 Hey everyone, it's theCUBE live at VMware Explorer 2022. We're at Moscone Center in lovely, beautiful San Francisco. Dave Vellante is with me, Lisa Martin. Beautiful weather here today. Dave. It is beautiful. I couldn't have missed this one because, you know, the orange and the pure and Vaughn are history together. I had, I had to switch sets. You did. You were going to have FOMO without it. You guessed who's back. One of our longtime alumni, Vaughn Stewart, VP of Global Technology Alliance as partners at Pure Storage. Vaughn, it's great to have you back on the program and seeing you in 3D. It's, it's so great to be here. And we get a guest interviewer. So this is fantastic. Fly by. Yeah. So talk to us. What's going on at Pure? It's been a while since we had a chance to talk. Right. Well, besides fact, it's great to see everybody in person and to be back at a conference and see all of our customers, partners and prospects. You know, Pure Storage has just been on a tear. Just for your audience, many of those who don't follow Pure, right? We finished our last year with our Q4 being 41% year-over-year growth, ending the year just under $2.2 billion. And then we come out of the gates this year, close our Q1 at 50% year-over-year quarterly growth. Have you ever seen a storage company or an infrastructure partner at $2 billion grow at that rate? Well, the thing was, it was striking was that the acceleration of growth. Because, you know, COVID, there was supply chain issues. And, you know, you saw that. And then, and we've seen this before at cloud companies. We see, actually, AWS has accelerated growth. So this is my premise here, is you guys are actually becoming a cloud-like company building on top of infrastructure, going from on-prem to cloud. But we're going to talk about that. But yeah, very much that super cloud premise. Well, it is. And, but I think it's, one of the characteristics is you can actually, you know, we used to see companies, they come out of escape velocity and then they, growth would slow. I used to be at IDC, we'd see it. We'd see it down, then it'd be single digits. You guys are seeing the opposite. It's not just our bookings. And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't remind your audience that our second quarter earnings call is tomorrow. So we'll see how this velocity and momentum keeps going. But besides the growth, right? All the external metrics around our business are increasing as well. So our net promoter score increased. We're at 85.2, we are the gold standard, not just in storage, in infrastructure period. Like there's no one close to us. 85, I mean, that's like, that's like Apple. It's higher than Apple, it's higher than Tesla. It's higher than AWS shopping. And if you look at it, like our review of our products, FlashArray is the leader in the Gardner Magic Quadrant for, for storage arrays. It's been there for eight years. Portworx is the leader in the giga-home radar for native Kubernetes storage, three years in a row. Like it's great to be at a company that's hitting on all cylinders. Particularly at a time that's just got so much change going on in our industry. Yeah, tremendous amount of change. Talk about the VMware partnership from a momentum of velocity perspective. What's going on there and some of the things that you're accelerating? Absolutely. So VMware is the oldest or the longest tenured technology partner that we've had. I'm about to start my 10th year of pure storage. It feels like it was yesterday when I joined. They were a Alliance partner before I joined. And so not to make that about me, but that's just like we built some of the key aspects around our first product, the FlashArray, with VMware workloads in mind. And so we are a co-development partner. We've worked with them on a number of projects over years of late. Things that are top of mind is like the evolution of VVOLs, the support for NVMe over fabric storage. More recently, SRM support for automating DR with VVOL deployments. And then our work around VMware extends to not just with VMware. They're really the catalysts for a lot of three-way partnerships. So partnerships into our investments in data protection partners. Well, you got to support VADP for backing up the VMware space. Our partnership with NVIDIA. Well, you got to support NVAI so they can accelerate bringing those technologies into the enterprise. And so it's not just a unilateral partnership. It's a bi-directional piece because for a lot of customers, VMware is kind of like a touch point for managing the infrastructure. So how has that changed? Because you mentioned all the previous days it was like, okay, let's make storage work. Let's do the integration. Let's do the hard work. It was kind of a race for the engineering teams to get there. All the storage companies would compete and it was actually really good for the industry. Yeah, yeah. It went from really complex to much, much simpler. And now with the Portworx acquisition, it brings you closer to the whole DevOps scene. And you're seeing now VMware with its multi-cloud initiatives really focusing on the applications and that layer. So how does that dynamic evolve in terms of the partnership and where the focus is? So there's always, in the last decade or so, right? There's always been some amount of overlap