 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni to theCUBE. Prakash Darje is here, the VP and GM of the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure Storage. Prakash, it's great to have you back on the program. Yeah, Lisa, thanks for having me. It's been, I don't know, more than a year since I've seen theCUBE, right? Pre-COVID, so it's been a little while. Pre-COVID, remember those days. Well, thank you for joining us virtually. We appreciate that. And also excited to hear some of the things that are going to be coming out at Accelerate, an event that I've covered in person several times. So talk to me about this Digital Experience Business Unit. This is relatively new. What is it encompassed? What are you hoping to deliver from a portfolio perspective to your customers? Well, what's interesting is it's new and it's not, right? Because we've been as a company, a SaaS company that happened to ship storage boxes on premise. So we've had Pure One, which was largely used for monitoring and supporting our fleet like a SaaS company would do. And customers had access to that as their single pane of glass. But as we expanded beyond just observability and monitoring, we realized that we could use this observability to do more for customers. And we introduced our Pure as a service offering about three years ago now, which customers just sign up for SLAs. Like they went on a cloud, you sign up, I want this performance, I want this capacity at storage. So why don't you just sign up for what you need? And we created the DX Business Unit, the Digital Experience Business Unit to bring those things together because frankly, we're using Pure One to monitor, manage and allow customers to sign up for their SLAs in a very digital way. And I guess the world's changed a little bit because previously you would call up your sales rep to do things and then COVID happened. And I think a lot of people got a little bit of Zoom fatigue and therefore, we see a lot of traction right now in terms of people just self-serving and going up and signing up for the SLAs they need. Talk to me about some of those SLAs the customers are signing up for. What is it that they know with Pure as a service, for example, in Pure One that they can get? Well, you want storage, you want storage that's high performing, you want storage that supports your applications. Number one thing with storage is you're signing up for capacity and performance, right? When you think storage, you're like, oh, I need to store my videos or I need to store my apps or I need to store something. And right now we've got customers and multiple hundreds of petabytes, right? And try like big customers, lots of storage. And we've got small customers as well, five to 10 terabytes of storage as well. So, but across that entire range in storage, you're basically want to make sure you don't lose your data, it's protected, it's safe, the world's becoming a little less secure, ransomware and attacks and all of those types of things. So we've introduced concepts of ransomware assessment and capabilities like that but the performance of capacity are the two things you want to sign up for. So what if you just said, I want it this fast and I want this much space and all of the other technology problems you give to pure, right? Because you know what, you run out of space, we'll ship the box, we'll manage it. You don't need to call us, you don't need to order, you don't need to do that. So it's more than just, I think when people think about services, they think about subscriptions, right? CapEx versus Apex. And sure there's an element to CapEx versus Apex but that's not really what a service is, that's just a subscription. A service is, hey, I just want this performance and this capacity, who's going to run it and operate it and manage it for me? You know, when you sign up for a SaaS service, you don't really care when you sign up for Salesforce, how it runs, who's running it, et cetera. You just want to manage your CRM pipeline. And you know, we're bringing that same SaaS experience to storage. You do expect that, you bring up a good point when you're talking about SaaS applications, one of the things that we saw in the last year is this massive proliferation or acceleration of companies in every industry dependent on so many SaaS apps just for collaboration alone and internally, let alone externally, brought up ransomware. It's something I've been talking a lot about in the last year, how that's been on the rise. Talk to me about, you know, as enterprise, enterprises need storage to do more than just that. Talk to me about how you're working with customers to ensure that this data across the enterprise is secure. Well, so it's interesting. When I talk to people and they ask me, are you secure? I'm like, well, that's kind of a silly question. Because, you know, if you think about security, there's always more you could do. It's not am I secure, it's how secure am I? And you want to be the NSA where everything's under a lock and key, you can do that. And it's just going to be really expensive to do. So what we're, the way we're approaching it is we're giving customers levels of ransomware that they can actually implement for production. Level zero, right? The simplest is make sure that I've got, you know, an air gap of my data and a copy of it to prevent you from altering