 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante of theCUBE, and we have some news for you. Pure Storage has acquired Portworx, the Kubernetes specialist for $370 million in an all-cash transaction. Charlie G. and Carlo is here. He's the CEO of Pure Storage, and he's joined by Merlee Thiramale, who is the CEO of Portworx. Gentlemen, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Dave. Thanks for having us. So, Charlie, the transaction, all-cash transaction north of $300 million, your biggest transaction ever, your biggest acquisition, give us the hard news. Yeah, well, the hard news is easy news for our customers. We're bringing together two great companies. Pure, as you know, the leader in technology and data storage and management, and we're bringing to get in to our team, the Portworx team. That has been the leader in container orchestrated storage systems, and it really is going to match the existing and legacy hardware and application environment to the new environment of containers, and we couldn't be more excited. So tell us, what was the rationale, sort of thesis behind the acquisition? What are you hoping to accomplish, Charlie? You know, containers is the way that applications are going to be developed in the future with no doubt. And containers utilize storage differently than traditional application environments, whether those are our VMs or even bare metal application environments. And because of that, it's a very new way of handling data management. The other thing we saw was a philosophy within Portworx, very similar to Pure, of building cloud everywhere and make it look the same, whether it's in a private data center or in the public cloud environment. And so by bringing these two things together, we create a very consistent environment for customers, whether they're utilizing and going with their existing application environment or with the new container environment for their new applications. So Merlin, let me go to you. First of all, congratulations. You know, this isn't your first nice exit. We've known each other for a long time. So that's fantastic for you and the team. So bring us up to date on kind of where the company, you know, started and where it's gone and why you feel like this is such a good fit and a good exit for Portworx. Well, let's start with the company. You know, we've been at this for a five and a half years, almost six now. And we started with the very premise that as containers were beginning to be deployed and apps started to kind of be seen everywhere, containerized that data agility needed to match the app agility that people were getting from containers. And that was something that was missing. And so one of the things we did was really kind of take an entirely different approach to storage. We turned kind of storage on its head and designed it from the app down. And effectively what we did was leverage Kubernetes which was being used really until then to orchestrate really just the container part of the system to start orchestrating data and storage as well. So Northbound containers are being orchestrated by Kubernetes to manage the apps and Southbound Portworx now added the ability to manage data with Kubernetes. And what that's resulted in, Dave, is that in the last several years we've gained 160 customers, household names, Comcast, T-Mobile, Lufthansa, GE, Roblox, RBC who've all sort of deployed us in production and really kind of built a leadership position in the ability to aid digital transformation of which customers are going through with containers. Hey guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart. I want to just introduce some ETR data here. So this is one of our favorite views, X, Y view. The vertical axis is spending momentum when what we call net score higher the better and the horizontal axis is market share. And you can see I've outlined with that little pink area container orchestration and container platforms. And you can see it's very elevated right there with machine learning and AI, a little bit above cloud computing, right there with robotic process automation. This is the April survey of 1200 respondents. The July survey, robotic process automation bumps up a little bit, which changes the shape. But I wanted to show this picture to really explain to our audience the popularity. And this is where people are investing. And Charlie, you can see storage kind of right there in the middle. And it seems to me you're now connecting the dots to containers, which are going to disperse everywhere. We often think of containers sometimes as the separate thing, but it's not. I mean, it's embedded into the entire stack. I wonder if you could talk about the next generation way of building applications, right? And one of the great things about containers when you build an app on containers it becomes what's known as portable. It can operate in the cloud. It can operate on your own hardware inside your own data center. And of course, Pure is known for making data portable as well between both private data centers and hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure. So by bringing this together, making it possible not just for, as we talked about, container-based applications, but also for existing application environments, whether that is their VM or bare metal, we create a very flexible portable environment. I wonder if we could talk merely about just sort of the evolution of, I mean, VMs and obviously