 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. We're back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DevNet zone at Cisco Live 2018. Beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest. Mike Bundy, who is the head of global strategic alliances with Pure Storage. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having me. All right, first time guest, give us a little bit about your background. You're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. Absolutely, so relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco, leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there, led the Global Enterprise Data Center sales force. So a lot of background experience around cloud, virtualization, automation in the data center space. So very excited to be at Pure. All right, so when you talk about Pure, here at the Cisco show, I know it's Flashtack, but give us a little bit of the breadth and the depth of the relationships there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT and just the future of world, these technologies are going. So where's the intersections? Yeah, so Flashtack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. And you know, what differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. And we're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with explosion of IoT, intelligence, whether it's deep learning neural networks or business intelligence with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on Hadoop infrastructure, so. Yeah, I want to unpack some of those because you said a lot there. So our research from Wikibon, they said coming into 2018, I mean, data is at the center of it all. Absolutely. When you talk to Cisco, data, majorly important, it's not just moving at things, but how do we get value out of the data. So let's start with IoT, you mentioned in there, how does a company, I think a pure storage company, how does pure have an impact in relationship on the IoT discussion? Right, so IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. Absolutely. You know, it'll be, in two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created. So for us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths of the company. So our software set is called Pure One and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage, you know, solutions that have been in the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. So very, very powerful and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. You know, let's, Flashtack, you know, let's talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? You know, the trend of converged infrastructure now has gone on for over eight years. Yes. You know, there's the buzz of hyperconverged, there's, you know, cloud, you know, is kind of front and center. Why is converged infrastructure in general and Flashtack specifically so important today? Yes. So if you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, you know, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments there. You know, if you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform. It's very simple to manage. It's very scalable. You can get, you know, 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a Flashtack than you can the competitors. So it's really, you know, an innovative modernized, you know, converged infrastructure stat. You know, as you said, CI's been around for eight years. The Flashtack's been in the marketplace about two years and has had tremendous growth in that timeframe as a result. So, you know, we continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model. How you maintain it from a cost perspective is different. So it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CI's in the marketplace. You know, one of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started, he said to companies, it's database, database, database. There's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere pure's, you know, focus has been. Talk about, you know, what are some of the results? What did customers see when they moved to CI for, you know, business critical applications like database? So, you know, if you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is, you know, how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. So the way that the Flash stack and the pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas, it's very fast and easy. And we've seen developers cut down 25, 30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? So it's drastically different, you know, than what they've been used to in the past. All right, so, Mike, you live for years on the Cisco side of the equation. Yes. What's your partner, Cisco? Give us, what's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make pure, you know, feel special yet, you know, understand kind of the cooperative nature of our industry? Well, you know, I think, I think what we're trying to make sure we do here is focus on the customer outcome, right? So we are really, you know, working day in and day out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer, and that is what separates, you know, the partnership from others. So when you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem, you know, but it's very competitive as you call out, but, you know, there's still a great partnership here and Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. Yeah, it's been a few years since I'd been to attend a Cisco live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone, lots of people here coding. I walk through the world of solutions. It's not just networking, you know. Networking is a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? You know, how's that impact Pure? And just personally, you know, what do you look at this ecosystem? Yeah, so I think, you know, going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge they're solving? What is the opportunity they're seizing? And how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their, you know, software teams to really take advantage of that? So really, that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud friendly, more automated, and then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, you know, healthcare industry, et cetera. So that's really where I've seen a transition from. It's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure. It's about the higher level outcome for the customer business. Yeah, when it comes to Pure's business, general and flash tax specifically, any differences in here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? Not really, I think from a flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that here, what we saw probably about two years ago in the United States. So there's actually a ton of excitement here now in terms of the opportunity for, you know, the flash stack and what flash can do for that. Yeah, well, it's interesting you mentioned for flash and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't kind of dove in. Correct. Any commentary as to what's holding people back or some aha moments that you've had customers that those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyper-converged that they should get on board? Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input, output, performance requirements initially, virtualization, virtual desktops were very big and then your higher performance applications now. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about flash and performance. It actually is about a storage platform now and the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. So I think you'll continue to see this expansion. I think Gardner and IDC talk about the next three to five years. You'll see a much greater, greater density of applications moving on to flash versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon and we'll be integrating into FlashStack. Other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data, things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective and I think you'll see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? Absolutely, so we'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new use cases that are very relevant in this space to capture the demands of the customer. So things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence. We'll scale that out and you'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable foundational elements of a storage platform, right? So those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. All right, well Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman and I'll see you next time.