it for up to 30 days or some time period, which, you know, is the first level of threat that, you know, someone can't hold you hostage by encrypting your data or those types of things. And we've done that for our whole portfolio, we provide that, and we now even give customers an assessment to tell them, you know, whether they can go into our digital experience and do an assessment to see how secure are they? But that's only the first step. Hackers are actually getting more sophisticated now on air gap and just saying, well, what if I do a time delayed encryption thing that overcomes the 30 day thing? And, you know, like the world's evolving. So the next level is a physical gap where you take it off the primary system and you actually put it on the secondary system, your data. So, you know, your virtual air gaps, one thing, your physical distance provides another layer of security because now it's another physical asset with another copy of your data. Sure it costs more money because you're storing it twice. So you have to decide based on the sensitivity of your information, how many layers of security you want to build it. You can even build in a third layer that says, if something happens, I don't want to pay the ransomware, I just need to be able to recover quickly. So let me have a rapid recovery SLA. And, you know, we use our Flash Play to deliver that because it's one of the, you know, fastest recovery products on the planet based on the performance threshold. So, you know, we've seen a lot of companies now adopt and use Flash Play is kind of that level three for rapid recovery. In, instead of paying for the insurance, they're paying for the remediation, you know what I mean? So it's a different, it's interesting how the landscape has evolved. Right, and as the threat actors have access to more and more sophistication, obviously that becomes a challenge, but you bring up a good point and that is it's sort of, it's not a matter of, is it going to happen to us? It's when, and it's kind of that tolerance level based on the data. Modern data experience, here's been talking about this. Obviously the modern data experience has changed a lot in the last year. Talk to us about what that is. How does the modern data experience, our Pure One and Pure as a Service foundational to that and talk to me about the benefits in it for customers? Well, so when we think about the modern data experience there's really three pillars we talk about in the modern data experience. The first one is just innovation leadership. Pure's got a little bit of a history of redefining storage. First of all, flash, first the unified fast pollen object. You know, we're on a third generation of QLC technology. So we figure if we don't invent the future who else is going to? You know, we look around the landscape and there's a lot of data technology. So we need to invent a future that people have a blueprint to copy. Like, that's our goal of modernizing the landscape. You know, we don't see a lot of original and innovative thought happening in the industry. So we have to create the blueprint of the future, right? We pride ourselves on that innovation leadership. And Evergreen, which, you know, we've introduced as an innovation where, you know, people buy at 500 terabytes of storage today they don't have to rebuy it every three to five years. That innovation that we introduced is still unmatched in industry after we've been in industry for 10 years because companies haven't figured out how to copy it. Evergreen is still a differentiator. It sounds like the modern data experience what you're looking to do is also define it with and for customers and have that be a unique differentiator for what Pure delivers. 100%. So, you know, this innovation leadership is big making sure that you can run your landscape like a cloud, you know, have a service catalog, you know, service catalog for developers as containers. And, you know, we lean very heavily into what we're doing for DevOps and developers not just for our administrators. And, you know, part of the modern data experience is being cloud ready and container ready. And then finally just having the best digital experience which, you know, Pure one and Pure as a service is foundational to where customers can go in and procure easy, support easy and all of it starts with the data. Like if I was to say, hey, you're going to get into a Tesla, right? And you're going to turn on the self-driving mode. Would you turn it on if you knew that there were zero miles clocked on the odometer, right? Where no, like, yeah, you're the first we haven't really trained this yet, right? No one would turn that on. So for you to be able to offer a digital experience and a service experience to a customer it's all about miles driven. And since we've introduced Pure one five years ago, you know, now on a yearly basis we're collecting over 20 petabytes of data tons of signals, training the algorithms around giving customers recommendations which we've been doing now. Customers can get performance recommendations and upgrade recommendations. And now we've used the recommendations are such high fidelity that because of our miles driven we're using that internally to run and operate our services for on behalf of customers. And when companies think about disruptive events let me take my old portfolio and create a new one