 Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live here in San Francisco for Oracle World 2016. It's the Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, co-CEO of Silicon Angle Media with Peter Burris, Head of Research for Silicon Angle Media. Also the GM of Wikimonde Research. Our next guest is Chad Kenny, VP and CTO of Pure Storage and Sarah Stewart, who's the Vice Worldwide Sales Lead for Oracle, almost called you the Vice President, but you're the Worldwide Sales Lead. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So I wish we had the better camera angle because your booth is right there, pure. It would be a nice backdrop for the nice orange, the recognizable orange. You know Pure Storage, you know that orange is their colors. You get some orange in you, so you're good, you pass the corporate test. I almost went with the full orange suit, but a little too much, I don't know. So tell us what's going on. I'll see you guys. Very successful company, Wentpublic. Scott Dietz, probably one of the most fan, fabulous entrepreneurs on the planet. Remember it was my first interview with him when he started Pure. All flash storage. That's the future. Never once wavered. Even when things were like, EMC came at him full bore with all the fun. Stayed on his message. Stayed on the mission. Wentpublic, congratulations. What's new, give us the update. What's new? It's been a great run. We've been growing like a weed, and we're at 93% growth here over here, doing incredibly well in the market. Going back to the overall recipe, which was let's make storage simple, make it economic, and make it super fast so you can harness the overall data. So it's just been overall great for us, just to put our new product, the FlashBlade, and been doing great with Cisco as a partner of ours and our FlashEx solution. You know, you've had some help along the way. EMC, kind of like Donald Trump, I won't say Donald Trump of storage. They've helped you in. I mean, I thought of that business where Sun said, a lot of the older technology. So there was some good market share. You got some nice space there. But you guys really took off. It wasn't a one-trick pony. Could you just share for a minute why you guys weren't a one-trick pony and how Flash stayed relevant? So it really was all about disrupting this market. It was right for disruption. I mean, it was old antiquated technology that wasn't keeping up with even the consumer space and was really taking advantage of Flash today and doing it in a way that allowed them instant access to data. The difference here is that we changed the game around economics. We incorporated a lot of in-line data-reducing feature sets with in-line D2 compression pattern removal. Was able to get Flash out to the masses and be a quick plug-and-play to your traditional storage array that was out there. And so we had great traction in that space and we're continuing to expand that now into kind of the unstructured file container-based space with our Flash play planning. So really bringing Flash to the masses and allowing you to harness the data in a highly simplistic, resilient and secure methodology. Sarah, so what's your role in this? You're a use case proof point for Pure. Talk about what you do and why it's relevant to your world. Yeah, definitely. So at Cisco, we're looking to grow our business around data center and we realized that it's really all about the application. So we looked at Oracle and what customers were looking to do with their products and how they could deploy them in a faster, simpler method. And with Cisco's UCS, our stateless computing, our Nexus platform, and then Pure slash storage, we're able to create this great solution that was very easy to deploy for customers. It's based on a Cisco validated design, which is easy to deploy. It's almost, you can think of it like a recipe. So we give you the ingredients, what to buy, and the directions on how to actually create it so you don't have to worry about leaving something out or having got to use once you're starting to deploy the solution. So we really wanted to make it very simple for our customers to deploy a solution. So I've got to ask you on that line. Cisco customers are very well known for being, I won't say finicky, but they're also like, it's got to be a certain way that they've been based a lot on Cisco. Why the success with Pure? Why is it working? What's some of the things you're hearing and why it works so well? Well, I think the success happens, we really listen to our customers and what they were looking to get out of a solution. And it's just not another solution with another storage vendor. They were really looking for something that again was easy to deploy and repeatable process. And I think the validated design and then the management to wrap it all together. We have something called UCS Director that can actually manage the Pure Storage, the Cisco compute, the network, and we're able to actually deploy applications and create really a product catalog or service catalog that your end users can go in and deploy applications on top of the flash stack. And customers really enjoy that. One of the things that's most interesting about flash storage is that the access times are so fast that a lot of applications can access the same storage at the same time. Obviously that's great for a company that has their pedigree networking because you want to see data moving around a lot. So talk a little bit about how the ability to access data from anywhere through a lot of different interfaces, APIs, Pure One, for example, is starting to affect the way developers, storage, networking, server people think differently about data. Yeah, so proliferating the analytics