containers. Virtual machines, when we were spinning them up in the early days, storage was like the second-class citizen. And then through a series of integrations and hard work, you had storage much more native. But every VM is kind of fat, right? It's sharing the same or has its own operating system. My understanding is containers, they can share a single operating system. And so, but talk a little bit more, first of all, is that right? And where does storage fit in containers? I mean, we think of them at least in the early days as ephemeral, but you're solving a different problem of persistence. Maybe talk about that problem that you're solving. Sure, Dave, I think you characterize this as the right way, right? There's kind of VMs that have dominated sort of in the world of infrastructure for the last 10, 15 years now. But what is really happening here is a little bit more profound, right? Really, is if you think about it, this is the transformation of a data center from being very, very machine-centric, which is sort of the look-back view of the world to being much more application-centered going forward. And this is being accomplished, not just by what Charlie talked about, which is applications being deployed in containers, but by the evolution of using Kubernetes now as the new control plane for the data center. So, in the last couple of years, something amazing has happened, right? People have adopted containers and in doing so, they've realized they need to orchestrate these containers and lo and behold, they've kind of deployed Kubernetes. As they've done that, they've begun to recognize that Kubernetes now gives them an amazing capability. They can now let everything be application-driven. So Kubernetes is now the new app-defined control plane for the data center, just like VMs and VMware was the kind of compute-centered, machine-defined data center of the past. So we're one of those modern-day companies for the modern digital transformation stack. And it doesn't just mean, it's just not just products like Portworx, but other products in there, right? Whether it's a rancher, an open shift, or security solutions that are extensions of Kubernetes. So to your point, what we've done is we've taken Kubernetes and extended it to managing storage and data. And we're doing that in a way that allows it to be fully distributed, completely automated. And in fact, what happens is now, the management of the app and the data go hand in hand at the same time. You don't have the separation of sort of responsibilities. So the person who is really our buyer and buying set is a very different buyer than traditional storage. And you know, you know, traditional storage, I've talked to you about that part of the business a long time, many times in the past, our buyers are actually DevOps buyers. So we land in DevOps and we expand in ITOps. Our budgets are coming from a digital transformation budget like move to cloud or even just kind of business transformation and our users are really not the classic storage user, but really the person who's driving Kubernetes, the person who's making automation decisions, cloud architects, automation architects, they can now operate storage without having to know storage through products like Portworx that extend Kubernetes and allow it to be all application driven. It's an amazing- So it's much more than just bringing, I'd say just, much more than bringing state to what was originally a stateless environment. It's bringing more data management. So for Charlie, connect the dots for us in terms of where pure fits in that value chain. Well, as you know, we've developed a large number of products and capabilities that go well beyond storage into data management. So whether it's snapshotting or replication or data motion into, from on-prem into the cloud. And as we've been doing that, we've been building up a control plane to do this with traditional block and file storage. Now, this is extending that same set of capabilities to the container side, whether it'll be block because there are a lot of container systems that are looking at block, but even into the object space overall. So thinking of this as the integration of data management control plane for both existing and new apps and that data control plane existing not just in one location, such as the private data center or the private cloud, but also into the public cloud as well so that a company can orchestrate both their container-based apps, but also the data that goes along with them and the data that goes to their traditional apps with one orchestration tool. So you mentioned, I think when you said motion, I think of V motion. And if I want to move a workload from one VM to another, I can preserve its state. Is that kind of where you're headed with containers or the motion for containers? You're thinking of it very much in a push, IT push sense, rather than just the application calling for data access and being given it through a set of APIs. So again, much more dynamic environment, rather than it be a human instigated, think of it being as a policy and programmer-initiated set of activities. Now, I'm glad you brought that up because we often think in monolithic terms, and containers are not, right? It's really, like I said, thinking of applications. Even though they run inside of VMs, it sort of breaks that. They can, but they don't have to, right? They can run on bare metal, but of course, with VM where