 Good afternoon, everyone. Lisa Martin here with Rob's Touch A. We are coming to you live from the VMware Explorer at the Venetian Expo. This is day one of three days of Qth coverage. We have two sets, lots of content. It's also our 13th year of covering VMware customer events. We have one of the luminaries from Pure Storage. Finally, making his debut on the Qth, please welcome Cody Hosterman, Senior Director of Product Management at Pure. Great to have you, Cody. It's really great to be here. I've been watching the streams for many, many years and it's very fulfilling for me to be on here with you. So thank you very much. We appreciate it. So talk to us a little bit about Pure's big focus at VMware Explorer this year. I know there's some breaking news that broke this morning. Tell us about that. Yeah, you know, I mean, obviously one of the big messages here is multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. The Wi-Fi password is multi-cloud, right? You know, send the, you should say like send a message in your Wi-Fi name, but they went with the password. I think it's very interesting. No, a major focus for us, a major announcement for us just today was our support of Azure VMware solution with our product Pure Cloud Block Store. You know, a first enterprise block external offering for VMware Cloud. We're super excited to get this in the market. It's a pretty cool day for us. I bet. Talk about also what that means in terms of the expansion and the evolution of Pure's relationship, partnership with VMware and what that signifies. Yeah, this is a really important step for us around our go-to-market partnership with both VMware and Microsoft, right? Is that we can, an important part of what we're introducing here is help to optimize cost and really make the Azure VMware solution environment fit our customer's needs, right? Because a lot of customers needed some changes, needed some additional storage capacities, and it wasn't working out for them today. And so basically what we can do is by introducing our product into the sales cycle, we can shorten it and sell with these VMware and Microsoft sellers that were currently blocked out of some of these opportunities. So we have a really nice partnership around helping them sell their services, which is really what our folks is in particular in the public cloud. How can we help cloud vendors, VMware, sell their offerings with our product? I mean, Pure has been known for go-fast storage for quite a while now. How is this and how are the folks that are going to be using AVS, Microsoft's Azure VMware service? So we're solution. I always get, I always get it, always mixed up. There's an S in there. I'm just going to go AVS because I don't work for them. Exactly. But how are they going to be able to take advantage of the go-fast storage that Pure is so known for? And how does that really play within the Microsoft environment as well? Yeah, I think there's two main points here. And I could feather that into about a thousand other ones, but I'll keep it to two. Is really there's two things that we've done well historically across the board, right? So one is we build our product on the concept of data reduction, efficiency, deduplication, compression, pattern removal, thin provisioning. We built this to make flash cost-effective, right? I mean, this is what we built our company on. And, you know, surprise, surprise, these efficiencies also make a pretty big impact in the public cloud, right? How introducing our data reduction technologies to make efficient use of the back-end storage reduces the footprint, makes it more cost-effective and brings that into the cloud environment. The other prong here is just the VMware use case. About over three-quarters of our FlashArray customers are running VMware on one or more other FlashArray. It's a huge business for us. We've put a lot of energy into our co-engineering with VMware to make it a really streamlined and simple use case. And so all the stuff that we've built for on-premises VMware environments are now available with Azure VMware solution. Talk a little bit about the customer demand. Obviously, you're launching this now. I imagine customers were asking for it. You were talking about some of the challenges that they were having. How were customers involved in the actual evolution of this in the partnership? Yeah, so there's a couple pieces here. Like, certainly what started our interest in this, and the Microsoft's interest as well, is that they've been getting customer demand. Like, hey, we use pure on-prem. We want to take advantage of it in the public cloud. We like this feature. We like this use case. Whatever the case may be. There was building demand around that across the board. And, of course, there was losses, right? There were customers not able to take advantage of the product, right? We saw a couple different reasons around struggles around databases, cost optimization, and overall feature usage. And when we dug down into it, it was storage-related problems. And so we can open up that to those customers that were looking at AVS but couldn't for some other reason. And, of course, in the process of bringing it to market, we had customers in what Microsoft calls private preview, validating use cases. We had about 15 or 20 things. We really specifically wanted customers to give us feedback on. Is this right? Is this truly solving your problem? So we didn't want to launch something that was just a checkbox. We wanted to truly solve customer problems around their adoption with AVS. And so it's been a great partnership with our customers, with Microsoft as well. One of the notes I was reading about Cloud Block Store for AVS is that customers can achieve up to a 10x cost reduction. So we're talking about significant savings, potentially. Yeah, absolutely. Because there's really two pieces at play around this cost savings, right? One is, you know, data reduction, compression, you know, reducing the footprint. That's a part of it, but not honestly the main one. A big part of it is that a significant amount of on-premises VMware customers are storage heavy. 