outside the data stack itself has been huge with Pure One to be able to actually get access to information and even manage the data sets in a much more intuitive fashion. I think it's been way too complex, way too proprietary in the past. Down to the actual infrastructure itself, the great part here is it's 100% flash. Low latency, fast access, really quick. Be able to move all of your applications onto a single platform has been huge because it reduces the complexity for one. Typically you had to architect things and really separate them out so they didn't contend with each other. Flash is great where you can put it all in one big pool and every application gets great access. And when you incorporate data reducing feature sets like data for compression and all the other fun stuff, the data set actually, bigger is better, it reduces itself further and gives you overall better economics. And so we're just continuing to evolve this beyond the storage stack so that we can not only integrate with our partners as Cisco with UCS director and make the workflows fully automated and orchestrated, very cloud-centric like most folks like, but also be able to provide the great analytics that people want in order to be able to understand what's going on in their storage environment and be able to make better decisions overall. UCS had made a lot of great moves with the servers. We've interviewed many times and network servers go great together. Now you get the storage angle here with Pure. Is that, that's the trend to bring everything kind of converged in. Is that the driver for this? Is that some of the main force here? Yeah, I would say customers were looking at converged infrastructure because they wanted something that was easier to manage. And again, we put together this validated design so it was like a building block. So you can start small with just one application and then quickly scale out. And again, that's what customers are looking for when they're looking at moving to the cloud is they want agility, something that's very scalable. And with this architecture, we have that. And Cisco, we put in 40 gig design so we're able to take advantage of the flash storage and really get that fast access to our servers and to the storage. All right, so what's next? I mean, I'm just envisioning, I'm hearing Larry Ellison talk about in-memory. Is it going to be a pure memory product coming soon? I mean, especially seeing a lot of focus on speed going really, really kind of down to cost-wise getting lower and lower, but the speeds are getting faster and faster and the need for real time, internet of things, whatever use cases are emerging. What's the next? So we're continuing to evolve the product itself into the next generations of flash memory, which give you better overall performance density. Even though all flash solutions are still required for in-memory based databases, when it goes beyond the DRAM, you're going to need to pull the data back in a sub millisecond latency type result. So they pair very, very well as technologies together. But at some point in time, our customer's going to look at this and say, I'm more interested in my data as an asset than the underlying devices and the way to get access to them. Do you see the industry starting to focus on data assets and how well these technologies and networking storage provide access and reuse of those? Yes, so I think with our FlashBlade product, you'll see even more so where you're disconnecting the data itself from the actual application and being able to run applications against it in a highly distributed kind of key value store type concept. And so that'll be big for big data analytics, internet of things and next gen applications. For the more traditional database applications, FlashArray has still been a really good use case for that. You can proliferate the information out and across multiple different applications through clones, snapshots and various other stuff. But people are looking for more of that converged architecture to be able to deploy across and be able to move everything for all of your different applications onto one platform. So Sarah, take a minute to talk about these reference architectures. Is it just a technology statement? Is it also a way of thinking about the tasks to deploy resources appropriately? How far does it go? So it's the technology and how you deploy it. So again, we've tested it in Cisco's lab, so we have all the equipment, we have the pure storage, we have all the different networking and the server environment and we do stress tests and actually deploy the different applications on top of it. So we make sure that when you're a customer and you deploy the solution, if you follow like our blueprint or like I said before, kind of the recipe, the cook stuck by step directions, we actually tell you how to deploy it. And we work in the best practices. So we've already done the trial and error for you as the customer. So you don't have to worry that when you set this up it's not going to give you the results. You might have to go back and buy more hard drives from our memory. We've already said, hey, this is validated for this application and these are the results you're going to get. So it takes a lot of the error guessing out from the customer deployments. And this has gotten a lot of traction out there. We have over 900 customers deployed across 26 countries. It's growing at about 157% year over year for us. So people are loving the fact that they can deploy this in a very repeatable, simplistic fashion versus the more rigid models of doing the same thing or versus building your own. And having partners being able to deploy this in a consistent fashion is a huge win for