 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Hi, welcome to the CUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 with special coverage of APN partner experience. I'm John Furrier, your host. We are the CUBE virtual. We can't be there in person, we're there remote. And our two next guests are, we have Pure Storage, Michael Sotnik, VP of Worldwide Alliance is Pure Storage, and Rob Charnacki, Principal Product Manager for AWS Outposts. Welcome to the CUBE. Wonderful to be here, great to see you and thanks for having us. Michael, great to see you at Pure. You guys had some great momentum, earnings and some announcements. You guys have some new news. We're here at re-invent all part of AWS and Outposts. I want to get into it right away. Talk about the relationship with AWS. I know you guys have some hot news just came out in late November. We're here in the event, all the talk is about new higher level services, hybrid edge, what are you guys doing? What's the story? Yeah, look, I had to tell you, the partnership with AWS is a very high profile and strategic partnership for Pure Storage. Now we've worked hard with our cloud block store for AWS, which is an extensibility solution for Pure's flash array and into AWS. I think the big news and one of the things that we're most proud of is the recent establishment of Pure being service ready and Outposts ready and the first and only on-prem storage solution. And we're shoulder to shoulder with AWS as AWS takes Outposts into the data center. Now they're going after key workloads that we're well known for and we're very excited to partner with AWS in that regard. You know, congratulations to Pure. We've been following you guys from the beginning since inception, since it was founded, start up and now see growing public company on the next level kind of growth plan. You guys were early on all this stuff with Flash, with software and cloud, so it's paying off. Rob, I want to get to Outposts because this was probably the most controversial announcements I've ever covered at re-invent over the past eight years. It really was the first sign that Andy was saying, you know what, we're working backwards from the customers and they all are talking hybrid, we're going to have Outposts. Give us the update. What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing success with Outposts? Now that that's part of the portfolio. How does it all work and out? Give us the update on the workloads and the verticals. Absolutely. Although I have to say, I call it more exciting than controversial. We're so excited about the opportunities that Outposts open for our customers. And you know, customers have been asking us for years, how can we bring AWS services to our data centers? And we thought about it for a long time. And until we define the Outposts service, we really thought we could do better. And what Outposts does is it lets us take those services that customers are familiar with. It lets us bring it to their data center. And one of the really bright spots over the past year has just been how many different industries and market segments have shown interest in Outposts, right? You could have customers, for example, with data residency needs, those that have to do local data processing, maybe have latency needs on a specific workload that needs to run near their end users, or just folks trying to modernize their data center. And that's a journey that transformation takes time, right? So Outposts works for all of those customers. And one of the things that's really become clear to us is to enable the success that we think Outposts can have, we need to meet customers where they are. And one of the fantastic things about the Outposts Ready program is many of those customers are using Pure and they have Pure hardware. And we send an Outpost over to the Pure lab recently. And I have to tell you, a picture of those two racks next to each other looks really good. You know, it's funny, just to kind of walk back my controversial comment. You know, I meant in the sense of that's when cloud really got big into the enterprise and you had to deal with hybrid. So I do think it's exciting because the edge is a big theme here. Can you just share real quick before I get into some of the pure questions on this edge piece with the hybrid? Because what's the customer need? And when you talk to customers, I know you guys, you know, really kind of work backwards from the customer. What are their needs? What causes them to look at Outposts as part of their hybrid? What's the key consideration? Yeah, so there are a couple of different needs. John, right? One, for example, is we have regions and local zones across the globe, but we're not everywhere. And their data residency regulations that are becoming increasingly common and popular. So customers might come to us and say, look, I really need to run, for example, a financial services workload that needs to be in Thailand. And we don't have a regional local zone in Thailand, but we can get them an Outpost to places where they need to be, right? So that requirement to keep data, whether it's by regulation or by a contractual agreement, that's a big driver. The other piece is there's a tremendous amount of interest in that top-down executive sponsorship across enterprise customers to transform their operations, right? To modernize their digital approach. But when they actually look at their estate, they do see an awful lot of hardware. And that's a hard challenge to plan the migration. When you can bring an Outposts right into that data center, it really makes it much easier because AWS is right there. There could be a monolithic architecture that it doesn't lend well to having part of the workload running in the region, part of the workload running in their data center. But with an Outposts, they can extend AWS to their data center. And that just makes it so much easier for them to get started on their digital transformation. Michael, this is a key trend. You guys saw early cloud operations on-premise. It becomes cloudified at that point when you have DevOps on-premises and then pure cloud for bursting, all that stuff. And now you got the edge exploding as well as growth and opportunity. What causes the customer to get the pure option on Outposts? What's the angle for you guys? Obviously storage, you got data and I can see this whole here where there's no region and certainly Outposts stores data and that's a requirement for a lot of, certainly global customers and needs. What's the pure angle on this? Yeah, I appreciate that. And I appreciate Rob's comments around what AWS sees in the wild in terms of pure footprint in the market share that we've established as company over 11 years in business and over eight years of shipping product. What I would tell you is one of the things that a lot of people miss is the simplicity and the consistency that are characteristically very much in the AWS experience and equally within the pure experience. And that's really powerful. So as we were successful in putting pure into workloads that for all the reasons that Rob talked about, right? Data gravity, the regulatory issues, just application architecture and its inability to move to the public cloud. Our predictability, our simplicity, our consistency really match what the customer was getting with other workloads that they had in AWS. And so with AWS Outposts that's really bringing to the customer that single pane of glass to manage their entire environment. And so we saw that, we made the three year investment in Outposts. As Rob said, just having our solution in Pure's data center it's set up and running today with the solution built on FlashBlade which is our unstructured data solution and delivering fantastic performance results and AI and