 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day two of Pure Storage, Pure Accelerate 2019. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host, and we're very pleased to welcome, for the first time to theCUBE, Kathy Southwick, this CIO at Pure. Kathy, welcome. Thank you, glad to be here. You have a great story. This is not only your first Pure Accelerate, you've been at the company less than a year. You were not only a Pure customer before, but in a completely different industry. So your first Pure Accelerate, here we are in Dell Technologies' backyard. Give us your perspective on Pure's business from your previous customer role. Yeah, so I spent, I've been here just under a year, as you said, and I spent almost 22 years at AT&T. And coming into a company, it's completely different. Different size company, different size technology issues, everything we do looks very different. But there's a lot of similarities that you're trying to, as any company, trying to innovate and trying to stay on the cutting edge and you're trying to make sure you have the right teams in place and all that. So it's a lot of fun. It's great to see the energy and the excitement here. So that's been a lot of fun to come in and to see orange everywhere, painted orange. So it's been a lot of fun coming on. And you're compliant with your orange necklace. I got the memo. I said, you know, it's hard because orange is not one of my better colors to wear. But no, I'm happy to wear orange and proud to be part of such a company who is really looking at, you know, how do we take care of the customer? Right, so you were sold on Pure as a customer when you were with AT&T. What was it about the technology that when you were in that prior role that really differentiated it from its competition? Yeah, you know, it was really interesting. I was sharing with some folks earlier today that Pure was very different. Smaller company coming into a very large organization. We started working with them back at AT&T in 2013. So they were a very small company and very early on, but they were so bullish. They had this completely different attitude about storage. And it wasn't really necessarily about the storage. It's about what we're going to do to help you change your business. So for us, you know, I really looked at when you're in a very large company, you tend to not look so much at the particular like storage or compute or whatever. You're really looking at how am I enabling my business and with the limited dollars that you have and resources, et cetera, you're always trying to balance and prioritize. So for us, when they came in, they made this proposition and said, hey, we can show you this in two weeks. And it'll, and you know, when you're also big enterprise, you don't have time to look at technology for weeks and months on end and then have to test it. And so we brought pure end. They were tested out the products within two weeks and we saw more than what we were expecting. And I think that was what changed for us is it wasn't just about, we could do compression, we could do, you know, we could do, it was that all of a sudden with all these other capabilities we hadn't planned for. So it really was, it was pretty dramatic for us because we hadn't seen other providers that come in with a story that sounded different and not just the technology like, I'm going to save you a dollar. It's about now I'm going to enable your business to do something different faster and we saw it firsthand. How is the role of CIO at a technology company different from you were in a CIO at AT&T but you had kind of an engineering role if I understand that sort of solution engineering. How is the role different in terms of how you spend your time and what you care about? Yeah, so you know at AT&T the CIOs were focused on the application delivery side, so specific applications at Pure and so AT&T my role was centered around all the infrastructure for IT as well as our network engineering. So what we did for the service provider network coming into Pure, you have the whole spectrum but we're a different kind of company and that we're only 10 years old. Our technical debt looks very different. We use a lot of SaaS products so we use a lot of hosted solutions from our partners and providers and we do some on-prem as well but it's a very different kind of landscape. So the opportunity is you don't have as much technical debt. You also have the ability to try things because you are smaller and you can try things much quicker and be able to say, well, this working is it good enough and not have to have maybe things as gold plated as a regulated telecom would have versus a technology product company that is trying to be very agile to produce things and change for their customers. So essentially you were, I'll call you the CIO of infrastructure at AT&T with infrastructure that had to support, like you said, highly regulated and a very diverse, I'm sure, application portfolio. Extremely diverse. Like thousands of systems probably. Thousands of applications and very complex business models. So the interesting is AT&T is not a one entity business. They've got their media business. They've got their mobility business. They've got their wire line business. So when you have, people often think of AT&T as a company but there's actually, it's a very complex business model supporting multiple products. So it's just that those are multi-billion dollar product portfolios versus coming into Pure where we're still a billion and a half company building and growing our product portfolio. So what's your technology strategy at Pure and how are you enabling business outcomes for the company? It's a great question. So really the business strategy here has been that IT has to really evolve and scale differently than it had in the past. The organization before was really centered around some of the end user capabilities. It wasn't as centered around business outcomes and we've taken on a different role. So as I've come on to the organization our opportunity and our challenge is that we now have different responsibilities. We're taking on things like how do we want to think about data across the enterprise, not just within each individual domain. And so as a startup company you often are very focused on your R&D investments and your sales and marketing investments and you do a lot of things to get it done and that