 Live from the BuildGram Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Prince-Martin with Dave the Huvillante, and we're with David Hatfield, or HAT, the president of Pure Storage. HAT, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Lisa, great to be here. Thanks for being here. How fun is this? Great, oh yeah. Super fun. Got to represent, we love the orange here. Always a good venue. Yeah. There's not enough orange. Well, BuildGram, I mean, it's a great venue, but not generally one for technology conferences. No, it's not. You guys are not conventional. So far, so good. Thanks for keeping us out of Las Vegas for a change. As you say. Over my dead body, I think I've said once or twice before. Speaking of. Love our customers in Vegas. Have unconventional. You've said recently, this is not your father's storage company. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Well, we just always want to do things a little bit less conventional. We want to be modern. We want to do things differently. We want to create an environment where it's community. So our customers and our partners, prospective customers can get a feel for what we mean by doing things a little bit more modern. And so the whole orange thing is something that we all opt in for, but it's more about really helping transform customers' organizations, think differently, think out of the box. And so we wanted to create a venue that forced people to think differently. And so the last three years, one was in the peer 48, we transformed that. Last year, it wasn't a big steel workers in 100 year old steel manufacturing, ship building yard, which is now long since gone. But we thought the juxtaposition of that, big iron rust relative to what we're doing from a modern solid state perspective was a good metaphor. And here it's about making music. And how can we together as an industry, develop new things and develop new songs and really help transform organizations? So for those of you who don't know, spinning disk is known as spinning rust eventually. And it was so very clever sort of marketing. The more data you put out of the slower it gets and it gets really old and we wanted to get rid of that. We wanted to have everything beyond line in the data center. So that was the point. So, had as you go around and talk to customers, they're going through a digital transformation. You hear all the stuff about machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it. What are the questions that you're getting? CEOs, they want to get digital right. IT professionals are wondering what's next for them. What kind of questions and conversations are you having? Yeah, I think it's interesting. I was just in one of the largest financial services companies in New York. And we met with a chief data officer and the chief data officer reports him to the CEL. And he had right next to him the CIO. And so they have this development of a recognition that moving into a digital world and trying to harness the power of data requires a business context. It requires people that are trying to figure out how to extract value from the data. Where does our data live? But that's created a different organization and drives DevOps. I mean, if you're going to go through digital transformation, you're going to try and get access to your data, you have to be a software development house. And that means you're going to use DevOps. And so what's happened from our point of view over the last 10 years is that those folks have gone to the public cloud because IT wasn't really meeting the needs of what DevOps needed and what the data scientists were looking for. And so what we wanted to create not only was a platform and a toolset that allowed them to bridge the gap, make things better today dramatically but have a platform that gets you in the future but also create a community and an ecosystem where people are aware of what's happening in the DevOps side and connect the dots between IT and the data scientists. And so we see this exploding as companies digitize and somebody needs to be there to help kind of bridge the gap. So what's your point of view and advice to that IT ops person who may be really good at provisioning LUNs? It should they become more dev-like, maybe ops dev? Totally. I mean, I think there's a huge opportunity to kind of advance your career. And a lot of what Charlie talked about and a lot of what we've been doing for nine years now coming up on nine years is trying to make our customers heroes. And if data is a strategic asset so much so they're actually going to think about putting it on your balance sheet and you're hiring chief data officers who knows more about the data than the storage and infrastructure team? They understand the limitations that we had to go through over the past. They've recognized you had to make trade-offs between performance and cost. And in a shared accelerated storage platform where you have tons of IO and you can put all of your applications morning and at the same time you don't have to make those trade-offs. But the people that really know that are the storage leads. And so what we want to do is give them a path for their career to become strategic in their organization. Storage should be self-driving. Infrastructure should be self-driving. These are not things that in a boardroom people care about gigabytes and petabytes and petaflops and whatever metric what they care about is how can they can change their business and have a competitive advantage? How can they can deliver better customer experiences? How they can put more money on the bottom line through better insights, et cetera. And we want to teach and work with and celebrate data heroes that are coming from the infrastructure side and connecting to dots. So the value of that data is obviously something that's new in terms of it being front and center. So