 Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Cure Accelerate 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni, Murley Tirumala. You're still the VP and GM of the Cloud Native Business Unit at Cure Storage. Murley, welcome back. Lisa, it's great to be back at theCUBE. Looking forward to the discussion. Likewise. So it's been about six months or so since the Portworx acquisition by Cure Storage. Give us a lay of the line. What's been going on? What are some of the successes, early wins, and some of the lessons that you've learned? Yeah, you know, this is my third time being acquired, being a serial entrepreneur. So I've seen this movie before, and I have to say that, you know, this is really a lot of good anticipation followed by actually a lot of good stuff that has happened since. So it's been really a great ride so far. And when, you know, let me kind of start with sort of the beginning, sort of what the fundamental kind of goal of the acquisition were, right? There were a couple of kind of major goals and then kind of I can talk about how that integration is going. Really, I think from our viewpoint, from the Portworx viewpoint, the goal of the acquisition from our view was really to help kind of turbo charge and kind of our growth. We had really a very, very good product that was well accepted and established at customers, you know, doing well as far as kind of industry acceptance was concerned. And, you know, frankly, we had some great reference customers and some great installs expanding pretty well. Our issue was really how fast can we, can we turbo charge that growth? Because as everybody knows for a startup, the expensive part of an expansion is really on the go to market and sale side. And frankly, the timing for this was critical for us because the market had moved from, the Kubernetes market has moved from sort of the innovator stage to the early majority stage. So from the pure side, I think this made a lot of sense for them because they have been looking for how they can expand their kind of subscription models, how they can move to add more value from sort of the array-based business that there really have been a wonderful disruptor and to kind of add more value up the stack. And, you know, that was sort of the premise of the acquisition. One of the things that I paid a lot of attention to as anybody does in acquisitions is not just the strategy, but really to understand if there was a culture fit between the teams because, you know, a lot of the times acquisitions don't work because of the core culture fit. And so now let me kind of fast forward a little bit and say, hey, what, you know, looking back in about six, eight months into it, how is it turning out so far? And, you know, things have been just absolutely wonderful. Let me actually start with the culture fit because that often is ignored and is one of the most important parts, right? The resonance in the culture between the two companies is just off the charts, right? It actually starts with what I would call a dramatic kind of customer first sort of orientation. It's something we always had at Porkworks. I always, you know, used to tell our customers with a startup, you end up kind of, you know, you buy the product, but you get the team, right? That's what happens with early stage startups, but pure sort of the same way. They are very focused on customers. So the customer focus is a very, very useful thing that pulls us together. The second thing that's been really heartwarming to see has been really the focus on product excellence. You know, Pure made its dramatic entry into the market using Flash and being sort of the best Flash-based solution and now they've expanded into many, many different areas. And Porkworks also had a focus on product excellence. So that has kind of moved the needle forward for both of us. And then I think the third thing is really a focus on the team winning and not just sort of an individual, right? And look in these COVID times, this has been a tough year for everybody. I think, you know, it's to some extent, even as we onboard new people, it's the culture of the team, the ability to bring new people on board, invite the culture and make progress. All of that is really a function of how well the team kind of is a, you know, we is greater than me type of a model. And I think that both these three values of, you know, customer first, high focus on product excellence and the valuing the team, including the resellers and the customers as part of the team has really kind of, you know, been the cornerstone, I think of our success in the integration. That's outstanding because, you know, you, like you said, this is not your first rodeo launching, coming out of stealth and launching and getting acquired, but doing so during one of the most challenging times in the last hundred years in our history, while aligning cultures, I think that says a lot about the leadership on the Portworx side and the PureSide. You know, I have to say, right? This is one of those amazing things. I mean, and many people now that having been acquired can say this, really most of the diligence, the transactions, all of that were done over Zoom, right? So, and then of course, everything since then is we're still in Zoom paradise. And so I think it really is a testament to sort of the modern tools and stuff that we have, you know, that enabled that. Now, let me talk a little bit about the content of sort of what has happened, right? So strategically, I think the three areas that I think we've had huge kind of synergy and seeing the benefits are first and foremost on the product side. A little later, I'd like to kind of talk a little bit about some of the announcements we're making, but essentially, you know, Pure had this outstanding kind of core storage infrastructure product, well-known in the industry, you know, very much flash oriented, part of the whole kind of all flash kind of era now. And Portworks really came in with the idea of driving Kubernetes and cloud native workloads, which are really the majority of modern workloads. And what we found since then is that the integration of having really a more complete stack which is really centered around what used to be an IT infrastructure purchase, and what is in fact for Kubernetes a more DevOps oriented purchase. And that kind of a combination of being able to kind of provide that combo in one package is something that we've been working very hard on in the last six months. And, you know, I'll mention some of the announcements, but we have a number of integrations with FlashArray and FlashBlade and other pure products that we're able to highlight. So product integration for sure has been an area of some focus, but against a lot of progress. The second one is really customer synergy. You know, I kind of described to our team when we got acquired, I said, it's for us, it's, you know, being acquired by Pure is like strapping a rocket ship, you know, to ourselves as a small company because we now have access to a huge customer footprint. Pure has over 8,000 customers, hugely, amazingly high, kind of almost, you know, unbelievable NPS score with customers, one of the best in the IT industry. And I think, you know, we are finding that with the deployment of containers becoming more ubiquitous, right? 