 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting, Cube on Cloud, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. Okay, we're now going to explore what it's like to be the CIO of a fast-paced growth company in Silicon Valley and how the cloud, however you want to define the cloud, public cloud, on-prem, hybrid, et cetera, how it supported that growth. And with me is Cathy Southwick, who's the CIO of Pure Storage. Cathy has really deep experience managing technology organizations. Spent a number of years overseeing AT&T's cloud planning and engineering. And another few years overseeing a team of a couple thousand network and IT engineers working to break the physical stranglehold of fossilized telco networks, implementing network function virtualization and a software-defined methodology for the company. And of course, you spent the last couple of years as the CIO of Pure. So Cathy, it's great to see you again. Thank you for coming on the program. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Yeah, you're very welcome. So given your experience with cloud, dating back to really the early part of last decade, how did you look at cloud back then and how was it evolved from your point of view? Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question because I think that we've, there's some things that have moved very fast and there's some things that are very much the same as they were even a decade ago. I think that all companies are very focused on how do you think about cloud? Do you think about it as on-prem? And when I started, we really were focused on an on-prem solution. And I'm building an on-prem private cloud to help modernize our business. So I think that with that, all companies are still in that same mindset of how do I want to think about cloud and how do I want to think about that on-prem versus public versus combination or some type of hybrid solution? So I think all of us are on that journey. It just seems like it's taken us probably a little bit longer than most of us probably thought from the beginning. So as a CIO, thinking about that evolution, how has that informed the way you think about applying specifically the public cloud to Pure's business? You know, I think that we've been a, for Pure ourselves, I think we're in a really unique position. We were essentially born in the cloud. So we're a company that's 10, 11 years old. And if I give the contrast of that of AT&T being 130 year old company and having a lot of applications that have lived historically on-prem, there's very different issues and challenges that you have. Pure has had, I think, the advantage just like many other companies that are born in the cloud who can see what the advantages are very quickly. And we made decisions early on that said that we were going to actually do both. We were going to look to say, how do I put those applications in that data whether it was on public or on-prem and be able to do that both in the IT side as well as within the product side. So how do we develop our products? Now, as I mentioned upfront, you have obviously a lot of experience managing large technology teams. My question is when you first saw the emergence of the modern cloud, how did you communicate with your team members? I mean, you mentioned you were kind of building your own private cloud. So I guess that's less threatening to people, but what was it like? Was there a concern, were they eager to jump in? What was that dynamic like and how did you manage it? You know, it's really, it's different depending on the different part of the organization. So I'll give you kind of two things I learned. One of them was that our teams in the operation side, they saw it as a huge advantage. They saw it as an opportunity to really modernize, to really get themselves both their own individual skill sets advanced, as well as provide a better level of service for our internal, you know, customers, so to speak. Our application and our data partners that we had to work with, they saw it as an opportunity to bring agility to their applications, quicker speed to market, a more currency of their application. So they actually got some benefits that they weren't actually all called planning for. They were, they had the opportunity to get investment in their applications without having to put that investment on themselves. I would tell you, the thing I learned from the teams, this is probably, might be a little bit surprised, but often, you know, leaders believe like you gotta have all the answers, you're gonna drive everything, you're gonna make sure everyone knows what needs to get done. And what I actually found, this was actually one of my big moments, I think was our individuals, our employees, our teams, they are so brilliant and so bright on driving change. And a lot of times leaders, I think, get in the way of it. So for cloud and adoption, it was really about me getting out of the way. It was really about setting that North Star for where we want to go from the ability to deliver fast and quick for our business, and then get out of the way and let our teams actually drive. So it was a great, it was a, we actually, I actually saw the reverse. I saw more of our employees wanting to drive and I needed to like back out and just say, here's where we need to go, let them drive us there. So I got to ask it, don't please don't hate me for asking this question, but was your gender an advantage? Was it a disadvantage or was it really irrelevant in that regard? It was irrelevant. I think that it was, I actually, I truly believe it's irrelevant. I think it was literally recognizing that leaders need to set vision and what we want to achieve and let our teams help us drive to get there. And I think that that is gender neutral. I think it's really about, kind of checking your ego and everything. And I think that that's a really important part of what we're trying to do is we're trying to get our team and our team to be able to get to the final set to the side. And it's really about empowering people and our teams to help drive us there. So thinking about that, that learning specifically, are there any similar tectonic shifts that you're, you're seeing today where you can apply that experience? I'm just like, for instance, new modes of application development and requiring new skill sets or maybe another that you can think of. And whether you're in a high growth company like Pure or you're in a company that's trying to take costs out of your business or trying to do things, I think that it really is a matter of leaders needing to set the stage. And so if we're trying to drive change in a business, it's really making sure that we're doing, I'll call it more empowering of our employees. And because they will see the way that we can get there. It's just a matter of letting them have that ability to do it. So you joined Pure around two years ago and obviously growing very quickly. I love pandemic has changed the trajectory of that growth, but still a good outlook. But Silicon Valley, fast paced company, you know, I kind of put it in the camp of the work days and the service now is it could have similar, similar cultural patterns there. So you talked a little bit about this, but I wonder if we could come back and more specifically how you're leveraging cloud, how you're thinking about it, you know, on-prem hybrid, now the edge and how did that contribute to Pure's growth? Yeah, that's, it's a great question because I think that while I shared earlier, you know, we were essentially born in the cloud. I think that what it's really driven us is to be thinking more forward about where customers are going and what their challenges are. So whether it's for the IT teams on what we're trying to do to deliver for our business and you know, innovation, they're obviously trying to make sure they can hit their revenue goals and all those things that are important that every business deals with, but we also have that same mindset on how we develop our products. So it's really all driven by where the customer is going, that they need data mobility, they need application mobility, they need and really portability. So the moment that you have that ability where you can kind of control your destiny and define it and you only can get that by having, you know, applications that are portable and data that is mobile and secure, that you have that kind of flexibility. So I think for Pure, we've been definitely in a great position to drive for our customers or drive where our customers are going. And so we've defined our entire product set. So not just how we operate as a business and run our business, but then how we define for our customers, same mindset is, if our customers are going to the cloud that we need to have products that can help them to be in the cloud or be, you know, on-prem and let them decide what that looks like. Well, it's interesting, you mentioned that and I harken back to the Portworx acquisition which is an attempt to really change the way application development is done. It's another sort of approach to sort of modern data architecture. You as the CIO of a technology company, most CIOs that I know inside of tech companies, they're sort of the dog-fooding or champagne drinking, you know, testing. So had you already started to sort of use that tech, are you starting to, you know, does it support that vision that you just put forth? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, it does. So we had not been using Portworx as a product. We were just starting down that path of looking at how do we do containerization for the applications that we do have on-prem that's both on our engineering side as well as with an IT. And so, but we quickly have recognized, just like, you know, and part of that acquisition is applications or companies won't have the ability to have that portability of their applications and have that flexibility that they're all striving for unless they've done things like containerizer applications, made them that they're able to move them across different cloud environments, whether that's on-prem or off-prem or some hybrid. So for ourselves, you know, Portworx was a really critical acquisition that will help us on our own journey of doing the application modernization and putting those capabilities in place, but it will also enable our customers to have that same flexibility. So again, going back to the, we've adopt these things aren't like a, this is for this group and this is for this customer. It's really about how we operate both internally and then what we are providing for our customers. So that portability and being able to have control of your own destiny, that's really to me what Hybrid Cloud is all about. And you can't really achieve that if you don't have some of these capabilities within your, you know, within kind of your toolbox. Great, thank you for that. So I'm interested as the head of a technology group at a tech