 The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer just a set of remote services accessed through a public cloud. Rather it's expanding to on-premises, to multiple premises across clouds and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one. The opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this CUBE program where we're featuring pure storage in its latest innovations and bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them, if you will. And today we have a two-part program. First, we're going to hear from Rob Lee, who's the CTO of Pure Storage and then my colleague John Walls is going to talk to Scott Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group. Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage. Welcome, Rob. Good to see you. Good to see you again too, Dave. Hey, so take us through the announcements from today at a high level. What's most exciting about what you're delivering? Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, many announcements today, many things to discuss, but overall, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. We've always thought of the journey to modern data as being formed by three pillars. If you will, certainly modernizing infrastructure, modernizing operations and applications. And today's announcements are really in that kind of middle category of, like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one. Probably people best know us for that. And today's announcements are really about tackling that operations piece, bringing infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about Pure Fusion, for example, that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure products and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly integrated, seamlessly, transparently delivered way to the applications that they serve. Whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations, or between the premise, on premise environment and the cloud environment. Likewise, in the application front, when we think about today's announcements in Portworx data services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud native developers are using and relying on the database applications that are most popular in open source, Cassandra, Mongo, so on and so forth. How do we make the run and operate pieces of those applications a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed, monitored for those app developers? And so a ton of momentum is a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in Pure One, that's really all about how do we create more visibility connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure running the apps and bring those closer together. So when we think about the visibility we're now able to deliver for Portworx topologies, allowing developers and DevOps teams to look at the entire tech stack, if you will, of a container environment from the application to the containers to the Kubernetes cluster to the compute nodes all the way down to the storage and be able to see everything that's going on, root cause any sort of problems that come up. But again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. So that's really how I view it. And like I said, it's really the next step in our journey of helping customers modernize between infrastructure operations and their applications. Okay, so you've got the control plane piece, which is all about the operating model. You've got Pure One, you mentioned that, which is for monitoring. You've got the Portworx piece, which brings sort of development and deployment together and both infrastructure as a code and better understanding that full stack of, like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers all the way down to the storage. So I feel like it's not even a storage anymore. I mean, it's cloud. It is, and I chuckle a little bit because at the end of the day, we deliver storage, but what customers are looking for is and what they value and what they care about is their data. Now, obviously the storage is in service of the data. What we're doing with today's announcements is, again, just making it extending our reach, helping customers work over their data a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage, but now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly, get it in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. How does this news fit into Pure's evolution as a company? I mean, I don't see it as a pivot because the pivot's like, okay, we're gonna go from here and now we're doing this. Now we're doing this. Right, so it's more like a reinvention or a progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? Absolutely, and I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression. It's the next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention, right? And again, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long-term path, long-term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data. We got our start in infrastructure and just, if you wanna do bleeding edge things with data, you're not gonna do it on decades old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first. That's how we got our start. Today's announcements are really the next couple of steps along that journey. How do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate, more automated in the hands of not just the DevOps teams, the IT teams, but the application developers? How do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why is that important? It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds the traditional kind of measures bandwidth, IOPS latency, that sort of thing. But they're looking for a speed of agility, right? You look at the modern application space around how data is being processed. It's a very, very fast moving application space. The databases that are being used today may be different than the ones using being used three months from now or six months from now. And so developers, application teams are looking for a ton more flexibility, a ton more agility than they were three, five, 10, 15 years ago. The other aspect is simplicity and reliability, right? As you know, that's a core component of everything we do. Our core products, our arrays, our storage appliances, we're very well known for the simplicity and reliability we drive at the individual product level. Well, as we scale and look at larger environments, as we look at customers' expectations for what they expect from a cloud-like service, there's the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability, right? And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud wants to be able to manage large fleets of infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver infrastructure services to their internal customers. They want to be able to do it in a self-service, policy-driven, easy to control, easy to manage way. And that's the next level of fleet level simplicity. And that's really what Pure Fusion is about, right? It is allowing operators that control plane to specify those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Same thing with Powerworks, right? If we think about simplicity and reliability, containers, cloud-native applications, microservices, a lot of benefits there, right? Very fast-moving space. You can mix and match components, put them together very easily. But what goes hand-in-hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity because you have more moving parts and a greater need for reliability because, well, now you're not just serving one application, but 30 or 40 working in unison. And that's really what we're after with Portworks and Portworks Data Services and the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. Right, thanks for that, Rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. So virtually every infrastructure player now has an as-a-service offering. And there are lots of claims out there about who was first, who was the best, et cetera. What's Pure's position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack in delivering subscription and as-a-service offerings in the storage industry. You certainly were first with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as-a-service and Pure as-a-service? What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're leading the industry in this regard? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think first and foremost, we think of everything we do Pure as-a-service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate in an as-a-service model internally or whether it's Pure taking on more of that run and operate as-a-service ourselves with Pure as-a-service. And so the second part of your question, which is what is it that sets us apart? What are we doing differently? What gives us confidence that this is the right path? Well, fundamentally, I think the difference is, obviously this is a hotter topic in the industry of late, but I think the difference between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology-led philosophy and strategy, and we have since day one. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry who look at it as a little bit more of a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T's and C's and call it a service. And what do I mean by that? So if you look internally at Pure, everything we do, we think of as a service, we have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it and building out service offerings. When we think about why this is technology-led, I think of a service for something to be thought of as a service, it's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need, whether that's changing needs in terms of performance and capacity. I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day one rigid kind of static swim lanes of having the capacity plan or plan out what my user is going to look like 18 months from now. I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption. It's not a service if you're going to make me do a data migration or take a downtime. And so when I net all that out, what are the things that you need, the attributes you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product set that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolvable. You need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of needs, whether it's price performance, tiers, high performance, capacity, lower cost price points. You need something that's got a rich set of capabilities, whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, replications, snapshots, ransomware protection. So you need that full suite of capabilities. But in order to deliver it as a service and enable me as a customer to seamlessly grow and change, that's got to be delivered on a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products and expect me to change and move every single time I have a service need change. And so when I net that out, that puts us in an absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this. Because again, everything we do is based on two core product families, Portworx adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price performance and service tiers. And we're able to do this on a very tight code base. And as you know, everything we do is completely not disruptive. So all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of strategic focus for us. So these offerings, they're all part of the service-driven component of your portfolio. Is that correct? Absolutely, yeah. Great. You talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern application, modern data, changing the way customers think about infrastructure. What exactly does that mean and how are you driving that? Well, I think it means a couple of different things but if I were to net it out, it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. And if we look at why that is, when I talk to customers, as they think about infrastructure, largely they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today. And then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support, which is oftentimes the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve. So they're kind of balancing both worlds. And in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic, meaning the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time, the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver. It has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up, down, growing, it has to be a lot more elastic. And it has much higher variance. And what I mean by that is, if you look at a modern cloud native microservices architecture type application, it's really 20, 30, 40 different applications all working in concert with one another under the hood. This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set. Back in the day, you have an Oracle application, you go designing an environment for that. It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own life cycle. These days with modern applications, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30. You've got to support all of them working in unison. You don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece. And that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the change in demands on infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle. And so that at the end of the day drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure, being able to use it for many different purposes, much more agility, being able to adapt very, very quickly, and much more variance or dynamic range, right? The ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure. And this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. Great, thank you for that. I really liked that answer because it's not just a bunch of, you know, slideware mumbo jumbo. You actually put some substance on it, Rob. We're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you. And look forward to having you back soon. Now, in a moment, Scott Sinclair, who's a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, speaks with theCUBE's John Walls to give you the independent analysts take. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in high tech coverage.