80, 90% of customers in the enterprise are adopting Kubernetes and containers. And therefore these 8,000 customers are a, you know, big, huge target. They got a big target sign for both of us to be able to kind of leverage. And so we've kind of had a number of things that we're doing to kind of address and use the Pure sales team to get access to them. The Pure channel, of course, is also part of that. Pure is 100% channel organization, which is great. So I think the synergy on the customer side with being able to kind of have a solution that works for infrastructure and for DevOps has been a big area. You know, in this day and age, Kubernetes is an area for many of your listeners who are very, very familiar with Kubernetes. Customers struggle not just with day zero, but day one, day two, day three, right? It's how do you put it in production and support and integrating and the use of Kubernetes and containers, putting that stack together is a big area. So support is a big area of paying for customers. And it's an area that, again, for a Portworx viewpoint, now we've expanded our footprint with a great support organization that we can bring to bear 24 by seven around the globe. Portworx is running on a lot of mission critical applications in big industries like finance and retail and these types of things really support is a big area. And then the last thing I will just say is the use cases are hugely synergistic, right? And we'll talk a little bit more about use cases as we go along here, but really there's legacy apps, right? You know, in an interesting way, there's 80% of IT spending is still on legacy apps, if you will, in that stack. However, 80% of all the new applications are being deployed on this kind of modern app stack, right, with all these open source type of products and technologies. And most of that stack, the most of the modern app stack is containerized. You know, the 80, 85% of those applications really are where customers have chosen containers and Kubernetes as the mechanism to deliver those apps. And therefore, you know, pure products like FlashBlade were very, very focused with fast recovery for these kind of modern apps, which are, you know, the stack of AI and personalization and all the modern digital apps. And I think those things kind of align well with the Portworx offering. So really around the areas of culture, you know, customers, products, energy, support, and finally use cases are all kind of been areas of huge progress for us. It also seems to me that the Portworx acquisition gives Pure, a foray, a new buying center with respect to DevOps. Talk to me a little bit about that as an opportunity for Pure. Yeah. The, you know, the modern world is one where the enterprise itself has segmented into a whole lot of new areas of spending and infrastructure ownership, right? And, you know, in the old days, it used to be sort of the network storage and computer and apps, sort of the old kind of model of the world. And of course the app model has moved on and then, you know, certainly there's a lot of different ways, web apps, you know, the three tier apps and the web apps and so on. But the infrastructure world has morphed really into a bunch of other sub-segments and some of it is still traditional hardware. But then even that is being cloudified, right? Because a lot of companies like Pure have taken their hardware array offerings and are offering that as a cloud-like offering where you can purchase it, you know, as a service. And in fact, Pure is kind of offering a set of solutions called Evergreen that allow you to not even, you know, you just kind of under subscription, you get your hardware refreshes bundled in, very, very innovative. So you have now new buying centers coming in, in addition to the old traditional IT, there is sort of this whole, what used to be in the old ways called middleware now has kind of morphed into this DevSecOps kind of set of folks, right? Which is DevOps, it's ITOps and even security is a big part of that. The CISO organization has that kind of segment. And so these buying centers often have new budgets, right? It turns out that for example, to contrast, you know, the Portworx budget really comes from a entirely different budget, right? Our top two budget sources are usually CIO initiatives. They're not from the traditional storage budget. It comes from things like move to cloud or business transformation. And, you know, those set of folks, that set of customers is really born in a different era, so to speak. You know, Lisa, they come and I come from the old world. So I would say that, you know, I'm kind of more of an oldie, hopefully a goldie, but an oldie. These folks are born in the post DevOps, post cloud, post open source world, right? They are used to brand new tools, new GitOps, the way to, you know, everything's run on the cloud. It's on demand. So what we bring to pure is really the ability to take their initiatives, which were around infrastructure and cloudifying infrastructure to now adding two layers on top of that, right? So what Portworx adds to pure is the access to the new automation layer of middleware. Kubernetes is nothing but really an automation of model for containers and for infrastructure now. And then the third layer is on top of this is what I would call the Sassified layer and as a service layer. And so, you know, we bring the opportunity to get into those SaaS like budgets, the DevOps budgets and the DevOps and the SaaS kind of buyers. And together, the business has sort of very different models to it, you know, in addition to not just a different technologies, the buying behavior is different. It's based on a consumption model. You know, it's a subscription business. So it really is a change for new budgets, new buyers and new financial models, which is a subscription model, which as you know, is valued much more highly by Wall Street nowadays, compared to say some of the older hardware models. Well, you know, when we talk about storage or when we talk about data or the modern data experience, the more and more data that's being produced, the more value potentially there is for organizations. I think we saw, we learned several lessons in the last year and one of them is that, you know, being able to glean insights from data in real time or new real time is for many businesses no longer a nice to have, it's really table stakes. It was for survival of getting through COVID. It is now in terms of identification of new business models, but