company and what are the meaningful differences? I mean, there are a lot of differences, but relative to CIO of a large telco or other incumbent, you know, what are some of the good, the bad and the, you know, the ugly of the differences? Yeah, you know, it's, I meet with a lot of CIOs across Silicon Valley and we kind of joke that when you are working in a company that is a technology-based company, you know, everybody knows how to do, you know, because you do have brilliant engineers and they do know. I think the difference that you start to see is that, you know, IT is required to make sure that availability is there inherent in what you're doing on immediate rollout with like, you know, an application that's occurring. That's very different than how you do product life cycle management. What we've, what I've seen actually though is more similarities. I know that's probably surprised to you, but coming out of AT&T, what I had been working on those last couple of years was actually doing the combination of engineering and IT into one organization and that you do have a lot of benefits for how you can then develop, how you can manage and the skill sets, there's a lot of similarities. So there's actually probably more similarities between companies and on what they're trying to achieve than you would probably think there would be just because we're all trying to make sure that we can develop quickly. How about as it relates to cloud, Kathy? I mean, I remember in the early days of cloud a lot of the big banks said, you know, we can build our own cloud. We can essentially compete at scale with Amazon. We're, you know, the big bank. And then I think they quickly realized, well, the economics actually don't favor us necessarily. Do you think there's a different perception about the use of cloud between sort of traditional incumbents and a tech company in Silicon Valley? And if so, how so? I think that the, if you are, you know, a bank as you refer to and having, it really is where you're starting from. If you have a very large infrastructure footprint and application footprint, your application's probably not born in the cloud. There's a lot of modernization that has to be done with those applications so that they can operate as efficiently in a public cloud as an example. And I think that's something that sometimes gets overlooked is there are enormous benefits going to public cloud, but there's also costs if your applications or your data doesn't really fit as well in that type of environment. So I think that for large enterprises like the banks, some of the telcos, they've got very large footprints of infrastructure already, those investments have been made. And what they're really looking for is, how do I increase my ability to, you know, whether it's agility or it's speed or it's lower cost or it's all those things. And I think that's a different path and different journey that they're on. So they're trying to balance all those equations of, you know, the economics, as well as the ability to have, you know, no more investment or minimal investment in that infrastructure. For companies like Pure, where we started off with those investments, our decision and kind of the decision tree that we used is if it makes sense and I don't have to make that investment on-prem for whatever reason, then I should go ahead and make that investment in a public cloud strategy or a hybrid cloud strategy. And I'll kind of differentiate that because I think that it's different depending on the company you are. And so it really kind of depends on where you're starting from. Then it also depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you're just trying to achieve an economic solution, if you're trying to achieve a strategic solution, if you're trying to get agility, and I think it's different for companies and it's different depending where you're at in your kind of journey. So for a Silicon Valley company who's, you know, hyper growth, you know, one, we're very focused on agilities, you know, everything from scale because we've got to scale quickly. And those are things that we don't want to have to start going and building all these data centers to go do that. We don't have those embedded investments. So it's a real difference in where your starting point is. And I think there's value in all those different types of approaches. Right, and it's a real advantage for you that you don't have to shell out all that CAPEX on data centers. That's right. As you look back at the last 10 years of cloud, you know, it was largely about eliminating the heavy lift of infrastructure deployment and sacifying, you know, the business. What do you see going forward? What do you think was going to unfold in the 2020s? Is it going to be more of the same or do you expect meaningful differences? I think that we're going to get better as technology leaders on how to quickly make decisions and not have it less political. And I think COVID's actually taught us a lot about that around companies more willing to make, I'll call it a faster decision and remove some of the red tape. I've heard this from many of my peers that things that might've taken them months and months to get approved, it's nowadays. Even if they even have to go get approval. So I think that what we're going to see is, we'll see the continuance of public and I'll call it really hybrid cloud type of solutions. And I think that we'll be more purposeful about what goes there and how that