you're resetting the odometer at zero. So without something like Evergreen it makes no sense in terms of how do you get to as a service? You can get to CapEx versus OpEx, right? And, you know, we were the first people to do that in storage with Pure as a service three plus years ago but we've moved beyond a financial offering now to talk about, you know how do you run and operate performance and capacity as a lease? What's your point is so much more that customers need especially as there's more and more data being generated, you know the edges exploding, IoT devices are exploding and there's more challenges that customers have to do but it's also able to get those fast insights from data to be able to make those data driven decisions which it sounds like what you're doing from all of the mileage that Pure One and Pure as a service have to talk to me about some of the things that are being announced with respect to the digital experience of Pure One at Accelerate. So there's three primary announcements. We've moved beyond observability first to do assessments. So, you know, we can now say, you know instead of just monitoring and watching what's going on we can give you a threat level assessment specific to ransomware. That's a new capability we're introducing. We've also been, you know in monitoring monitoring storage and monitoring virtual machines for a while but if you take a look at how people deploy on storage they deploy VMs and they deploy containers. We've seen very little like they also have bare metal, right? But between those three now you cover how people are using storage from a deployment model and we've brought container monitoring into Pure One for end-to-end traceability monitoring for, you know both your container landscape as well as your storage landscape underneath with our flash drive and flash play. So, you know this observability and assessment space has a lot of new capabilities we're bringing. The second piece is recommendations. So previously we've had this data and customers could go into Pure One and use the data they could simulate adding performance they could simulate adding capacity they could simulate moving this workload from here to here. But now instead of you doing it we've created a recommendation engine where we'll tell you what to do because we actually tracked, you know how much time is spent with people trying to figure out what to do. There were times when storage admins were in the products like let me try moving it from here to here and see what would happen let me try moving it from here to here. If you've got thousands of volumes and hundreds of arrays and that type of thing you can spend weeks trying to figure out what to do by running permutational combinatorics. So instead we've used our AI engine now to simulate taking into account customer preference load capacity previous buying patterns, et cetera to create high fidelity recommendations for performance capacity, placing new workloads workload rebalancing and even for Pure as a service which SLA should I sign up for? When you go to Amazon one of the biggest problems on the cloud is too much choice. There's like 300 items on the service catalog even in storage there's like, I don't know 20, 30 options of should I pick this storage type or this storage type or that storage type? How do you even know? Because we've been the miles driven analogy because we've now know how customers have been deploying you can choose your workloads and based on what we've seen based on the wisdom of what we've collected across all the other customers we can tell you which service instance type you need. So this recommendation approach is big and then the last one is self-service. So customers now in control and set the reserved instances, expand, set the renewals we've even introduced a partner persona where partners can manage things on behalf of a customer and see transparency and billing in order traffic. So all of those things that you're used to in kind of a commerce and a cloud experience we've brought that to traditional storage. So some pretty big changes there and I like how here has always been very bold in defining its differentiators using its own data to make better decisions to as you said customers have a ton of choice, which is great. It's also challenging at the same time for them to be able to understand objectively what is it that my environment needs? Talk to me a little bit about some of the changes that you saw in the last year as companies shifted almost overnight to a remote working situation can't get into my data center. What are some of the ways in which here has helped organizations with the advancements that you've made in your services portfolio? Well, so the first thing we did and we did this kind of literally I think last February when, you know everything immediately went into lockdown we introduced a zero touch provisioning category. You don't want people in the data center, right? You need to obviously if there's physical stuff you have to rack stack and cable but beyond that everything else should be zero touch. And so we've introduced zero touch provisioning capability immediately and some of like the largest one of the largest, you know video conferencing providers on the planet happened to call us immediately saying look we can't even get stuff to keep up with the demand and overnight