it elevates the data conversation up to the C-suite, the board going, is our data protected, is it secure? Can we access it? And how do we deliver a modern data experience to our customers and to our internal employees? So with kind of that modern data experience and maybe the elevation.conversation lens, talk to me about some of the things that you're announcing at Accelerate with respect to Portworx. Yeah, so there are, you know, two sets of announcements to be honest, actually, this is a pretty exciting time for us, we're in the C-suite con time and the Accelerate time. And so let me kind of, you know, draw a circle around sort of both those sets of announcements, if you will, right? So let's start perhaps with just the sets of things that we are announcing at Accelerate, right? This is kind of the first things that are coming up right now. And I'll tell you, there are some very, very exciting things that we're doing. So the majority of the announcements is our centered around a release that we have called 2.8. So Portworx is, you know, we've been in the market now for well over five years with the product that really has been, you know, well deployed in very large global 2K enterprises. So the three or four major announcements, one of them is what I was talking about earlier, the integration of true Kubernetes applications running on pure storage. So we have a cloud native implementation of Portworx running on FlashArray and FlashBlade where essentially when users now provision a container volume through Portworx, the storage volumes are automatically created on FlashArray and FlashBlade, right? It's the idea of without having to interface so a DevOps engineer can deploy, you know, storage as code by provisioning volumes using Kubernetes without having to go issue a trouble ticket or a service ticket for a pure array. And Portworx essentially acts as sort of a layer between Kubernetes and the pure array and we allow configuration of volumes on the storage volumes of the pure array directly. So essentially now on FlashArray, these volumes now receive the full suite of Portworx storage management features, including Kubernetes DR, backup, security, auto-scaling and migration. So that is a first kind of version of sort of this integration, right? The second one is a personal favorite of mine. It's very, very exciting, right? When we came into pure, we discovered that pure or had this software solution called Pure as a Service. It was essentially a pure one service that allowed for continuous call home and log and diagnostic information. Really an awesome window for customers to be able to kind of see what their array utilization is like, complete observability end-to-end on capacity, what's coming up and allowed for proactive kind of, addressing of outages or issues or being able to kind of see it before it happened. The good news now is Portworx is integrated with pure one. And so now customers have kind of a unified observability stack for their Kubernetes applications using Portworx and FlashArray and FlashBlade in the pure one portal. So we are in the pure one portal now, really providing kind of end-to-end troubleshooting of issues and deployment. So very, very exciting, something that I think is a major step forward, right? Absolutely. Well, that single pane of glass is critical for management. So many companies waste a lot of time and resources managing disparate disconnected systems. And again, the last year has taught us so many businesses, there wasn't time because there's going to be somebody right behind you that's going to be faster and more nimble and has that single pane of glass unified view to be able to make better decisions. Last question really before we wrap here, I can hear your momentum, I can feel your momentum through Zoom here. Talk to me about what's next. Cause I know that when the acquisition happened about, we said six months or so ago, you said this is a small step in the Portworx journey. So what's ahead? Lisa, great question. I can say 10 things, but I'll let me kind of step up a little bit at the 10,000 foot level, right? In one sense, I think no company gets to declare victory in this ongoing battle and we're just getting started. But if I had to kind of say, what are some of the major teams that we have been part of and have been able to kind of make happen in addition to take advantage of, Pure obviously took advantage of the flash wave and the move to all flash. That's been kind of a major disruptor with Pure being the lead for Portworx. It has been really the move to containers and data management in an automated form, right? Kubernetes has become sort of not just a container orchestrator looking north, but looking southbound is orchestrating infrastructure. We are in the throes of that revolution. But if you think about it, the other thing that's happening is all of this is in the service of, if you're a CIO, you're in the service of lines of businesses asking for a way to run their applications in a multi-cloud way, run their applications faster. And that is really the as a service revolution. And it feels a little silly to almost talk about as a service in this late in the cloud era, but the reality is that's just beginning, right? As a service revolution, dramatically changed the IaaS business, the infrastructure business. But if you look at it, data services as a data as a service is something that is what our customers are doing. So our customers are taking Pure hardware, Pure Portwork software, and then they are building them into a platform as a service, things like databases as a service. And what we are doing, you will see some announcements from us in the second half of this year, terribly exciting. I just can't wait for it, where we're going to be actually moving forward to allow our customers to more quickly get to data services at the push of a button, so to speak, right? So the idea of database as a service to offer messaging as a service, search as a service, streaming as a service, and then finally some ML kind of AI as a service, these five categories of data services are what you should be expecting to see from Portworks and Pure going forward from in the next half. Big potential there to really kick the door wide open on the total adjustable market. Well, Merley, it's been great to have you on the program. I can't wait to have you on next, because I know that there's so much more, like I said, I can feel your momentum through our virtual experience here. Thank you so much for joining us, giving us the lay of the land of what's been happening with the Portworks acquisition and all of the momentum and excitement that is about to come. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. Here's to a great reduced COVID second half of the year. Oh, cheers to that. Yeah, cheers. All right, thanks for Merley Tiramale. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate.