 The cloud essentially turned the data center into an API and ushered in the era of programmable infrastructure. No longer do we think about deploying infrastructure in rigid silos with a hardened outer shell, rather infrastructure has to facilitate digital business strategies. And what this means is putting data at the core of your organization, irrespective of its physical location. It also means infrastructure generally and storage specifically must be accessed as sets of services that can be discovered, deployed, managed, secured and governed in a DevOps model or ops dev if you prefer. Now this has specific implications as to how vendor product strategies will evolve and how they'll meet modern data requirements. Welcome to this CUBE conversation everybody. This is Dave Vellante and with me to discuss these seed changes is Ajay Singh, the Chief Product Officer of Pure Storage. Ajay, welcome. Thank you, David, glad to be here. Yeah, great to have you. So let's talk about your role at Pure. I think you're the first CPO. What's the vision there? That's right. I just joined at Pure about eight months ago from VMware as the Chief Product Officer. And you're right. I'm the first Chief Product Officer at Pure. And at VMware, I ran the Cloud Management Business Unit which was a lot about automation and infrastructure as code. And it's just great to join Pure which has a phenomenal all flash product set. You know, I kind of call it the iPhone of flash storage, super easy to use. And how do we take that same ease of use which is a heart of a cloud operating principle? And how do we actually take it up to really deliver a modern data experience which includes infrastructure and storage as code but then even more beyond that. How do you do modern operations and then modern data services? So super excited to be at Pure. And the vision if you may, at the end of the day is to provide leveraging this modern data experience a connected and effortless experience, data experience which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business. And by really leveraging and managing and winning with their data. Because ultimately data is the new oil if you may and if you can mine it, get insights from it and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation you're ahead. And that's what we intend to help our customers to. So you joined, you know, earlier this year kind of, I guess middle of the pandemic really I'm interested in kind of your first 100 days what that was like, what key milestones you set and now you're into the, your second 100 plus days. How's that all going? What can you share with us? And that's interesting timing because the effects of the pandemic you came in, you know, kind of post that. So you had experience from VMware and then you had to apply that to the product organization. So tell us about that sort of first 100 days and the sort of mission now. Absolutely. So I, so as we talked about the vision, you know, around the modern day experience going to have three components to it. You know, modernizing the infrastructure and really it's good as with the team out of the work we've been doing a ton of work in modernizing the infrastructure briefly talk to that. Then modernizing the data, you know much more than modernizing the operations. I'll talk to that as well. And then of course down the pike, you know, modernizing data services. So if you think about it from modernizing the infrastructure if you think about Pure for a minute Pure is the first company that took flash to mainstream essentially bringing what we call consumer simplicity to enterprise storage. The manual for the products with the front and back of a business card. That's it. You plug it in, boom, it's up and running and you get proactive AI driven support. Right. So that was kind of the heart of pure. You think about pure again, what's unique about pure has been a lot of our competition, you know, has dealt with flash at the SSD level. Hey, because guess what? All this software was built for hard drive. And so if I can treat man as a solid state drive SSD, then my software would easily work on it. But with pure because we started with flash, we really went straight to the NAND level and as opposed to kind of the SSD layer. And what that does is it gives you greater efficiency, greater reliability and greater performance compared to an SSD because you can optimize at the chip level as opposed to at the SSD module level. That's one big advantage that Pure has going for itself. And if you look at the physics, you know in the industry for a minute, recent data put out by Wikibon early this year, effectively showing that by the year, 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, just the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk is going to be cheaper than hard disk. So this big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that's going to disrupt the hard disk industry. Already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next. And then even the long tail is coming up over there. And so to, and to that extent, our lead, if you may, the introduction of QLC NAND, QLC NAND, a lot of a competition is barely introducing. And we've been at it for a while. We just recently, this year, you know, my first 100 days we introduced the Flash Erase C, C40 and C60 drives, which really start to open up our ability to go after the hybrid storage market in a big way. It opens up a big new, you know, market for us. So great in a great work there by the team. Also, at the heart of it, if you think about it in the NAND side, we have our flash array, which is a scale up latency centric architecture and flash blade, which is a scale out throughput architecture, all operating with NAND. And what that does is it allows us to cover both structured data, unstructured data, tier one apps and tier two apps. The pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all flash data center, slowly but surely we're heading over there to the all flash data center based on the NAND economics that I just talked about. And we've done a bunch of releases and the team has done a bunch of things around introducing NVMU or fabric, you know, the kind of things that you expect them to do. A lot of recognition in the industry for the team from the likes of Trust Radius, Gartner, you know, named flash array of the Cartempia Insight, a customer choice award and primary storage. In the MQ, we were the leader. So a lot of kudos and recognition coming to the team as a result. Flash blade just hit a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, kind of a leader by far in kind of the unstructured data, fast file and object marketplace. And then of course, all the work we're doing around what we say ESG, you know, environmental, social and governance around reducing carbon footprint or reducing waste, our whole notion of evergreen and non-destructive upgrades. We also kind of did a lot of work in that where we actually announced that over 2,700 customers are have actually done now non-destructive upgrades with our technology. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. And you know, a lot of this sometimes, you know, people say, ah, it's the plumbing but the plumbing is actually very important because we're in a major inflection point when we went from spinning disk to NAND. And it's all about volumes. You're seeing this all over the industry now. You see your old boss, Pat Gelsinger, is dealing with this at Intel. And it's all about consumer volumes in my view anyway because, you know, thanks to Steve Jobs, NAND volumes are enormous and you know, there's about two hard disk drive makers left in the planet. I don't know, maybe there's two and a half. But so those volumes drive costs down and so you're on that curve and you know, you can debate as to when it's going to happen but it's not an if, it's a when. Let me shift gears a little bit because cloud, as I was saying, it's ushered in this API economy, this as a service model. A lot of infrastructure companies have responded. How are you thinking at Pure about the as a service model for your customers? What's the strategy? How's it evolving? And how does it differentiate from the competition? No, absolutely, a great question is kind of segues into the second part of the modern day experience which is how do you modernize the operations? And that's where automation as a service because ultimately, you know, the cloud has validated and the other service model, right? People are looking for outcomes or they care less about how you get there. They just want the outcome and the as a service model actually delivers these outcomes and this whole notion of infrastructure as code is kind of the start of it. Imagine if my infrastructure for a developer is just a line of code in a Git repository in a program that goes through a CI CD process and automatically kind of is configured and set up fits in with the Terraform, the Ansible all that different automation frameworks. And so what we've done is we've gone down the path of really building out what I think is modern operations with this ability to have storage as code, this ability in addition, modern operations is not just storage as code but also we've got recently introduced some comprehensive ransomware protection. That's part of modern operations. You know, there's all the threat you hear in the news on ransomware, we introduced what we call safe mode snapshots that allow you to recover in literally seconds, you know when you have a ransomware attack. We also have in the modern operations pure one which is where we are the leader in AI driven support to prevent downtime. We actually call you 80% of the time and fix the problems without even knowing about it. That's what modern operations is all about. And then also modern operations says, okay, you've got flash on your on-prem side but I even maybe using flash in the public cloud. How can I have seamless multi-cloud experience in our cloud block store? We introduced it on Amazon, AWS and Azure allows one to do that. And then finally, for modern applications if you think about it the whole notion of infrastructure as code as a service software driven storage the Kubernetes infrastructure enables one to really deliver a great automation framework that enables to reduce the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code. And we have, you know, kudos to Charlie and the pure storage team before my time with the acquisition of Portworx, you know Portworx today is really delivers true storage as code orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes and in a multi-cloud hybrid situations that can run on EKS, GKE, OpenShift, Rancher, Tanzu recently, you know, announced as a leader by GigaOM for enterprise Kubernetes storage. We're really proud about that asset. And then finally, the last piece are pure as a service. That's also all outcome oriented. What matters is you sign up for SLAs and then you get those SLAs very different from our competition, right? Our competition tends to be a lot more around financial engineering. Hey, you know, you can buy it OPEX versus CAPEX and but you get the same thing with a lot of professional services. We've really got it, I'd say a couple of years lead on actually delivering and managing with SRE engineers to the SLA. So a lot of great work there. We recently also introduced Cisco flash stack. Again, flash stack as a service, again as a service for validation of that. And then finally, we also recently did an announcement with Equinex with their bare metal as a service where we are a key part of their bare metal as a service offering. Again, pushing the kind of the other service strategy. So yes, big for us, that's where the bucket skating half the enterprises even on-prem wanted to consume things in the cloud operating model. And so that's, we're putting a lot of investment. I see, so your contention is it's not just this CAPEX to OPEX, that's kind of the, you know, during the economic downturn of 2007, 2008, the economic crisis, that was the big thing for CFO. So that's kind of yesterday's news. What you're saying is you're creating a cloud-like operating model, as I was saying up front, irrespective of physical location. And I see that as your challenge or the industry's challenge. Hide the, if I'm going to affect the digital transformation, I don't want to deal with the cloud primitives. I want you to hide the underlying complexity of that cloud. I want to deal with higher level problems. But so that brings me to digital transformation, which is kind of the now initiative or I even sometimes call it the mandate. There's not a one size fits all for digital transformation but I'm interested in your thoughts on the, you know, must take steps, universal steps that everybody needs to think about in a digital transformation journey. Yeah, so ultimately the digital transformation is all about how companies gain a competitive edge in this new digital world or that the companies are and the competition are changing the game on, right? So you want to make sure that you can rapidly try new things, fail fast, innovate and invest, but speed is of the essence, agility. And the cloud operating model enables that agility, right? And so what we're also doing is not only are we driving agility in a multi-cloud kind of data infrastructure, data operation fashion, but we're also taking it a step further. We're also on the journey to deliver modern data services. Imagine on a pure on-prem infrastructure along with your different public clouds that you're working on with the Kubernetes infrastructures. You could with a few clicks run Kafka as a service, TensorFlow as a service, Mongo as a service. So me as a technology team can truly become a service provider and not just an on-prem service provider but a multi-cloud service provider. So I said these services can be used to analyze the data that you have, not only your data, your partner data, you know, the third-party public data and how you can marry those different data sets, analyze it to deliver new insights that ultimately give you a competitive edge in the digital transformation. So you can see data plays a big role there. The data is what generates those insights, you know, the ability to match the data with partner data, public data, your data, the analysis on it, services ready to go. As you get the digital, as you get those insights, you can really start to separate yourself from your competition and get on the leaderboard a decade from now when this digital transformation settles down. All right, so bring us home, Ajay. Summarize, what does a modern data strategy look like and how does it fit into a digital business or a digital organization? So look, at the end of the day, data and analysis, both of them play a big role in the digital transformation. And it really comes down to how do I leverage this data? My data, partner data, public data to really get that edge. And that links back to our vision. How do we provide that connected and effortless modern data experience that allows our customers to focus on their business? How do I get the edge in the digital transformation by easily leveraging, managing and winning with their data? And that's the heart of where Pure is headed. Ajay Singh, thanks so much for coming inside the cube and sharing your vision. Thank you, Dave, what a real pleasure. And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.