 We're back with Steve McDowell, the principal analyst for data and storage at More Insights and Strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You've got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, right? Whether it's on-prem or cloud or, you know, software as a service. My background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM, came up through the ranks and then shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management. And I've been doing, working as an industry analyst now for about five years at More Insights and Strategy. Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started. It's going to snowballing, you know, however you look at it, your percent of spending on storage that you think is going to land in as a service, how do you see the evolution here? IT buyers are looking at as a service of consumption-based as, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility, all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty around cost and security and things like that, right? That also come with a public cloud. And it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know and that I've worked with, you know, for in some cases, decades. So I don't know that we have hard data on how much adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, you know, and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So it's clearly popular with CIOs and IT practitioners alike. So Steve, organizations are at a, they're different levels of maturity in their transformation journeys. And of course, as a result, they're going to have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives from an IT buyer perspective. You may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal. Where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever? Again, absolutely be a growth leader. It gives me the flexibility as an IT architect to scale my business over time without worrying about how much money I have to invest in storage hardware. Right? So I get kind of, again, that cloud-like flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment. But it gives me that control oftentimes being on site within my permit and I manage it like a storage array that I own. So, you know, it's beautiful for organizations that are scaling and it's equally nice for organizations that just want to manage and control cost over time. So it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and it's certainly growing in adoption and in popularity. How about from a technology vendor perspective? You've worked in the tech industry for companies. What do you think is going to define the winners and losers in this space? If you were running strategy for a storage company, what would you say? I think the days of a storage administrator managing rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right? What these organizations like Pure delivering with their offerings is simplicity. It's a push-button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right? It becomes storage as a utility. So it's not just the, you know, the consumption-based economic model as a service. It's also the manageability that comes with that or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bytes to, you know, workload that needs it and it just becomes very simple, right, for the storage administrator in a way that, you know, kind of old school on-prem storage can't really deliver. You know, I want to ask you, I mean, I've been thinking about this because, again, a lot of companies are, you know, hopping on the as-a-service bandwagon. I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives. The innovation is going to come from making that singular experience from on-prem to the clouds, across clouds, maybe eventually out to the edge. Do you, do you, where do you see the innovation in as-a-service? Well, there's two levels of innovation, right? One is business model innovation, right? I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure to support my digital transformation efforts. But on the product side and the offering side, it really is, as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape, or form, right? I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud. I don't know where my data is and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that manageability experience to the IT administrators. So when I look at innovation in this space, it's not just a stored array in a rack that I'm leasing, right? This is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated into end management of my data and all of the things around that. Yeah, so to your point about lease models, if you're doing a lease, yeah, you can shift CAPEX to OPEX, but you're still committed to, you have to over provision whereas here, and I wanted to ask you about that. It's an interesting model, right? Because you've got to read the fine print. Of course, the fine print says you've got to commit to some level, typically. And then if you go over, you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down. And that's got to be very attractive for folks. I wonder if we'll ever see like true cloud-like consumption pricing. That has two edges to it, right? You see consumption-based pricing in some of the software models. And yeah, people like it, the lines of business maybe because they pay in by the drink, but then procurement hates it because they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? You see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on where we're at? No, I do see that maturing, right? And when you work with a company like Pure to understand their consumption based and as a service, and when you work with a company like Pure to understand their consumption based and as a service offerings, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale, right? You buy in at a certain level, you have capacity planning, you can expand if you need to, you can shrink if you need to. So it really does put more control in the hands of the IT buyer than, well, certainly than traditional CapEx based on-prem, but also more control than you would get, you know, working with an Amazon or an Azure. Well, next 10 years, it ain't going to be like the last 10 years. Thanks, Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Look, keep it right there. You don't want to miss this next segment where we dig into the customer angle. You're watching theCUBE's production of At Your Storage Service, brought to you by Pure Storage. One more. Okay, thanks, Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there. At Your Storage Service continues in a moment. You're watching theCUBE.