60% or so of external storage users are blocked. And there's some file as well. And then there's a smattering of other options on-premises. And so a significant amount of them are very storage heavy. And so those customers themselves were fairly blocked out around the particular solution itself. And so bringing that into AVS and opening up that market was really a key piece of what we were trying to do here. And it would seem that having same kit on-prem and in the cloud gives them advantages, especially when you look at mobility and data reduction and what you bring up into the cloud. Maybe you want to go to AVS and use certain, you know, you want to burst for GPUs to do some, you know, LLM fund, something like that. Exactly. And then that's kind of more pointed that I want to get as well on the cost optimization point around that 10x number is that if you need more storage without external storage like Pure, you have to provision more compute, right? That's you're paying for compute that you don't need. And so we can reduce the amount of compute that you need to the exact that you actually want and then add in the amount of storage that you need, really right-sizing the environment. And so where these large numbers around cost savings come into are use cases where you don't necessarily need all that compute right now, disaster recovery. You can provision zero compute and just use our product to store the data and then bring up the environment as needed. Analytics, DevTest, places where it's very elastic. We can reduce what you need of compute to very minimal amount, introducing significant cost savings and those particular use cases across the board. What's been some of the feedback today? Obviously that news broke this morning at 6 a.m. Pacific time. But what have you heard on the show floor, analysts, customers? It's been, it's been, there's been a lot of different pieces of feedback. I think one of my favorite quotes is that it was from a customer that commented on one of my LinkedIn posts. They're just saying, I have Pure on-prem. I'm really excited to be able to finally use it in the public cloud. That's really a cool thing for me to see across the board because I've been working our VMware ecosystem for a while. Similar thing with our channel partners. We've been comments like, I've been selling with Pure for a decade. I'm very excited that we finally sell with them really on the Azure VMware solution today too. So channel partner customers in VMware folks. I've been getting a lot of VMware folks coming up to me this at the booth and just randomly walking around. They're like, hey, this is like, we see what you're doing. You're really solving a problem. This is opening up a new market for us. And so they're excited to talk to their customers about it. So it's been fun to hear the feedback on this offering. Yeah, I think one of the things that I wonder about and you can help me with this is one of the things your customers, when I talk to them, they love is the Pure Evergreen. Is that part of this whole thing as well? Or how does that work? That's a great question because really Evergreen, there's two pieces that I see Evergreen come to play here. So one is the consumption model, the licensing model. So we have an Evergreen one offering that allows you to just purchase capacity from Pure. And that is applicable to flash arrays on-premise hardware, flash arrays, and as well as Pure Cloud Blockstore in Azure. And so that license can actually follow your data set. So if you're migrating, building new applications in the Azure VMware solution, either one, in particular the migration, you don't need to line that migration up with your storage refresh. You move it as needed, that license follows it. And if you empty that flash array on-premises because you've been fully moved into the cloud, that gets shipped back to Pure. We own it. It's your OPEX paying for the capacity. And so the licensing model makes it really flexible to make this migration happen at your pace at the amount that you want to actually move it to. That's one piece, kind of the economic model of it. The other side is the technical model, the technology that we introduced. Part of the Evergreen story is that your product is Evergreen, right? It gets better and better and better over time. We continue to invest in improving the product. Very recently, we moved from Altra SSD, which is a form of block storage with an Azure, into premium SDV2. And we moved our controllers from a D-series to E-series compute, improving our performance by 30% and dropping the cost of running our product by a third. Significant improvement that just came with a random purity upgrade. It was literally our code. It was six, I think it was purity 645, if I recall, right? It's a very innocuous number. We're releasing monthly on our purity offering. And so the Evergreen promise is not just about the mobility of licensing, but also just really just your subscribing to innovation to the platform. And that's a big part of our software-only model when it comes to CBS. So the solution that was announced this morning, when is that going to be generally available for the regions? So it is in public preview right now. So any customer can go on and try it out. GA usually happens. Microsoft process is usually about 90 days or so around it. And that can vary based on customer feedback. So we have some significant feedback. We