they've designed it to be able to run inside of VMs as well, that's what customers are most comfortable with. Sure, okay, Merle, you were going to add some color to that. Yeah, I think what Charlie is describing is really kind of a new paradigm. That's a self-service paradigm where application owners and application drivers, people who are creating apps, deploying apps, now can self-service themselves to a Kubernetes-based interface and it's all automated, right? So in a funny way, one way to think about this is somebody who's deploying apps, they are doing that with the help of Kubernetes. Their hands never leave the Kubernetes wheel and now all of a sudden, they're deploying data and storage and doing all of that without an intimate knowledge of the storage infrastructure. So that kind of idea of automation driving and it's an app-driven self-service model really enables that agility for data in addition to the agility for the app layer. And I think, Dave, the key thing here is why has that container bubble floated to the top of the graph that you just showed? It's because I think modern day enterprises are doing two things that are imperative for their success, right? One of them is the fast enterprises are gonna eat the slow. So they need to move fast and the way for that fast to be translated from an app agility to the agility throughout the whole stack is enabled by this. The other thing that they are doing is data is the new oil and folks really need to be able to leverage their data whether it's their own data, external data, but bring it all together in real time, mine it and they can't do that without automating the heck out of it, right? And that's what Kubernetes enables also. So the combination of data agility and being able to kind of create that ability to mine in real time the data to an app-oriented interface is completely revolutionary if you think about it. And in my view, going forward, what you're gonna start seeing is that Kubernetes is gonna start revolutionizing not just the app world, but the world of infrastructure. The world of infrastructure is going to change significantly with the advent of Kubernetes being used to manage infrastructure. Yeah, we often say in theCUBE that data is the new development kit and you're talking about infrastructure as code is the perfect instantiation here. So Charlie, I wonder, are developers sort of a new distribution channel for you? Do you see that evolving? Yeah, we did a lot of studying before bringing the two companies together and about 40% of the buyers of this environment of Portworx, our customers that we do talk to regularly in the IT group and about 60% in the DevOps environment. So one of the beautiful things about this is we have a good head start with the people we're selling to today, but also it opens up a whole new buying area for us with DevOps and one that we plan on investing in as we go forward. So Charlie, I would imagine this is a pretty fast close, right? What's the time frame? Yeah, these are two California companies and luckily we scoot under the legal radar of HSR so we think we'll be able to close this within 30 days. Great, and how we organize it? You're going to sort of, where is it going to be? It's going to be a new business unit reporting directly to me, especially as we go through the early days of integrating, but really we want to learn from the way that Portworx has built a successful business, make sure that we combine the best of both organizations together and really understand how to best tie together our go-to markets with the combination of legacy and container. So Merle, are you going to hang out for a while? Absolutely, I was talking to my team earlier and I said, look, the journey of business success is like a thousand steps and the part of a startup is only the first 250 steps. I'll tell you, I think we've kind of run up those first 250 steps pretty fast, but we're going to sprint through the next 750 steps with, in the company of Pure because Pure has always been well known as a disruptor in the business for a long time and we are a relatively new disruptor in the Kubernetes space. I think this level of our joint ability to disrupt that market end to end is going to be just astonishing. And I'm just really looking forward to kind of taking this to a greater level of accelerating our business. Well, Charlie, I mean, you see the data, I mean, if we pick up an analyst firm, the vast majority of new applications are being developed using Kubernetes and containers, but give us the last word, give us the summary in your final thoughts. You know, I think for both Pure and Portwork customers, what they're going to see is just a great marriage of two great companies. I think it's a marriage of two great technologies and they're going to see the ability to be able to orchestrate all of their data across their existing, as well as their new application environments and across both their development of their private cloud and the public cloud environment. So this is a great addition to the advancement that customers are seeing through orchestration, orchestration both of their application environment, but just as importantly, the orchestration of their data storage and management. Excellent. Well, gentlemen, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you, David. Always good to see you. Pleasure. All right, and best of luck to you both. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.