or competing with your partnerships, right? Something in their portfolio. Is there expanding maybe, or you expand, you encroach on them? I think two parts to how I would want to answer your question. The retrospective look. VMware is our number one ISV from a partner that we turn transactions with. The bookings growth that I shared with you, you could almost say is a direct reflection of how we're growing within that VMware marketplace. We are bringing a platform that I think customers feel services their workloads well today and gives them the flexibility of what might come in their cloud tomorrow. So you look at programs like our Evergreen One subscription model where you can deploy a consumption-based subscription model. So very cloud-like, right? Only pay for what you use on-prem and turn that dial as you need to dial it into a cloud or multiple clouds. That's just one example. Looking forward, Portworx is probably the platform that VMware should have bought because when you look at today's story, right? When Kit Colbert shared a cross-cloud services, right? It was the modern version of what VMware used to say, which was, here's a software-defined data center. We're going to standardize all your dissimilar hardware. Another saying, software-defined management to standardize all your dissimilar clouds. We do that for Kubernetes. We talk about accelerating customers' adoption of Kubernetes by allowing developers just to turn on and enable features, be it security, backup, high availability. But we don't do it in a homogeneous environment. We allow customers to do it heterogeneously. So I can deploy VMware Tanzu and connect it to Amazon EKS. I can switch one of those over to Red Hat OpenShift non-disruptively if I need to, right? So as customers are going on this journey, particularly enterprise customers, and they're not sure where they're going, we're giving them a platform that standardizes where they want to go on-prem, in the cloud, and anywhere in between. And what's really interesting is our latest feature within the Portworx portfolio is called Portworx Data Services and allows customers to deploy databases on demand. Like, install it, download the binaries, you have a, there, you got a database, you got a database, you want Cassandra, you want Mongo, right? Yeah. And for a lot of enterprise customers who've kind of not know where to, don't know where to start with Portworx, we found that to be a great place where they're like, I have this neatness out of my infrastructure. You can help me reduce cost, time, and deliver databases to teams. And that's how they kick off their Tanzu journey, for example. The Portworx was the enabler, you mentioned maybe VMware should have bought, but of course they had to get the value out of Pivotal. I understand. Okay, okay, so that, so how, subsequent to the Portworx acquisition, how has it changed the way that you guys think about storage and how your customers are actually deploying and managing storage? Sure. So you touched base earlier on what was really great about the cloud in VMware was this evolution of simplifying storage, technologies, usually operational functions, right? Making things simpler, more API driven, right? So they could be automated. I think what we're seeing customers do to today is, first off, there's a tremendous rise in everyone in wanting to do, every customer, not every customer, a large portion of the customer who is wanting to acquire technology as OPEX. And I think it's really driven by like eliminate technical debt. I signed a short term agreement. Our short, our shortest commitment is nine months. If we don't deliver on what we say, you walk away from us in nine months. Like you couldn't do that historically. Furthermore, I think customers are looking for the flexibility, so our subscriptions, more from between on-prem and cloud as I shared earlier, it's been a big driver in that space. And lastly, I would probably touch on our environmental and sustainability efforts. You saw this morning Raghu in the keynote touch on what was it, zero carbon consumption initiative or ZCCI? My apologies to the VMware folks if I misspoke. We've had sustainability into our products since day one. I don't know if you saw our inaugural ESG report that came out about 60 days ago, but the bottom line is our portfolio reduces the power directly consumed by storage arrays by up to 80%. And another aspect to look at is that 97% of all of the products that we've sold in the last six years are still in the market today. They're not being put into recycle bins and whatnot. Pure storage's goal by the end of this decade is to further drive the efficiency of our platforms by another 66%. And so it's an ambitious goal, but we believe it's important. I was at HQ earlier this month, so I actually did see it. And where is sustainability from a differentiation perspective, but also from a customer requirements perspective? I'm talking to a lot of customers that are putting that requirement when they're doing RFPs and whatnot on the vendors. I think we would like to all, and this is a free form form comment here, so my apologies, but I think we'd all like to believe that we can reduce the energy consumption of the planet through these efforts. And in some ways, maybe we can. What I fear in the technology space