we were able to go ahead and work with them to, you know get them the efficiency that they needed. So, you know, if I take a look at our supply chain throughout COVID, we were able, you know to meet most shipments in sub four days throughout COVID even in a globally disrupted supply chain because of the agility and the flexibility we have in our portfolio. And frankly just a phenomenal supply chain team as well. So, you know that approach has engendered a ton of trust whenever you do anything, like, you know in this environment, COVID pandemic, et cetera people are under stress. It creates stress for human beings and even creates stress for families, right? I have two small children and it creates stress. What do you, how do you get through that stress? All the things that are unnecessary are things you just forget about and to get the things that are necessary done to go to the people you trust. So that's a great point you bring up about trust because that is table stakes for an organization to trust its partners or its customers to be able to trust that it's going to deliver what it needs. It's no longer a nice to have. I think this, one of the things that COVID climate has shown us is that it's absolutely essential. Last question, Prakash, I want to get to you is let's talk about AI ops for a second. We're seeing more and more organizations turning to AI ops for more intelligent operations. What is it? What are some of the benefits that Pure can deliver in that response? Well, look, I have a lot of opinions on AI ops but the first one is like saying AI ops now is like saying web 2.0 a few years ago, right? It's a hot term. Everyone likes to talk about it and the very few people actually do anything real AI, right? It's like, well, let me tell you something. So as you think about AI ops today you need to first get the data and the miles driven matter. The second thing you need to do is you could use that data and create a ton of recommendations that you tell send to customers. And you will be the equivalent of Facebook ads, right? Like click, click, click, click, click. Some of these are relevant. Some of these aren't, right? If all you do is create recommendations you're creating a spam flow to your customers. The number one thing to really make it learning based is if someone rejects a recommendation you now have to collect that and train your algorithms to say, you know what? This person doesn't need that, right? And maybe the other person accepted that same recommendation and they do. So the time isn't just about data collection and miles driven but the amount of recommendations that customers accept and reject can train and personalize how you do your AI operations. And I feel like this economy because AI ops is hot everyone's just like, I have AI ops and it's just so facetious. You need to think about how you're gonna continually evolve and train and learn and who's gonna train? The way you train support is support personnel and bug fixes. You need to monitor how your support personnel fixes things to be able to replicate and have higher efficiencies and support. So even small customers can get the same level of support as the large customers because, you know, it's not like the big guys get 50 people and the small guys only get one, right? You need to use software as the great equalizer. And the same thing goes in sales when you're approaching customers with offers and recommendations or when customers, whether they need performance or capacity the fidelity matters and data and technology will only go so far. You need to use the human feedback loop to train your AI. If you don't do that you're missing the concept of machine learning. Agreed, last question since we have about 30 seconds left or so talk to me about how peer is going to continue to utilize AI and to your point not just throughout recommendations but actually have learning going on so that the right relevant offers, for example can be delivered to the right customer at the right time. Well, we pride ourselves on simplicity and customer first, right? Our net promoter score is, you know one of the top crust scores in the industry. And because of that we've got a very vibrant and active customer community that goes into, you know tier one on a daily basis to monitor the landscape to see what's going on, to create support cases whatever it may be. And because of that we're going to continue engaging and learning from our customers. And, you know I think you can't do it without the trust and, you know a large portion of our business is large SaaS providers. So, you know you think about, you know very, very large SaaS companies we service them because of our Evergreen model and now bringing this level of predictability creates a level of efficiency for SaaS companies that means they could do more with less. And that's what this industry is about. Well said. Prakash, thank you so much for joining me at our coverage of Accelerate excited to see what's going on with the modern data experience how you're getting in there and working and partnering with customers using the data to learn and tweak and improve. Excited to hear some of the other stuff that comes up but I appreciate you joining me this morning. Thanks for having me Lisa. I enjoyed the conversation. Excellent. Prakash Darje, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2021.