means that individual teams will do work but you tend to not think about what the full life cycle is of something that you're working on. So for our opportunity now is to take a step back be able to look across and say it worked great for that period of time. Now we have the opportunity to rethink how we want to think about the customer experience from the time product is developed all the way through and a quote to a customer through its life cycle, through delivery and then the support for that customer. So technology to support that sort of workflow. The ecosystem instead of within individual areas and so that's really our focus is how do we help our business to become even faster? How do we get more focused on the customer from a whole ecosystem and that we think about the customer from the whole ecosystem instead of each individual area? Sounds like that horizontal view that Charlie Giancarlo talks about with storage being so vertical in the past and cures wanting to revolutionize that and make that horizontal, ensuring that any type of business whether we're talking about cures business or a retailer or an airline every function in that organization has access to share that data to extract business value to lower costs to find new revenue streams, new routes to market, et cetera. And we are no different as a business. We need to do those same things to make sure that we can deliver those for our business. So that's a big part of our strategy. A lot of times we'll talk to CIOs at technology companies and their large established technology companies. I think Cisco, SAP, they've been around a long time. They have a lot of technical debt. They look a lot like your customers, frankly or many of your customers. Fewer is different but my question is a lot of these CIOs that I've just mentioned sort of generically, they're called wine tasters, right? You know, there used to be dog fooders, drink your own champagne but they are like the first line of defense, first beta customer and they give feedback to the product groups. Do you play that role as well? We do. We not probably to the extent because we're a smaller company so we tend to, as with our product announcements we've made, we'll go out to a wide set of our customers. So I think we had 60 and one of the betas that was just done. What we do with an IT is because we have a smaller footprint just the size, we do have flash array, we do have flash blade, we do use pure one. We do it more of a, from how would a smaller customer look at it, think about it and use it? And so that tends to be the, I'll say the lens that we look through. I think that the role I've played coming in is though bringing a perspective from a larger enterprise on how does a larger enterprise in IT think about it? And it's, again, it's not just that you're helping me with storage. You're actually helping me to solve a business problem. So there's some other, and some of the leaders that we've brought in, they also come from outside industry. Some have used pure, some have not. And so have that different kind of lens of what we would expect to see from our, the product teams. But they're also extremely open to what do you think, what is IT thinking about? How are you, we're thinking about these product ideas. What's the input from IT? So there's a lot of, while we're very small from an IT organization, I think that the two-way communication is what it's going to, you know, what will help. What are some of the innovations, and I know you've only had a short tenure there, but one of the things I read in the Q2 earnings, which were just released last month in August, was seven net new customers added per business day for Pure, so 450 or so plus customers added in that quarter, but also a 50% increase in multi-million dollar deals. So enterprise. Any innovations that you can share since you've been on board that your team has helped Pure understand to be able to go after those large enterprise multi-million dollar deals directly? Well, certainly from a, you know, from a personal understanding of the product and what Pure can do at scale is, you know, I certainly have that perspective to share with our customers and bringing that confidence and credibility that, you know, if you are looking at a large enterprise customer and the opportunity, they have a lot of questions about, so how exactly did AT&T do it? It's not like they run a few arrays, they run hundreds and hundreds of arrays and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes. So there's, it's not like it's a proof of concept or a pilot, and it's been years of doing upgrades non-disruptively over the years with all the Pure upgrades that have come into play. So I can certainly bring that to the table with helping the customers to get it, you know, a little bit of confidence, but also just an understanding about how Pure is approaching it with these other large customers. So, and as you've talked to other customers, there's enough customers out there that are, you know, they're very eager to share because they're so excited about what it's done for their business. We've heard, oh, sorry, Dave. I was going to say on the customer front, we've, what 6,600 plus customers Pure now has in its first 10 years, and the customers we've spoken to the last two days, Dave and I have noticed that a common theme is they're talking about their overall experience with the technology. They're not talking about boxes and array names and all these specifics, they're talking about how they are able to, one customer from a legal firm, I think in Florida, didn't even do a PSC, had a Pure that was a Pure customer and from that, Pure's advice got it right on board and was really talking about the experience and all of the things, to your point, on the business side, that they're able to influence with the technology, not talking about speeds and feeds and arrays and drives and things like that. So, it's a very different conversation. It's, well, so it was interesting because in the role that I had, I had the teams that did the architecture, plan and design and through implementation. So, the operation teams, one of the most unique things that I share with customers is when you are in a technology and you're in a large enterprise, you tend to have a challenge with introducing new technology because you don't want more technical debt. It doesn't matter what it is, you just don't