 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome to theCUBE's day two coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019 from Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE Pure's VP of strategy, Matt Kicks-Muller-Kicks. Welcome back. Thank you very much, happy to be here. This has been a big shout out of a cannon yesterday and today, lots of news. First of all, happy 10th anniversary to you and Pure. Thank you very much, yeah. Tremendous amount of innovation, as Charlie said yesterday, overnight in 10 years. It's a really fun time at Pure, just something about the nostalgia of 10 years gets people naturally to start thinking about what the next 10 years are about. And so there's just a lot of that spirit right now at the company, so it's almost like people are really charging into the second chapter with a lot of energy. So that's cool. A lot of energy I think all fueled by this massive sea of orange that has descended on Austin. So four announcements yesterday. Let's start with Cloud Block Store, what you guys are doing with AWS and kind of this vision of Pure's cloud strategy. Yeah, look, the cloud discussions I've had with customers here at the show have been awesome. And I think more than anything, people have realized that we've really built something very unique with Cloud Block Store, something that doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry right now. And if you look at kind of other storage vendors over the time, people have certainly taken their storage OSs and put them in the cloud, kind of as a test dev experiment, a way to try things out. But never really thinking, I want to build something that runs tier one applications. And that was our goal from day one. We looked at the Amazon platform and said, they really built EBS, their block offering, as kind of a way to boot VMs, but it was really never meant for a way to run mission critical applications. So they've been very open and partnered with us to say, look, let's bring this capability onto the platform. And we really re-architected our purity operating environment. So the whole lower half of that is really optimized for the AWS services to help customers move tier one apps to the cloud. Was that joint engineering or was it really mostly pure doing that work? You know, it was pure engineering in the sense that we wrote the code, but there was a lot of co-architecture work with AWS so we could fundamentally understand the basics of all of their services and how to optimize for it. And you know, one of the big realizations and choices that came out of that was not to base the storage layer of this on EBS, but instead to base it on S3. And you know, if you look at your average cloud customer, they really use S3 as the storage basis for the apps they build on Amazon. And so S3 is the 11-9 durable storage platform there. And so our whole goal here was how do you use S3 but still deliver the level of performance you'd expect out of a tier one block environment? Well, when you read the cloud storage press release du jour, you can't really get into the nuance, but if I understand it correctly, you guys essentially have architected using AWS services a new class of block storage that runs on AWS, but looks like pure. So you're essentially front-ending cheap S3 storage with high priority EC2s. You've got some mirroring for rights to give it high availability. And again, it looks like pure. So you win because you're making money on the software. AWS is selling services and the customer has a pure experience. Yeah, and you know, I think the combination that the one two punch that's been very interesting for customers is not only what we're doing with cloud block store, but the new pure as a service offering. And so pure as a service is our as a service consumption mechanism that allows you to essentially subscribe to or rent pure arrays from pure in your data center. But it's a license that can go between on-prem and cloud. And so imagine you're a customer that is mostly on-prem today, but you have that mandate, I've got to get to the cloud. You might need more storage, but the last thing you want to do is commit to another three or five year purchase of a storage array that just puts off that cloud journey that much longer. So a customer can subscribe to pure as a service. They'll it might be subscribed to a hundred terabytes and we put an array in their data center right now. But you know, a year from now, they decided they're going to move 50 terabytes to cloud block store in Amazon. That's just a transparent movement. They're already licensed for it. And there's already, oh, sorry, sorry. There's already customers that are in beta with cloud lock stores. Any interesting insights that you can share without giving away secret sauce? Oh, absolutely. I think the thing that pleased us the most about the beta was really the divergence of use cases. We created this, but there's always a, you create something you don't know what people are going to do with it, right? And so we have this goal of going after tier one apps. Obviously there's a lot of people that are just focused on migration. How do I get the tier one app from on-prem to cloud? And so that was what I would say would be the dominant use case. There were a lot of interest in test dev type use cases. And really interesting, I think we saw it in both directions. So we saw some customers who wanted to develop their app in the cloud, but then deploy on-prem. We saw the opposite. We saw people who wanted to develop on-prem, but then deploy in the scalable infrastructure in the cloud. And so I thought that was quite interesting. How