want to go and dress and make some changes. That can delay it a little bit longer, but generally it's around 90 days. So we expect GA towards the end of the year. Nice. And is this kind of an expansion in the Microsoft partnership? I mean, or is this the first stop in a partnership that is continuing to grow? Oh, this is, it's certainly a major stop, but it's certainly not our first one, but it's definitely a big one for us. We've been offering Cloud Block Store in Azure. And there's many other parts of Pure's business, of course, that interact with Azure, right? Our Portworx team, you know, we spoke with the Venkat in the past and Flash Play as well, some EDA use cases. But at least from the software side and the Cloud Block Store side, this is certainly a step, but not the first one. We've been seeing a tremendous amount of growth in what we call the Cloud Storage Optimization offering, where customers are looking to invest in Azure in different ways, AWS as well. I want to spend my money on more strategic initiatives, AI, pipelining and past services around that, but I'm not getting more money in my IT budget to spend. And so what do you do? You have to find somewhere in your budget to save money and reallocate that cost. And so we've been seeing customers look at their bill. It's like, well, the two biggest places are compute and storage, right? Not functionally different than you see on premises, right? When it comes to the biggest cost centers. And so they're like, all right, we right size our compute and what can we do around right sizing storage? Well, there's not a lot you can do. You can drop tiers, you can sacrifice features. There's not much else. And so they did that, but didn't really save the money they needed to invest in these other places. And so that's where we got brought in. Our products is about optimization of storage footprint as a data reduction, T-dub, compression, all that type of stuff. And saving 30, 40% on their cloud storage bill what they can reinvest, right? And that money, you know, like sometimes we talk to Azure sellers and like, well, we don't want them to spend less. Like no one spends less. Like if you spend your money more wisely at home, you don't give it back to your company, right? You put it in your investment or you buy a TV or whatever. Same thing is that that money is being reallocated to far more strategic initiatives within Azure. And so we've been seeing some great success that makes Microsoft happy, us happy because we're selling to happy customers and these customers are spending their money more strategically. And so it's been a motion that we've been working on for a while and we announced a major customer that purchased that at our recent annual fiscal reporting as well. So we're seeing a lot of success in that area too. So continued flywheel of momentum at Pure Storage which we always see a year after year. What are some of the things that excite you about the, say the next, you know, six months, 12 months and in particular in your relationship with VMware as it evolves. Yeah, so I mean, there's a couple of things. I mean, like, I'm certainly excited about we finally have this AVS offering in public previews that customers can dive in really taking advantage of it and I'm excited just to see the partnership between our sales organizations and our joint customers really grow. So I think I truly excited about that. Certainly we're doing a lot with VMware. We've always made a point with VMware to co-engineer offerings, really build the vSphere platform and this external storage ecosystem further and further. We recently added NFS data stores to our offering for a unified experience around flash arrays of block and file and we're working with VMware to push that forward too. There's a lot of stuff that hasn't been happening around that, around enhancements on the NFS stack and VMware is really open to working with us on that. So there's some cool things coming with that. Overall, we've been spending a lot with NVMware fabrics in the virtual volume program with VMware and we're releasing NVMware fabric support for VVolts quite soon. We have a new version of a certificate management for VASA providers with VVolts a lot coming out just on the core storage side with VMware. So I'm excited about some of the conversations we had with VMware PM this week, what we can start moving on and the things we'll be shipping over the next six months. So there's a ton coming on core VMware. I was going to say you were one of the first to actually support VVolts on an array. I remember back to when that was there. We weren't the first. So there was kind of an early wave around it and then we were, I would call us the second wave where when we came in and we re-looked at the architecture, how can truly simplify it? I call us one of the leaders of that second wave of VVolts vendors that really simplified the platform and really brought it into the kind of the core thinking and strategy around our customers around storage. So I think we've been very vocal about it and frankly that's a fairly common thought that we were the first ones because frankly, my personal view, we're the first ones to do it right. Oh, there you go. Chots fired. Chots fired. That's a bike chop I'm just telling you right there. There we go. You are officially a CUBE alumni. We so appreciate you coming on and sharing the great news and the continued momentum that we see from Pure Storage. Yeah, I really appreciate the time. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much. Good, our pleasure. For our guests and for Rob Scudge, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 23. Stick around. Dave Vellante is here next for the great insights on day one of our coverage. We'll see you soon.