who determines the value of that data? You would think it's the business line. And so there's got to be a relationship between that IT ops person and the business line which maybe here to four was somewhat adversarial. Business guys are calling, the clients are calling again and the business guys are saying oh IT, they're slow. They say no. So how are you seeing that relationship changing? It has to come together because it does come down to what are the insights that we can extract from our data? How much more data can we get online to be able to get those insights? And that's a combination of improving the infrastructure and making it easy and removing those trade-offs that I talked about but also being able to ask the right questions. And so a lot has to happen. We have one of the leaders in DevOps speaking tomorrow to go through here's what's happening on the software development DevOps side. Here's what the data scientists are trying to get at. So our IT professionals understand the language, understand the problem set. But they have to come together. We have Dr. Kate Harding as well coming in from MIT who's brilliant and thinking about AI. Well, there's only 0.5% of all the data has actually been analyzed. It's all in these piggy banks as Burke talked about on stage. And so we want to get rid of the piggy banks and actually create it and make it more accessible and get more than 0.5% of the data to be usable. Bring as much of that online as possible because it's going to provide richer insights. But up into this point, storage has been a bottleneck to making that happen. It was either too costly or too complex or it wasn't performant enough. With what we've been able to bring through solid state natively into sort of this platform is an ability to have all of that without the trade-offs. That number of half a percent or less than half a percent of all data in the world is actually able to be analyzed is really, really small. We talk about often you'll hear old people say data's a lifelovel of an organization. Well, it's really a business catalyst. Because, right, but catalysts need to be applied to multiple reactions simultaneously. And that's what a company needs to be able to do to maximize the value. Because if you can't do that, there's no value in that. How are you guys helping to kind of maybe abstract storage? We hear a lot of, we heard the word simplicity a lot today from Mercedes Formula One, for example. How are you partnering with customers to help them identify where do we start narrowing down to find those needles in the haystack that are going to open up new business opportunities, new services for our business? Well, I think, first of all, we recognize it pure that we want to be the innovators. We want to be the folks that are, again, making things dramatically better today, but really future-proofing people for what applications and insights they want to get in the future. Charlie talked about the three-legged stool, right? There's innovations that's been happening in compute. There's innovations that have been happening over the years in networking, but storage hasn't really kept up. It literally was sort of the bottleneck that was holding people back from being able to feed the GPUs and the compute that's out there to be able to extract the insights. So, we wanted to partner with the ecosystem, but we recognized an opportunity to remove the primary bottleneck, right? And if we can remove the bottleneck and we can partner with firms like NVIDIA and firms like Cisco, where you integrate the solution and make it self-driving, so customers don't have to worry about it. They don't have to make the trade-offs and performance and cost on the back end, but it just is easy to stamp out. And so, it was really great to hear service now and Keith walk through his story where he was able to get a three-X level improvement and something that was simple to scale as their business grew without having an impact on the customer. So, we need to be part of an ecosystem. We need to partner well. We need to recognize that we're a key component of it because we think data's at the core, but we're only a component of it. One analogy somebody shared with me when I first started at Pure was, you can date your compute and networking partner, but you actually get married to your storage partner. And we think that's true because data's at the core of every organization, but it's making it available and accessible and affordable so you can leverage the compute and networking stacks to make it happen. You've used the word platform, and I want to unpack that a little bit. Platform versus product, right? We hear platform a lot today. I think it's pretty clear that platforms beat products and that allows you to grow and penetrate the market further. It also has an implication in terms of the ecosystem and how you partner. So, I wonder if you could talk about platform, what it means to you, the API economy, however you want to take that. Yeah, so, I mean, platform, first of all, I think, if you're starting a disruptive technology company, being hyper focused on delivering something that's better and faster in every dimension, it had to be 10X in every dimension. So when we started, we said, let's start with tier one block, mission critical data workloads with a product, our flash array product. It was the fastest growing product in storage, I think, of all time and it still continues to be a great contributor and it should be a multi-billion dollar business by itself. But what customers are looking for is that same consumer-like or cloud-like experience, all the benefits of that simplicity and performance across their entire data set. And so, as we think about providing value to customers, we want to make sure we capture as much of that 99.5% of the data and make it online and make it affordable, regardless