much of the impetus to do that offering was hardcore customer demand. We need this versus, hey, we need to embrace the cloud and make it a tailwind and not be defensive about it. You know, I think when we looked at what was going to be the buying criteria for the storage array of tomorrow, fundamentally this is it, right? People want on-prem infrastructure that's connected to the cloud and provides them a roadmap or a bridge to the cloud. And you know, I think we've seen a big change in mindset over the, even the last couple of years. You know, I'd say two or three years ago, the mindset from customers was, I'm all in on cloud. I think we've seen that soften where they've realized that the cloud is not a panacea. It's usually actually not cheaper or faster, but it is more agile, it is more flexible. And so a combination of on-prem and cloud is the right answer. And so what does that mean from a storage platform? Storage is the hard part. And so I then need a storage architecture that can support both on-prem and cloud and drive commonality, as opposed to having to be totally different architecture. Was Outposts at all a catalyst in your thinking on this, or was this happening way before you even saw it? No, we started this effort before that. But I think Outposts is a good example, I believe, of how Amazon is just getting serious about saying, look, we can't ask everybody to re-architect every application for a web scale. There's certain apps that won't make sense to re-architect. How do we bring those to the cloud in an efficient way? And those are really the types of applications in the first generation cloud block stores perfect for. You can take your existing on-prem app, move it to the cloud without changing it, and then maybe slowly re-architect parts of the application. You evolve it over time, but that's not a gate to going to the cloud anymore. I like the way you said it. You thought about what storage is going to look like in the next 10 years. We've said this a lot is the cloud experience, bringing that cloud experience to your data is what storage is going to look like wherever it lives is going to look like in the next 10 years. Absolutely. And I think the other real mindset shift I think we've seen is how people are thinking about truly running their on-prem environment more like a service. If you look at the key message that we had at the show here was really the modern data experience and defining for customers what that meant. And in a lot of ways, I've been in the storage industry for a little while. I think back 20 years ago, the buzzword was utility storage. I think one of our competitors had that as their slogan sometime in the 90s. And the reality though is when you talk to most storage teams, they just never did that. They still ran a bunch of arrays on a project by project basis and it didn't look at all like the cloud. And so now people have learned the lessons from the public cloud and said, we really need to apply those on-prem to truly bring our infrastructure together into much more of a virtual pool, truly delivered on demand, abstract consumption from the backing infrastructure to give flexibility. And so that's really what we're trying to deliver with a modern storage experience is to say, look, let's get out of the world of array by array management. If a customer buys 50 or 100 of our arrays, how do they take that pool of arrays and turn it into a block service, turn it into a file service, turn it into an object service for their customers with real abstractions and real APIs for those services that have nothing to do with the backing infrastructure. And when Charlie talked yesterday about the modern data experience, the three S's pop up, simple, seamless, sustainable. But as IT is getting more and more complex and customers are in a multi-cloud environment, not necessarily from a strategic perspective, right, acquisition, et cetera, how does Pure actually take that word simple from a marketing concept into reality for your customers? Yeah, I think Simple is the most underappreciated, but biggest differentiator that Pure has. I was recalling for someone, you talked to Cause earlier today, I had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of Pure, excuse me, with Cause. And we were just debating, I mean, this is before we wrote any code at all about what would be Pure's long-term differentiator. And I was kind of like, I will be the Flash people or high performance or whatever, he's like, no, no, no. We're going to be simple. We are going to deliver a culture that drives some plus into our products and that will be game-changing. And I thought he was a little crazy at the time, but he's absolutely turned out to be right. And if you look over the years, that started with just an appliance experience, a tent card install, you know, just a really easy environment, but that's manifested itself into every product we create. And it's really hard to reverse engineer that. You know, it's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build in the DNA of the company. Yeah, he kind of shared that with us, Lisa. He was basically, in my words, saying you don't ever want to suboptimize Simple to get a little knob turn on performance because you'll be turning knobs your entire career. There's a lot of storage arrays out there that it's all about turning the knobs. And if you can't fix it, you feature it. So. And if you think about really trying to automate something, it's really hard to automate complex stuff. You know, if something simple, if it's a consistent, it plugs into an automation framework. You talked about get your 10X. Yeah. I