want more technical debt. So, typically your operation teams are doing a little bit of pushback on, you know, no, we don't need something new, no, we don't need, unless they're having significant outages or incidents that they're trying to solve for. What I found, and even to this day, and there's some of the folks that are actually around the floor here, the folks that were in operations, they were literally coming and saying, we want more pure. And so, when you're in a technology organization, that typically doesn't happen. It's a, so it wasn't, and it wasn't like we want more of, like you said, the array. It was, we just want, we don't want to have to worry about, and I just took a reduction in my head count. So, I want, if I'm going to have to take on more data and I need to take on more support for the business, I don't want to have to worry about it. And so, to have that, that's a very different, and we had the same experience with our application team saying, hey, I just got lower latency. So, they didn't actually know why. They just knew that when I was trying to do my work on the application side working with a database, all of a sudden I had all this improvement. And so, what we allowed them to do is say, okay, well, we'll give you more capabilities, more feature functionality. And that didn't happen before. Those were things where they were like, really like operations and application teams are going to work as a team. Very different experience. So, if I were a pure sales rep, I would say, hey, Kathy, can you come tell my customer that might prospect that story? Do the sales reps have access to your calendar? How much of your time do you spend with sales folks wanting you to tell stories like that? So, I haven't been with the company that long. So, I have spent a fair amount of my time talking to customers, but we also have a lot of work with an IT. And so, they're just as incented to have me work with an IT because I can understand what we need to do to help our field as well. And that's one of our objectives is, what are we going to do in IT to make it that much easier and better for not just our sales teams, but the manufacturing teams, the support teams, our hardware teams, all the teams that it takes to deliver. And so, in fairness, I have joked with some that have stopped me and said, hey, we need you. I said, remember, we also want to deliver for you so that to make your jobs easier. So, there's a balance that goes on. It's different in a technology company, right? It's kind of encouraged that the CIO goes out and evangelizes. Yeah, it's actually a lot of fun. I do joke that when I go out to talk to the other CIOs, I mean, they're my people. They're too, I, you know, it's the challenges that we have to deal with the, you know, you're dealing with the technology, those very specific items. Then you're dealing with the, how do I help my business? And then you're dealing with, I want to make sure I'm doing the right things for people development and all those. So, Ann, you have a lens across the entire enterprise. So it's not like you're just looking at sales or you're just looking at ops or you're kind of looking at everything to say, well, how do I help all the teams to be that much better? Because the better we are, you know, be cliche, you know, collectively, that's just going to enable Pure to do more for our customers. So what's on the minds of your peers in these days? You know, I feel so fortunate to be in the Bay Area and there are amazing CIOs that get together, talk very openly, share strategies. Actually, eagerly and openly reach out to say, how can I help you? And that's, I think that's a unique as part of the CIO community that there's this willingness to say, look, we're all in this together from a technology perspective. I mean, look, we all want to do well for our companies, but you're also trying to figure out how to make technology teams stronger. And, you know, and it's a lot of the same issues. It's how do I change the focus of and the perception of where IT fits into a business that it's not just back office. It's not these systems, but it's actually becoming a very strategic, you know, enabler, advisor, participant, helping to help, you know, can provide input. You can be one of the first, you know, betas for your company if you're in a technology area. And that's a change. There's a lot of companies who I've always fascinated where it's like, if you're a product and you have an IT, you're selling to those people. So pitch to them. If you can't sell it to them, you're not going to be successful. So I think it's just changing and evolving, you know, some of those relationships. And that's a big deal. And, you know, I'll say on that, that's from how you run your organization. There's the, you know, how do we make sure that the technologies we're all investing in are somewhat future-proof and that they can evolve with us, not become inhibitors or, you know, box you into something that you, you know, can't kind of navigate through. And we'll actually deliver on future-proof. It's one of those marketing terms that is used by so many organizations delivering whatever kind of product, same as with simple and seamless. Those are, we talk about this all the time. We did hear from customers where Evergreen is concerned. You know, I said, non-disruptive is how much of that goes from a marketing to reality. And consistently heard about Pure's ability to deliver there. But it's interesting and it's refreshing, I think, to hear that you've experienced a changing role of the CIO to be collaborative versus, you know, there's a lot of competition in tech. So that's a refreshing thing to hear. And I have an idea for you since you're so in, you're in such demand. I have a to-do. It's a good, but you're going to like this. I have an idea. Hashtag, help Kathy scale. Give them this video. Thank you, I will do that. You'll be able to reach so many pure customers all across the globe. Thank you, I will do that. That's great advice. And that's an easy to do. It is easy to do. Well, Kathy's been great having you on theCUBE. Thank you for sharing your perspective as their newish CIO and how you went from pure customer to running their IT. And congratulations on being part of the next decade of pure success. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming on. Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.