio that we currently have? So it's more of a, I feel very fortunate that we came in pretty strong and we're still at that point, but we are doing some all calls and reassessing some of our priorities to say, are these the right things we should still continue to do? Or should we alter some of that? So at this point, that's what we're looking at. Yeah, I've talked to a number of technology leaders that have said, look, this is sort of a shift in priorities, as you were mentioning from, for instance, one said yesterday that we had this kind of hardened network and now we've got this distributed workforce. So we're really kind of rethinking our network priorities. We've got to secure those remote workers. It's not just video conferencing tools. It's our VPN, it's security, it's our network bandwidth. It's maybe things like VDI, et cetera. Have you had to shuffle some of your priorities? So I would say that arts have been more of augmenting capabilities. So we've had a pretty successful strategy around what we're doing on the remote workers and how we secure them, et cetera. We are absolutely like everybody else. And I've participated in several CIO forums where we talk about this, do we need to go back and revalidate some of the decisions that you might have made in the past. And so we are doing that from ensuring that we have the right security around our enterprise. But the other is that it's also looking at, are there things that we could do that would help us from productivity capabilities? And those are things like, we have some tools that allow us to do, like you said, video conferencing those, but they're also, do you want to have capabilities to actually do whiteboarding or sessions that allow you to feel like you're in the room with someone? So looking at some of those new opportunities. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that some of your suppliers are doing. Obviously, Pure is a big supplier of yours, I presume they're treating you like gold. But I've had some CIOs that I've talked to say that they really were overwhelmed and pleased with the way in which their vendor partners have treated them, maybe deferring payments for them in some of these hard hit industries and the like. What has the relationship been with your providers? I would characterize it very similar. We've had great partnerships with many of our major suppliers of technology and for both SAS providers as well as some of the other areas that we work with. And I would say that everyone has been made the extra effort to either reach out, whether it's at the CEO level, it's at different layers within their supply chain. A lot of communication, you hear a lot of communication from the, I'll say the supplier community, which has been really great and very responsive. So when we are seeing issues or have questions, it's not a we'll get back to you at some time or you're not important, it's about what we do to help you. So I think we're seeing similar to what you've heard from others. We're experiencing that great kind of ecosystem that says, hey, we got to make sure everyone is successful, not just an individual company. So that's been the experience we've had as well. It's been really nice to see it. In that CIO and CISO roundtable that I mentioned from ETR, we had thought that especially in some of the harder hit industries that they'd be less likely or more reticent to work with startups, but it was just the opposite. In fact, one individual said, you hear the guy says, hey, I picked three from the upper right and the magic quadrant, I vet them. He said, I always picked two from the upper right and then one from the lower left because I'm trying to find that next diamond in the rough. And he mentioned a couple of success stories. They don't all pan out, but they want to try new things and get some competitive advantage. What's your take? I mean, you guys were in this position as the challenger, the disruptor, but what's your take on working with startups in these times of crisis? I think it's important too, because they're seeing and they're nimble. And so I think that was one of the benefits at Pure Hat. We're very nimble, very quick to make decisions. You're hyper focused on the customer. And I know that a lot of companies will comment that they're very focused on their customer and customer first, but coming into Pure, you see it firsthand. And so you often see that from startups. They're very curious on what problems are you trying to solve. So they're not necessarily trying to sell you a widget of some sort. They're really trying to solve a business issue that you're facing. So I would tell you that we've had success as well over the years. Pure has worked with startups over the years. We participate with different communities, whether they're the VC community who's doing round tables on discussions around new startups and the opportunities that they're bringing will they solve problems? And I would tend to agree. I think you need to have some that understand your business enough that can help you to scale, because as a company like Pure, we're continuing to grow. You've got to be able to scale your business. And so some startups might not have some of those capabilities, but there's actually quite a few that they can solve the problems a different way. And so scale looks different than maybe what a traditional way to approach it. So I think it's really important to keep them in the mix and to actually just keep anyone who's trying to solve problems because if you aren't looking at it from the lens of like, what are we trying to do to support our business? And a lot of the CIOs were in the same boat. You're trying to figure out how do I help the business be faster, better, et cetera. You're stuck with a status quo and none of us want to be in that position. And none of our businesses can actually afford that either. But it sounds like your business continuance, business resilience went well beyond disaster recovery. I mean, it sounds like you are in pretty good shape. But I'll ask you, what