ML workloads. We see the same opportunity within backup and disaster recovery workloads and analytics. And then equally the opportunity to build FlashRay and our other storage solutions and to build architectures with Outposts in our data center and bring them to market. Real quick, just to follow up on that. What use cases are you seeing that are most successful with Outposts? And in general, how do you guys get your customers to integrate with the rest of their environments? Because everyone's got now this operating environment it's not just cloud public, it's cloud on-premise and everything else. Yeah, you know what's cool is, and then Rob hit right on it, is the wide range of industries and the wide range of use cases and workloads that are finding themselves attracted to the Outposts offering. And so, without a doubt, there's going to be, I think what people would immediately believe, right? AI and ML workloads and the importance of having high-performance storage and to have a high-performance Outposts environment, as close to the center as possible of those solutions, but it doesn't stop there. Traditional, virtualized database workloads that for reasons of application architecture aren't candidates to move. AWS's public cloud offering are a great fit for Outposts and those are workloads that we've always traditionally been successful with in the market and see a great opportunity to build on that success as an Outposts partner. Rob, I got to ask you last reinvent when we were in person, when we had real life back then. I was at the replay party and hanging out and this guy comes out to me, I didn't even know who he was, obviously big time engineer over there, opens his hand up and shows me this little processor and I'm like, he closes it and he's like, and I go, I take a picture and everyone's like freaking out, don't take a picture. It was the big processor, it was the big kind of perna, I think it was, the big monster. And it was just so small. See, the innovation and hardware, you guys have done a lot there, that's cool. I can't get your thoughts on where the future's going there because you got great hardware innovation, but you got the higher level services with containers. I know you guys took your time. Containers are super important because that's going to deal with that. So how do you look at that? You got the innovation on the hardware, check containers, how does that all fit in? Cause you guys have been making a lot of investments in some of these cloud native projects. What's your position on that? You know, it's all part of one common story, John, right? Customers, they want an easy path to delivering impact for their business, right? And you've heard us speak a lot over the past few years about how we're really seeing these two different types of customers. We have those customers that really love to get those foundational core building blocks and stitch them together in a creative way. But then you have more and more customers that they want to operate at a different level. And that's okay, we want to support both of them. We want to give both of them all the tools that they need to spend their time and put their resources towards what differentiates their business and just be able to give them support at whatever level they need on the infrastructure side. And you know, it's fantastic that our combination of investments in hardware and services and now with Outpost, we can bring those investments even closer to the customer. If you really think about it that way, the possibilities become limitless. Yeah, I'd like to simplicity aspect, it's pretty beautiful too, the way it looks. It looks nice. Michael, I got to ask you on your side, a couple of big announcements that we've been following from Pure. Looking back, you obviously had the Pure as a Service announcement. You bought the Port Works with acquisition. You know, that's container management across the data center, including Outposts. You got Pure as a Service. Is Pure as a Service working with Outposts? And if so, how and what's the consumption model for customers there? Yeah, thanks so much, John. And I appreciate you following us the way that you do. It's meaningful and appreciated. Listen, I think the customers have made it clear and AWS has kind of led the way in terms of the consumption and experience expectations that customers have. It's got to be consumable. They've got to pay for what they use and it's got to be outcome oriented. And we're doing that with Pure as a Service. And so I think we saw that early and have invested in Pure as a Service for our customers. And we look at the way we acquired Outposts as a customer and a partner of AWS. And that is exactly the same way customers can consume Pure, all of our solutions in a, use what you need, pay for what you use environment. And one of the exciting things about our AWS partnership is it's wide ranging. And one of the things that AWS has done, I think world-class is marketplace. And so we're excited to share with this audience, really on the back of just recent announcement that Pure as a Service is available within the AWS marketplace. And so you think about the simplicity and the consistency that Pure and AWS deliver to the market, AWS customers demand that. And they get that in the marketplace and we're proud to have our offerings there. And Portworx has been in the marketplace and we'll continue to be showcased from a container management standpoint. So as those workloads increasingly become the cloud native, DevOps containerized workloads, we've got a solution end to end to support that. Great job, great insight. Congratulations to Pure. Good moves, dad's making some good moves. Rob, I want to just get to you the final word here on Outposts again. Great, everyone loves this product. Again, it's a lot of attention. It's really that puts the operating model of cloud firmly in the on-premise world for Amazon, opens up a lot of good conversation and business opportunities and technical integrations are all around you. So what's your message to the ecosystem out there for Outposts? How do I, what's the word? I want to do my work with you guys. How do I get involved? What are some of the opportunities? What's your position? How do you talk to the ecosystem? Yeah, you know, John, I think the best way to frame it is we're just getting started. We've got our first year in the books. We've seen so many promising signals from customers, had so many interesting conversations that just weren't possible without Outposts. And, you know, working with partners like Pure and expanding our Outposts ready program is just the beginning, right? We launched back in September. We've seen another meaningful set of partners come out here at Reinvent. And we're going to continue to double down both the Outposts business, but specifically on working with our partners. I think that the key to unlocking the magic of Outposts is meeting customers where they are. And those customers are using our partners. And there's no reason that it shouldn't just work when they move their partner-based workload from their existing infrastructure right over to the Outposts. All right, I'll leave it there. Michael Sotnik, VP of Worldwide Alliances at Pure Storage, congratulations on the great innovation strategy. It's easy to do alliances when you've got a great product and technology. Congratulations, Rob Carnegie, Principal Product Manager of Outposts. We'll be speaking more to you throughout the next couple of weeks here at Reinvent Virtual. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so Cube Virtual, we are the Cube Virtual. We wish we could be there in person this year, but it's a virtual event over three weeks. We'll leave lots of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.