of whether it's block, file, or object, or regardless of it's tier one, tier two and tier three, we talk about this notion of a shared, accelerated storage platform because we want to have all of the applications hit it without any compromise. And in architecture that we provided today, you can do that. So, as we think about partnering, we want to go, and our strategy, we want to go get as much of the data we possibly can and make it usable and affordable to bring online and then partner with the API-first open approach. There's a ton of orchestration tools that are out there. There's great automation. We have a deep integration with ACI at Cisco. Whatever management and orchestration tools that our customer wants to use, we want to make those available. And so, as you look at our flash array, flash stack, airy, and flash blade technologies, all of them have an API-open-first approach. And so, a lot of what we're talking about with our cloud integrations is how do we actually leverage orchestration and how do we now allow and make it easy for customers to move data in and out of whatever clouds they may want to run from. One of the key premises of the business was with this exploding data growth and whether it's 30, 40, or 50 zettabytes of data over the next five years, there's only two and a half or three zettabytes of internet connectivity in those same period of time. Which means that companies, and there's not enough data platform or data resources to actually handle all of it. So the temporal nature of the data, where it's created, what a data center looks like, is going to be highly distributed. And it's going to be multi-cloud. And so, we wanted to provide an architecture and a platform that removed the trade-offs in the bottlenecks while also being open and allowing customers to take advantage of Redshift and Red Hat and all the different container technologies and platform as a service technologies that exist that are completely changing the way we get access to data. So, we're part of an ecosystem and it needs to be API and open first. So you had service now on stage today and they're obviously a platform company. I mean, anytime they do M&A, they bring that company into their platform, their applications that they build are all part of that platform. So should we think about Pure, if we think about Pure as a platform company, does that mean, I mean, one of your major competitors is consolidating its portfolio. Should we think of you going forward as a platform company? In other words, you're not going to have a stovepipe set of products or is that asking too much as you go get to your next level of milestone? Well, we think we're largely there in many respects. If you look at any of the competitive technologies that are out there, they have a different operating system and a different customer experience for their block products, their file products and their object products, et cetera. So, we wanted to have a shared system that had the similar attributes from a storage perspective and then provide a very consistent customer experience with our cloud-based Pure One platform. And so, the combination of our systems, you hear Bill Serretta talk about, you have to do different things for different protocols to be able to get the efficiencies and the data services people want, but ultimately you need to abstract that into a customer experience that's seamless. And so, our Pure One cloud-based software allows for a consistent experience. The fact that you have one application that's leveraging block and one application that's leveraging unstructured tool sets, you want to be able to have that be in a shared accelerated storage platform. That's why Gartner's talking about that, right? Is that now you can do it with a solid state world. So, it's super key to say, hey look, we want one consistent customer experience regardless of what data tier it used to be on or what protocol it is. And we do that through our Pure One cloud-based platform. You guys have been pretty bullish for a long time now where competition is concerned. When we talk about AWS, Angie Jassy always talks about, they look forward, they're not looking at Oracle and things like that. How, what's that like at Pure? You guys really kind of, you've been also very bullish recently about NVMe. Are you looking forward together with your partners and listening to the voice of the customer versus looking at, you know, with blue over the corner? Yeah, so first of all, we have a lot of respect for companies that get big. One of my mentors told me one time that they got big because they did something well. And so, we have a lot of respect for the ecosystem and companies that build the scale. We actually want to be one of those and are already doing that. But I think it's also important to listen and to be part of the community. And so, we've always wanted to be the pioneers. You know, we always wanted to be the innovators. We always wanted to challenge conventions. And one of the reasons why we founded the company, why Kaz and Hayes founded the company originally, was because they saw that there was a bottleneck and it was a media level bottleneck. And in order to remove that, you needed to write a file system that was purpose built for the new media, whatever it was going to be. And that shows solid state because it was a $40 billion industry thanks to our consumer products and devices. So it was a cost curve where R&D was going to happen by Samsung and Toshiba and Micron and all those guys that we can ride that curve down, allowing us to be able to get more and more of the data that's out there. And so, we founded the company with the premise that you need to remove that bottleneck and you can drive innovation that was 10x better in every dimension. But we also recognized in doing so that by putting an evergreen ownership