can help us to, I'll call it enable us much faster than we've been able to do it before. I think that's been our challenges. We get mired into some of the details of some of these things that maybe it would be easier for us to just make a decision and move forward than to keep going round and round on what's the right way to do it. Yeah, so that's interesting. You're saying about the fast decisions. I felt like a lot of 2020 was very tactical. Okay, go deal with the work from home, et cetera. Although you definitely see IT spending suppressed in 2020. Our forecast was minus 4%, but we're saying, it's going to grow. We actually see a decent snapback. You know, what are you seeing generally, not even necessarily pure, but when you talk to some of your colleagues, you're obviously in the technology business. It's good to be in the technology business these days, but do you see spending, you know, generally coming back and maybe the timing, first half maybe a little soft, second half, what are you seeing there? Yeah, almost identical to what you said. I think that we'll see, you know, a little bit of a tendency to not really hold back, but really kind of see what's happening in the first quarter of the year. There's a lot going on with companies and everyone's having to kind of balance at what that looks like. I do see, and what I'm hearing from several of my peers is that, you know, it's not necessarily budget cuts, it might be budget redirections, it might be reparitization, but definitely technology investments are still there. And it's still important for businesses to keep on their journeys. And we do see that even at pure as a way to differentiate ourselves in the market as well. Do you, what about the work from home piece? I mean, prior to COVID, I think the average was about 15 or 16% of employees worked from home. You know, now it's got to be, you know, well over in the high 70s. And the CIOs that we've talked to suggest that, you know, that's going to come down in the first half, maybe down to still pretty high, 50, 60%, but then eventually it's going to settle at a higher rate than it was pre-COVID, maybe double that rate, maybe in the 30, 35, maybe even 40%, you know, what are you expecting? Something probably very similar. I think that what companies have recognized, and I actually tell you CIOs have thought this many of them for many years, that there's a huge value in having some type of hybrid model. There's value in having, you know, both from a business perspective as well as a personal perspective. So employees work life balance and trying to balance that. So I think that, you know, we at Pure and myself as, you know, the CIO, hugely expect that we will see some type of, you know, all-call leveling off, figuring out what's the right for the right group. And I think what we don't want to get into is, you know, a prescriptive that says, you know, this is what the company will look like as a whole. I think it really is going to come down to certain types of work are more conducive to a more remote environment. Others need to have, and I always kind of use this term of individual, you know, productivity versus team, you know, productivity. We've seen, you know, great advances in team, or individual productivity. Team productivity is still a challenge when you're still trying to do very collaborative, you know, brainstorming sessions. And so we are looking at capabilities to be able to enable our employees to do that. But there are some things you just can't replace the human interaction and the ability to very quickly, interactively, you know, five minutes, catch someone and do that. So I think we'll see both. We'll see some leveling off. And I think we'll see some areas of businesses that have once thought you can't do that remote, they might actually say, hey, that is work that can be remote. So I think we'll see a combination of both. That's an interesting perspective on productivity. And what's the old saying is you can go faster alone, but further as a team. And not a lot of folks have been talking about that team productivity. We clearly saw the hit, the positive hit on productivity, especially in the technology business. So my question then is, so you expect, you know, HQ doesn't go away. Maybe it gets, you know, maybe it gets smaller. But so is there pent up demand for technology spending at the headquarters? Because you've been, you've been, you know, pushing tech out, out to the edge, out to the remote workers, securing those remote workers, figuring out better ways to collaborate. Is there pent up demand at HQ? Absolutely. We've been, you know, we've been actually exploring different technologies. We've been looking at what are things that, you know, could help create a different kind of experience. So I do think, and it'll be some different types of technology. Those will be the things that maybe aren't even out there developed yet on how do you create some of those comparable experiences. So I think that the notion of, you know, individuals will continue to thrive, but we've got to start working on how do we continue to enhance that team collaborative productivity environment that looks and feels different than what it might look like today. Yeah, they've got to leave it there. Great as always having you in the Cube. Thanks so much for participating in Cube on cloud. Great, it's great to be here. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. More content right after this short break.