think that's what you said. And an entrepreneur who's very successful once told me, I look for two things, a large market and a 10X impact. Yep. What is your 10X? You know, we had two 10Xes at the show this year. So first was really kind of a 10 year jump in performance. You know, when we first entered, people were used to 10 millisecond latency from disk and we introduced them to one millisecond latency. You know, now with the shipping direct memory and bringing SCM into the architecture, you know, we can do 100 microseconds. That's another 10X. And so it's hard to ignore that. It's game changing as you said yesterday. Exactly. The other is really around our next product, FlashArray C, which brings Flash to tier two data. And there it's all about consolidation. Most people have now used Flash to fix tier one, but their biggest problem now is tier two. You know, they have less important applications, but because they haven't optimized that, it's taken up way too much of IT time. And so FlashArray C is how do I go and basically consolidate 10X consolidation at that tier two level to really bring sanity to tier two storage? And you've got NAND pricing. We talked to Charlie about this, that it ultimately should be a tailwind for you guys. As NAND pricing comes down, as Norfab capacity's coming online in China to go after the thumb drives, right? So that's going to leave the enterprise for all the traditional Flash guys that we know and love. So that should open up new markets for you. Yeah, today if you look at pricing for, you know, Flash C class storage, if I got it right, I'm guessing one, one and a half dollars a gigabyte, you see hybrid still in the, probably half that, 65, 70 cents. You see that compressing over the next, let's call it 18, 24 months. Absolutely, I mean what we can do with this product is really bring out Flash at disk prices. And so if you think about the difference, I mean what we now have in the product line is two platforms, FlashArray X optimized for performance, you know, hundreds of microseconds of latency. But C, at a little bit slower performance, still in the millisecond range, can really get down now to those disk prices you just mentioned. So it fundamentally gives customers a chance to ask, can I really now eliminate disk from the data center? You know, as I said in my keynote, you know, that the slogan from Pure from day one has been the all Flash data center. And 10 years ago, people didn't believe it, we were maybe leaning over our skis a little bit in doing that. It now really feels possible to go and have the all Flash data center. Well, I tell you, we believe that, you know, David Floyer picked up on it early on, and he was actually probably too aggressive with his forecast. We missed the NAND, you know, supply constraints. Now that seems to be loosening up. Well, and you know, look, one of the things that really helps us build the perfect product around QLC is the work we've done to integrate with raw Flash. We can not just use QLC, but we can use it really efficiently. And the challenge there is to make it reliable. It's inherently a less reliable Flash. And so that's what we're good at, taking things that are less reliable and making them enterprise-grade. And your custom Flash modules allow that? Can you add some color to that? You know, basically what we do is we source raw NAND, put it in our system, but then do all the work in software to manage the Flash. And so when you have a less reliable Flash medium like QLC, generally what you have to do is add more Flash to over-provision and be careful riding to it. And so when we do it globally, we don't do it inside every SSD. We can do it across the whole system, which makes the whole thing more efficient, thus allowing us to drive cost down even more. One of the things that we have heard over the last day and a half from customers, even those that were on stage yesterday, those that were on theCUBE yesterday, and those that will come on today is they talk about the customer experience. They don't talk about FlashBlade, FlashArray. They're not talking about product names. They're talking about maybe workloads that they're running on there. But the interesting thing is, when we go to some other shows, you hear a lot of names of boxes. Haven't heard that. Talk to me a little bit about how Pure has evolved. It really maybe created this customer experience that's focused on simplicity, on outcomes that is, in your perspective, why people aren't talking about the specific technologies, but rather this single pane of glass that they have. Look, when we started the company, I obviously talked to a lot of customers, and I found in general, there was frustration with products, but they also just generally didn't like their storage company. And so, from day one, we said, how do we reinvent the experience? Of course, we have to build a better product, and we can use Flash as kind of an excuse to do that. But we also want to work on the business model of storage, and we also want to work on the customer experience, the support experience, just 360 view of how you deal with a vendor. And so, from day one, we've been very disciplined about all of that. Going all Flash was a key part of the product. Evergreen has probably been our quintessential investment in just how do you change that buying cycle, and so you can buy into an experience and have non-disruptively evolve versus replace your storage array every three to five years. And then, I think the overall customer experience just comes from the culture of the company. Everybody at Pure is centered on making customers happy, doing the right thing, being