model in place, it can fundamentally change the business model that customers were really frustrated by over the last 25 years. It was fair because disk has lots of moving parts. It gets slower with the more data you put on, et cetera. And so you pass those maintenance expenses and software onto customers. But in a solid state world, you didn't need that, right? And so, what we wanted to do was actually, in addition to provide innovation that was 10x better, we wanted to provide a business model that was evergreen and cloud-like in every dimension. Well, those two forces were very disruptive to the competitors. And so it's very, very hard to take a file system that's 25 years old and retrofit it to be able to really get the full value of what the stack can provide. So we focus on innovation. We focus on what the markets are doing. And we focus on our customer requirements and where we anticipate the use cases to be. And then, we like to compete too. We're a company of folks that love to win. But ultimately, the real focus here is on enabling our customers to be successful and editing forward. And so, less about looking on sidewinds on who's blue and who's green, et cetera. But you said it before, when you were a startup, you had to be 10x better. Because those incumbents, even though it was an older operating system, people's processes were wired to that. So you had to give them an incentive to do that. But you have been first in a number of things. I mean, Flash itself, the sort of all flash at a spinning disk price, evergreen, you guys set the mark on that. NVME, you're doing it again with no premium. I mean, everybody's going to follow. You can look back and say, look, we were first, we led, we're the innovator. You're doing some things in cloud, which are similar. Obviously, you're doing this on purpose, but it's not just getting close to your customers. There's got to be a technology and architectural enabler for you guys. Is that fair? Well, yeah, it's software. At the end of the day, if you write a file system that's purpose-built for a new media, you think about the inefficiencies of that media and the benefits of that media. And so we knew it was going to be memory. We knew it was going to be silicon. It behaves differently. Reads are effectively free. Writes are expensive, right? And so that means you need to write something that's different. And so it's NVME that we've been plumbing and working on for three years. That provides 44,000 parallel access points, massive parallelism, which enables these next generation of applications. And so, yeah, we have been talking about that and inventing ways to be able to take full advantage of that. There's 3D crosspoint and there's SCM and all kinds of really interesting technologies that are coming down the line that we want to be able to take advantage of and future proof for our customers. But in order to do that, you have to have a software platform that allows for it. And that's where our competitive advantage really resides, is in the software. Yeah, well, there are a lot of smart companies in Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley. And you guys, like I say, have achieved that escape velocity. And so it's pretty impressive. Congratulations. Thank you, we're just getting started. And we really appreciate all the work you guys do. So thanks for being here. Yeah, and we just a couple of days ago with the Q1 FY19, 40% year over year growth, you added 300 more customers, now at 4,800 customers globally. So momentum. Thank you, thank you. Well, we only do it if we're helping our customers one day at a time. I'll tell you that this whole customer first philosophy, a lot of customers, a lot of companies talk about it. But it truly has to be integrated in the DNA of the business from the founders. And causes, whole pitch at the very beginning of this was we're going to change the media, which is going to be able to transform the business model. But ultimately, we want to make this as intuitive as an iPhone. Infrastructure should just work. And so we have this focus on delivering simplicity and delivering ownership that's future-proofed from the very beginning. And that sort of permeates. And so as we think about our growth, our growth has happened because our customers are buying more stuff from us. If you look at underneath the covers on our growth, 70 plus percent of our growth every single quarter comes from customers buying more stuff. And so as we think about how we partner and we think about how we innovate, we're going to continue to build and innovate in new areas. We're going to keep partnering. The data protection staff, we've got great partners like Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik and that are out there. And we're going to acquire. We do have a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be able to go do that. And so we're going to listen to our customers on where they want us to do that. And that's going to guide us to the future. And expansion overseas. I mean, North America is what? 70 percent of your business? Is that correct? Rough and tough, yeah. We had 28 percent. It's an upside. Any mature B2B systems company should line up to be 55, 45, 55 North America, 45, in line with GDP and in line with IT spend. So we made investments from the beginning, knowing we wanted to be an independent company, knowing we wanted to support global 2000 companies. You have to have operations across multiple countries. And so globalization is always going to be key for us. We're going to continue our march on doing that. Delivering Evergreen from an orange center. Thanks so much for joining Dave and I on the show this morning. Thanks Lisa. Thanks Dave. Nice to see you guys. We are the Cube Live from Pure Accelerate 2018 from San Francisco and Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.