that I think we've all and many of your viewers have seen is there's always more tomorrow, right? There's more apps, more vendors, more offerings, more data to store. And so I think it's really just an imperative is you've got to continue to be able to provide more services or store more data in yesterday's footprint tomorrow. And part of the way that you get to it is through a sustainability effort, whether it's in chip design, storage technologies, et cetera. And unfortunately, it's some that organizations need to adopt today. And we've had a number of wins where customers have said, I thought I had to evacuate this data center, your technology comes in, and now it buys me more years of time in this infrastructure. And so it can be very strategic to a lot of vendors who think their only option is like data center evacuation. So I don't want to set you up, but I do want to have the super cloud conversation. And you've been around a long time, you're more technical than I am. So we can at least sort of try to figure it out together. When I first saw you guys, I think Lisa, you and I were at, was it, when did you announce block storage for AWS? Was that 2019? Cloud Block Store, I believe it was four years ago. So okay, so it was 2018. Okay, so we were there at Accelerate. And I said, oh, that's interesting. So basically, if I go back there, it was a hybrid model. You're connecting your on-prem, you were using, I think, priority EC2 infrastructure to get high performance and connecting the two. And it was a singular experience between on-prem and AWS in a pure customer saw pure. Right, okay. So that was the first time I started to think about super cloud. I mean, I think thought about it in different forms years ago, but that was the first actual instantiation. So I'm interested in how that's evolved, how it's evolving, how it's going across clouds. Can you talk just conceptually about how that architecture is morphing? Sure, just to set the expectations appropriately, right? We've got a lot of engineering work that's going on right now. There's a bunch of stuff that I would love to share with you that I feel is right around the corner. And so hopefully we'll get across the line. But where we're at today? But where we're at today? So the connective DNA of flash array on-prem, Cloud Block Store in the cloud, we can set up for what we call active DR. So again, customers are looking at these arrays as a pair that allows workloads to be put into the cloud or transferred between the cloud. That's kind of like your basic building, blocking TACLEE 101. Like what do I do for DR, example, right? Or give me an easy button to evacuate a data center. Where we've seen a lot of growth is around Cloud Block Store. And Cloud Block Store really was released as like a software version of our hardware array on-prem. And it hasn't been making the news, but it's been continually evolving. And so today the way you would look at Cloud Block Store is really bringing enterprise data services to like EBS for AWS customers or to like, as your premium disk for Azure users. And what do I mean by enterprise data services? It's the way that large scale applications are managed on-prem. Not just their performance and their availability considerations. How do I stage the development team, the sandbox team before they patch? What's my cyber protection? Not just data protection. How am I protected from a cyber hack? We bring all those capabilities to those storage platforms. And the best result is because of our data reduction technologies, which was critical in reducing the cost of flash 10 years ago, reduces the cost of the cloud by 50% or more and pays for more than pays for our software Cloud Block Store to enable these enterprise data services to give all these rapid capabilities like instant database clones, instant recovery from cyber attacks, things of that nature. Do customers, we heard today that cloud chaos. Our customers saying, so okay, you can run an Azure, you can run an AWS, fine. Our customers saying, hey, we want to connect those islands, are you hearing that from customers or is it sort of still too early? I think it's still too early. That doesn't mean we don't have customers who are very much in let's buy, let me buy some software that will monitor the price of my cloud and I might move stuff around. But there's also a cost to moving, right? The egress charges can add up, particularly if you're at scale. So I don't know how much I've seen and even through the cloud days, how much I saw the notion of workloads moving. Like I'm kind of in the early days, like VMotion, we thought there might be like a, is there going to be a fall of the moon computing, you know, surge here? Like, you know, have your workload run where power costs are lower? We didn't really see that come to fruition. So I think there is a desire for customers to have standardization because they gain the benefits of that from an operational perspective. Whether they put that in motion to move workloads back and forth, I think that's to be determined. Let's say they don't move them because of your point, you know, it's too expensive. But you just, I think, touched on it is they do want some kind of standard in terms of the workflow. You're saying, you're starting to see demand. Standard operating