customers. Well, you know the old expression pets, cattle and someone's had another one for, I've looked at the data center. Pets, take care of your pets, the servers. Now you treat it like cattle, which is bulk of recipes. And now you've got serverless right around the corner which is going to be a very interesting technology trend. So I'd love to get you guys' thoughts on how all this relates to Oracle customers. We're here at Oracle Open World. What's the top things that you're hearing from those guys? Can you stack rank the top three use cases? Is it speed, is it performing integration? And then look at that at moving train with Oracle going to the cloud. How do you guys ensure customers get what they need and what are they asking for? So I think it goes back to the main recipe which is make things simple to deploy. So we started there. There's no complexity on how you deploy it. There's no management complexity, no tiering, no cashing, all that kind of fun stuff. And... So setting up, configuring, managing it. It's gone. It's dead simple. Yeah, the stick of infrastructure being something you just don't think about it anymore. It's repeatable on how you deploy it through the Cisco Validata designs and the way, and we have an Oracle RAC CBD. It's repeatable in the way that you do it. The infrastructure is almost unmanaged. You don't need to manage it whatsoever. Self-galing, no configurations or performance configurations you need on it. And so you in essence create a sub-millisecond latency result to your application, harness the actual data sets that you have out there, and be able to do things faster. I mean, the business value of these types of solutions are, you can deploy things quick and you can get access to information much quicker than you ever did before. And what's Cisco's up to these days? I mean, obviously the world's changing for Cisco too. You guys are modernizing. Right. What's the update with Cisco? So for Cisco, we're really focused again on our applications and making sure the customer's application is on the best fit. So if it's in the cloud or if it's on-premise in a private cloud, we're also looking at making sure we're connecting everything. So Cisco is very big into the internet of things and making sure that all these new devices and applications are being able to talk to your data center. We're wrapping security around it. We're making sure we're getting those applications from the edge and connecting everything together. Because like you said before, customers are very interested in the data that they're producing and they want to make sure they have access to that and starting to create new insights from that data. So to be able to do analytics on the data from different sites, like an oil rig that you might have out and you can't send that all the way back to your main data center. But how do we connect that to data you might have on your pure storage in your data center and draw some kind of conclusions? What's the biggest business impact that you guys see with the solution for customers? Is it more productivity, stage time, more cash, more top line, bottom line, all the above? Can you just share some color around? So we pair it really into two things. The IT transformation side is really shrinking the overall cost model, making it easier to deploy and using less overall rock space, power cooling, all that kind of fun stuff. The stuff that excites me most is more on the business advantage, which is the reports that used to take weeks now take hours to seconds. People are monetizing this with new business lines. They're getting access to real time analytics that make a lot better decisions. We have companies like Nielson that used to do a 24 hour report. Now on an hourly basis, they can apply and monetize these new reports to customers. You don't see the fear of, oh my God, job security? Are they being too much work to do? They'd be ready to deploy somewhere else. I think they're moving upwards in the stack. I mean, infrastructure was never a real sexy thing in the first place, right? It was a game of having to manage complexity. If you can move away from that, you can start to show higher value into the business. Sarah, are the younger IT people really thinking like that? That's an old kind of ageism thing. All the people stuck in their system management job, I don't want to change, I know how to provision servers and network storage, or do the young people don't care, they'll go where the action is. Are you seeing a trend, a regional trend? I mean, I do see the trend, like we were just talking about, I think the infrastructure has never been that exciting and it's really about the application and creating real business value, because just because we come out with a new solution, like faster storage or faster networking, customers aren't going to move to that unless we actually show value for their application. So again, more availability, can it bring the company actual return on investment and true value to create that? I think that's where people are going. I agree, super exciting. But at the end of the day, in this cloud technology transition, the best technology will still win. I mean, you can't have subpar technology. Right. At the end of the day. Agreed, yeah. Well, thanks so much for spending the time. Congratulations to your Cisco, great to see you and to see you in other CUBE events. Guys, thanks for coming on and supporting theCUBE. Really appreciate it. It's theCUBE live here at Oracle Local World in San Francisco on the show floor. Big booth in the center of all the action here with Pure Storage and Cisco Systems. We're having more live coverage after this short break. When I had such a fantastic batting.