a vendor that you actually want to work with. And that's not something you can really legislate. That's not something you can put rules around. It's just the culture at Pure. When we talked about Evergreen yesterday with a number of customers, including Formula One, I said, you know, as a marketer, how much of that non-disruptive operations take me from marketing to reality and all of them articulated the exact value problem you guys talk about? It was really remarkable. And another customer that we talked to, I think from a legal firm here in the U.S., didn't even do a POC. Talked to a peer of his at another company that was a Pure fan and bought it right on the spot. So the validation that you're getting from the voice of the customer is pretty remarkable. Yeah, this is our number one asset, right? I mean, so when we think about how do we spread the religion of Pure, it's just all about giving voice to our customers so they can share the stories because that's so much more credible than anything we say, obviously, as a vendor. You're one of only $2 billion independent storage companies, and which we love independent storage companies is the competition's great. How far out do you look and do you think about being an independent storage company? You've seen it as a somewhat historian of the industry. You've seen TAM expansion. You guys are working hard on TAM expansion now. New workloads. You got backup stuff going on. You got the cloud as a multi-cloud as an opportunity. So you got some runway there. Beyond that, you've seen companies try to vertically integrate by backup software companies, converged infrastructure, whatever it is. How far out do you think about it from a business model standpoint? Or do you not worry about that? You know, look, to put it in context a little bit, you look at the latest IDC numbers, we're maybe one-third into the transition to flash, right? The world still buys two-third disk, one-third flash. That's a huge opportunity. We're now five or six globally in storage. That's a few spots we have to go, right? And so we're not at all market share limited or opportunity limited even within the storage industry to make a much, much larger company. And so that's mission number one at Pure. But when we think beyond that, that's just a launching point. And so you've seen us do some stuff here at the show where we're getting into different types of storage. The first obvious expansion is let's make sure anything that is a storage product comes from Pure. And there's obvious categories we don't play in today. You saw us introduce a new product around VM Analytics Pro where we're reaching up the stack and adding real value at the VM tier, taking our meta AI technology and using it to give VM level optimization recommendations. And so, yeah, I think we increasingly understand that IT is a full-stack game. And so storage is maybe the hardest part of the stack and that gives us great base to work from. But we don't constrain our engineers to say you can only solve storage problems. Geography's another upside for you. I mean, most of your business, vast majority of your business is in the U.S. Whereas you take a company like, you know, some of these other ones around here, more than half their business is outside the U.S., so. Yeah, our international business has been international five or six years now and it felt like the first couple years, our investment years, and it took time. But we're really starting to see them grow and take hold. And so it's great to see the international business grow. And I think Pure as a company is also learning to really think internationally. Not just because we want the opportunity, but the largest customers in the world that we now deal with have international operations. And they want to deal with one Pure globally. So when you're talking, and maybe this has even happened the last day and a half with a prospective customer who is still investing a lot on-prem, still investing, not yet gone the route of flash, as you were saying, those numbers speak for themselves. What do you say to them? If they're not on flash yet? Yeah, yeah, to show them the benefits. I mean, what's that conversation like? You know, it's rare to be honest now to find customers who haven't started with flash. But I think the biggest thing I try to encourage folks is that flash is not just about performance. You know, and when I look at the history of people who have embraced Pure, they usually start with some performance need, but very quickly they realize it's all about simplicity, it's all about efficiency. And if they can make storage fundamentally simpler and more efficient, they free up dollars to put towards innovation. And you know, we unlock the ability to drive dollars towards innovation, and then we drive storage to the new innovation projects, like analytics, like AI, et cetera. And so we just try to talk about that broader opportunity. And I think that's the hardest thing for people to grasp because you know, the IT history has always been lots of ROI pitches that say, hey, this thing costs a lot, but trust me, you'll make it up in all these other benefits that no one believes. And so you just have to get them to taste it to begin with, and when they see it for themselves, that's when it clicks, and they start to really understand the ROI around that. Well congratulations on 10 years of Pure Unlocking innovation, not just internally, but externally across the globe. We appreciate your time kicks. Thank you, we're looking forward to the next 10 years. All right, to the next 10. For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 2019.