practices. Yeah, SOPs. And if they're big into pure, why wouldn't they want that? If assuming they have, you know, multiple clouds, which a lot of customers do. I'll share with you one thing. Going back to basic primitives, and I touched on it a minute ago with data reduction, you have customers look at their storage bills in the cloud and say we're going to reduce that by half or more. You have a conversation. Because they can bring your stack into the cloud and it's got more maturity than what you'd find from a cloud company. Well, yeah, just data reduction's not part of block storage today in the cloud. So we've got an advantage there that we bring to bear. So here we are at VMware Explorer. The first one of this name, and I love the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe. Doesn't that sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be superheroes walking around here at some point. Maybe they're on. We've got Mr. Fantastic right here. We do. Who's the score? Who's the honest score? I don't know. But a lot of news this morning in the keynote, you were in the keynote. What are some of the things that you're hearing from VMware and what excites you about this continued evolution of the partnership with Pure? Yeah, great point. So I think I touched on the two things that really caught my attention. Obviously, we've got a lot of investment in VRealize that was now kind of rebranded as Aerie. That I think we're really eager to see if we can help drive that consumption a bit higher. Because we believe that plays into our favor as a vendor. We have over 100 templates for the Aerie platform right now. Automation templates, whether it's levels at your platform, automatically move workloads, deploy on demand. So again, I think the focus there is very exciting for us. Obviously, when they've got a new release like vSphere 8, that's going to drive a lot of channel behavior. So we've got to get our, we're a 100% channel company. And so we've got to go get our channel ready because with about half of the updates of vSphere is a hardware refresh. And so we've got to be prepared for that. So some of the excitement's about just being able to find more points in the market to do more business together. All right, come to the grounds, right? I mean, so, okay, you guys announced earnings tomorrow, so we can't obviously quiet period, but of course you're not going to divulge that anyway. So we'll be looking for that. What other catalysts are out there that we should be paying attention to? We got re-invent coming up in November. You guys are obviously going to be there in a big way. Accelerate was back this year. How was Accelerate? Accelerate was in Los Angeles this year. We had great weather. It was a phenomenal venue, great event, great partner event to kick it off. We happened to share the facility with the president and a bunch of international delegates. So that did make for a little bit of some logistical challenges. It was like the summit of the Americas, I believe I'm recalling that correctly. But it was fantastic, right? You get to bring the customers out. You get to put a bunch of the engineers on display for the products that we're building. You know, two of the highlights there were we announced our new FlashBlade S. So higher, more performant, more scalable version of our scale at object and file platform. With that, we also announced the next generation of our AIRI, which is our AI-ready infrastructure within Vidya. So think of it like converged infrastructure for AI workloads. We're seeing tremendous growth in that unstructured space. And so, obviously Pure was founded around block storage, a lot around virtual machines. The data growth is in unstructured, right? We're just seeing, we're seeing just tons of machine learning opportunities, a lot of opportunities whether we're looking at health life sciences, genome sequencing, medical imaging, we're seeing a lot of velocity in the federal space, things I can't talk about, a lot of velocity in the automotive space. And so from a completeness of platform, FlashBlade is really addressing a need, really kind of changing the market from NAS as like tier two storage or object is tier three to like both as a tier one performance candidate. And now you see applications that are supporting running on top of object, right? All your analytics platforms run on object today. So it's a whole new world. Awesome. And Pure's also glad I see on the website a tech fest going on. You guys are going to be in Seoul, Mexico City, in Singapore in the next week alone. So customers get the chance to be able to in-person talk with those execs once again. Yeah, we've been doing the Accelerate Tech Fest, sorry about that, around the globe. And if one of them is aligned with your schedule or you can free your schedule to join us, I would encourage you, the whole list of events, dates are on purestorage.com. I'm looking at it right now. Vaughn, thank you so much for joining Dave and me. I got to sit between two dapper dudes. Great conversation about what's going on at Pure. Pure with VMware, better together and the catalysis that's going on on both sides. I think that's an actual word. I should know I have a degree in biology. For Vaughn Stewart and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So keep it here.