do you feel as though your biggest challenge has been since COVID-19 hit? It's funny, I've been thinking a lot about this because we're always trying to figure out like, how do we do this better next time? What does that look like? So certainly, I think it's the education part with our employee community. We have spent an enormous amount of time with our HR partners on doing training, what I'll call training sessions or how do you best practice sessions? How do you use this? What's the best way to do this way? So I think that our key learning is that most users only touch the surface of capabilities in any of the tools that you provide, whether it's even a laptop or a computer, or a computer that you use to, you know, their home networks to what they're doing on, you know, software tools, collaboration tools. And everyone kind of just does enough to get themselves started. But when you move into an environment where we're all remote, you have to rely on all of those tools so much more. So I found it to be that we spend more time, what I'll call on the education side, on the awareness side. We are still running like some of our normal campaigns around like security awareness. But more in that lane than we have on, I'll say dealing with it or, you know, challenge with some of the just technical capabilities to keep our teams productive. So it's been more of the people side. And when you asked that question earlier, more of the people side that we've been focused on. So technology infrastructure, pretty solid. It's really sort of, you know, educating people. I always said bad user behavior, Trump's good security every time. But I'll follow up with, you know, somebody who was joking the other day that worked from home infrastructure to the new hand sanitizer. You can't get a lot of it. So, but no challenges with securing, you know, laptops or other sort of components that you might need. Now I think that some of our initiatives we're still very focused on. I would say some of the areas that we're trying to get a little bit further on is what I'll call, you know, complete touchless remote capabilities. So similar to like what our customers expect of Pure where you want, you know, remote installs, you want to be able to do it touchless. You don't want people coming in. It's the same thing in the IT space. So we're trying to look at, can we adopt some of what we're doing in the, you know, what I'll call the go-to-market side? Can we do more of that with our employee base? And I think that's where we're going to spend more of our time is, you know, that do we need to expand the collaboration capabilities? And then do we need to expand more of our capabilities on the remote side of when people are, you know, not physically in the office or can't come into an office very quickly? What can we do to do more remote assist for those users? And we've spent a fair amount on that, but I would call it more of the basic capabilities. I think where I need to look at do we expand and, you know, it's really kind of to strengthen some of what we've done today. I mean, I got to say, I'm not super surprised about your posture here. I mean, Pure, you don't have a lot of legacy baggage. You've always been a very fast moving company kind of forward thinking. But I wonder if we could just ask you generally, I kind of my last question here is when you think about Pure, but you specifically, but also your peers, what portions of kind of post COVID-19 do you think are going to be permanent? You know, a lot of people were kind of the wrong side of history in terms of work from home, forcing people to come in to the, you know, to create the beehive, understandably. But that obviously is going to change the whole use of collaboration tools. What's your sense of the top things that might remain permanent in a post COVID world? That's a great question. It's actually one of the top questions that we're trying to grapple with right now is what does reintegration look like? And what do you do both from a technical perspective, a people perspective, and what are we going to do? So I would say that there's still a lot of questions that are unanswered right now. I think that, you know, like all companies, you know, we're, I'll say, you know, we're open for business right now. We're trying to understand what's happening from government controls, et cetera, and what will those need at the state, you know, country level, et cetera, for what we would have to do different with our employees. And I would tell you that our position as a company has been very much that we're going to have to continue to expand how we thought about, you know, the beehive concept versus, you know, do we have more work from home? And I think you will see that as a general, you'll see more work from home across the board. And I also think that we'll look for some creative things that we've never done as companies before, whether that is staggering, you know, times when people are in the office, while we kind of do that today just based on employee needs, we've got people who come in at, you know, six in the morning, we have people who come in at, you know, 10 or 11 in the morning. So I think that we might have to be a little bit more prescribed about so many people in the office at a certain time. So I think it's going to be a combination of, I think the technical will all continue to work that. I think the people side of reintegration is going to be the, how do we want to, you know, balance the working from home or the remote working and the, do we have more staggered schedules? All those things are going to be, I think the bigger challenges for us to address as just kind of as the economy in general. Okay, there's been great having you on. As you know, theCUBE, we love face to face, but this is safe to safe. So thanks so much for coming on and sharing your perspectives, great stuff. Great, it's great to see you, Dave. All right, and stay safe. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and theCUBE Conversation. We'll see you next time.