 So everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Mountain View, California at Pure Storage's headquarters on Cache Territory. We're here in the arcade of the main building, one of six buildings here in downtown where Pure has their contingent of offices. I'm joined by Kathy Self, who is a CIO of Pure, formerly many, many years at AT&T running IT operations and right of other workloads. Great to see you, thanks for spending the time. Great, thanks for having me. So we're in the arcade here all the old school standup video games from our generation when we used to play video games standing up, but kind of speaks to the culture of Pure. What's your role of Pure, what do you do and how long you've been here? Yeah, great. So I've been here at Pure for just about five months and it's been great. I came on board as a CIO and as all companies are facing their challenges going forward, we have ours for scaling as this business continues to grow. So super excited to be here and just been a lot of fun so far. Tell about your career before Pure, where were you and how long you worked there? I spent a better part of my career at AT&T, amazing company and was there for a little over 21 years, had a variety of roles, primarily always in the technology side. So everything from the IT, from application side to operations, to infrastructure, to project management, to technology innovation. And then the last few years was spent working on a lot of our network strategy. So what are we doing as a business to kind of transform AT&T's service provider network and how does that align from a cloud and a technology for what we had been doing in some cases on the IT side? And you've been at both sides of the table, you were a customer of Pure, now you work at Pure running all IT here as a CIO, trying to keep this transformation going. What's your take on the industry right now? Because it's interesting times as IT's transforming, you've got security front center, roles are changing, you've got skills gaps, you've got the cloud with scale, a lot of change. Yeah, you know, and it's interesting, that happens at both big companies and smaller companies. So the transition at AT&T having those same challenges, they look different here at Pure because we are a lower nine-year-old company. And as you start to look at, we have the real benefit of being a little bit younger in the tech front and being so close to, obviously being in Silicon Valley, you're so close to all the VCs and the startups, you get to have a little bit of different flavor, but it's a huge transition. I think that all of us in the industry are really faced with the challenges of not just trying to transform your teams and the work and what they're doing, but then also enable technology that's gonna bridge us from, what do we have to do with today and where do we think we're gonna go? So I don't think that is any different on any of the companies. I think we're all in that same boat of saying, how do you make sure I have technology that's gonna live longer than a year or three years? And then how do I have a workforce that can continue to grow and develop? Because we wanna be able to have our talent stay with us and make those journeys with us. And one of the things we do a lot of CUBE interviews over the past 10 years, certainly in IT, change has been a constant theme. But what's interesting is economics have changed and it's still got the skilled gas, but economics have changed and then the time to value the big long projects used to take months and months, years are now short and those cycles have been accelerated down to months and days sometimes. Can you comment and react to economics and then the time to value? You know, I think economics are, they're always in the forefront of every company, especially publicly traded companies that, you know, you wanna make sure we're returning the right value to our shareholders and that's an important aspect. But I think the more important part of it is just trying to make sure that you can make decisions that can outlive kind of a shorter economic window than maybe you'd have would have done in the past. So I think that's where all of us in the space of CIO roles are trying to really evaluate, how do you do that? How do you make sure that you can make those transitions and not have economics be your only foundation, but be part of it to help you make some of that shift? And the emphasis on workloads, I've probably heard the word workload, if it was a tag cloud, I'd probably say workload would be the biggest font because workloads would mean applications, applications have been around for a while, but more and more applications are coming, the migrating workloads to the cloud on premise. So a lot of emphasis on workloads these days, is that putting pressure on ITs, is putting pressure on the operations? How do you see that whole workload thing evolving? Yeah, I definitely do. So one of the big initiatives I ran AT&T was migrating a thousand of our strategic applications onto an on-prem private cloud. And it was all about not just the economics, but also the efficiency and the enablement for the business to move faster at a lower cost point. So that always tends to be your kind of bottom line part. But I think as I've come into Pure and has your trying to figure out how do you evolve, our workloads look very different. We are in our applications look very different. So companies have different profiles of whether it's an application or a workload. I think the other is it's a hyper focused around the user experience or the, so not just the end customer, but also the employee experience and what happens. So when you talk about workloads, it's not just applications that are business functions. They're also about how do you make sure that our employees are having that great experience because you want to have that so that they can help to grow us as well and be productive in their roles. I want to ask you one of the talk tracks I have on my notes here about Pure specifically, but more generically workloads are dominated in conversation, but also technology selection and personnel selection are also tied to workloads. And some have said to me, pick the right cloud for the right workload, pick the right tool for the job. You hear that a lot. You do. What's your thoughts on that? Because this seems to kind of muddle the wars a little bit because the old school was, oh, here's my suppliers. You pick them, they're all standing on, they all come in with this general purpose. But now with customization, more agility, it seems to be that workloads and selection of tech and people are tied together for that. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think that, you know, part of our challenge is figuring out, and this is what you hear a lot of is don't get yourself locked in. And to that old notion of, you know, what you would have seen, you know, back in the day is you did, you'd pick a vendor and you kind of ride that through whatever, you know, the challenge you had. I think the vendor community has also recognized that's not really the model they want to be in either. They really want to be a partner. So now it's about figuring out what I consider enablement. So can I use you to work on or to be optimized for a certain type of function? But can I put my workload somewhere else and do it? So that's been one of the things I've been surprised that's probably more rapid shift is it's not just about can I do it all myself or on-prem or with these set of vendors, it's to say I want to be able to actually move across. So can I have the flexibility and being realistic because you can't have, you know, total flexibility and everything. But you can start to be prescriptive about certain areas and saying these type of applications or these functions or these workloads, I could get the largest amount of flexibility. But these, I'm actually okay saying most optimized, should go here. Whether that's on-prem, off-prem, hybrid, I think that's what we'll start to see a lot of. Yeah, we see that in the cloud conversation. We're going to talk with some peer folks about this, but one cloud could be great for a workload. That's right. And use another cloud for another workload. And that's multi-cloud because you have a couple of clouds. That's right. And that's the trend that we're seeing. Do you see that? Absolutely. Solid at AT&T, same thing here at Pure. We do some on-prem and we do some hybrid. We also do some hosted where we have our SaaS provider host start the application as well. And that actually then starts to get you into some other challenges that we have in IT that you start to say, so what happens with my data? And what does that look like? Where is it going? How is it secure? All those things that are so important as a business to make sure your customer and your employee data is, you know, core and centric to you. Final question before we get into the talk track. I got to ask you, being a veteran in the business, what is it crazier now? Than it was 10, 15 years ago in terms of work, operations, is it faster? What's your take on, you know, if you look back the old way into the new ways that, you know, more of the same, but just different kind of products and technologies. What's your take? So I probably had a unique role because I think it's super fun. I think that the ability to be able to transform your business and have the flexibility, I'm certainly being here in this role. And, you know, nine and a half year old company, there's lots of opportunity to be completely flexible. And I think that part is really fun. I think that the challenge for some larger, you know, companies who've been around 100 plus year old companies, as those companies, you know, have a challenge with saying, I've got such a large embedded base and trying to be, you know, interoperable around what exists and where they want to go. I think a lot of us that are, you know, in these companies that are like pure, we have a, you know, kind of, I think of it as a gift to be able to say, hey, this is really something we should be able to do. How do we go do it and have the support to actually do it? So it's a, I think it probably depends on the part of the industry that you're in. There's definitely some challenges and I think privacy is definitely, you know, kind of a backdrop, but I think as you think about that, there's workable solutions for that as all companies are trying to go through. I think it's just a matter of making a, you know, that commitment to say, you know, you can, it can be flexible and you can make the progress you're looking for. It seems to be more of a builder culture as well as just an operational culture. That's right. Build and operate, build and operate, kind of a new kind of flywheel. Yeah, and I think that's the exciting part for IT is I think we've transitioned or in that mode that time of period where instead of just being a pure enablement for the business, it's really turning it into, how do you become a strategic partner? How do you have that seat at the table where you're helping to say, how do I help your business? It's not just about, hey, I got these applications, here's our availability, here's, I mean, those are what I consider table stakes. You've got to be able to do those things. Now it's about, how can I help you actually, improve what you're trying to do in the business side of it? So that's the part I think is unique and different is that focus on IT helping to enable, not just enable, but be that strategic partner to help change the business. That's awesome. A couple of talk tracks I want to get your thoughts on. One is Accelerate Conference, which is pure. We've been following the company since it was founded. Scott Dietzen, first interview I think was the week he founded the company, watching the success. Now we have a big customer conference, week of the 16th in September. 16th of September that week. Check it out. Your first conference. You guys are introducing some new things. What's the buzz? What are you planning on for the conference? Yeah, so you know, it's interesting because as someone who's coming out of, you know, the industry side of it, the thing that's hard is as a CEO, you're always trying to figure out what's going to be the biggest bang for my time because I can't go to everything. So I'm super excited to be able to attend the event. I think the uniqueness is it's focused on the customer, so existing customers, but also prospects, customers who are considering pure. The other unique thing that's happening this year is there is a very specific track around the executive side so that having the C-level conversations, you know, with some of our key leaders in our business and innovative thinkers. And so it's kind of running the spectrum of being able to say, if you're coming and you should all come, if you're coming, you're going to be able to have the conversations that you're expecting at a C-level that might look a little different than maybe someone who's trying to do innovation and in your team and what they're looking for. So whether it's demos or workshops and things that you can get your hands dirty on, I think that that's the excitement of all of it is. It's kind of a multifaceted, and it's a great opportunity to connect with your peers and with other companies to be able to say, what are you doing? How do I learn from you? We do a lot of those kinds of things, I think in general, but I think when you can get focused and have a peer group that's in a smaller type of venue where it's not thousands at a major, major conference that's existing somewhere in the US or worldwide, then you can actually have those meaningful conversations with your peers to say, here's the things I'm working on. How have you done it? What are you doing? So I think we're going to enable all those type of conversations to take place. So I'm excited to go. It'll be a lot of fun. What's the objective of the C-level track? Is it just CIOs? Is it CSOs? Is it CXOs? What's the focus? What's the objective? It is all of that. One of it, so interesting is my CEO is actually going to be quizzing me and talking to me about what is actually expected of a CIO? Because I think that as any C-level position, we have expectations of what we need to deliver, but there's also how you contribute to the business. So it's kind of all facets of it. It's everything from understanding what the expectations are to some, I'll say thought leadership around where technology is going, trends, those type of conversations and being able to have some roundtable conversations with maybe industry peers. So all those kind of aspects, but all those areas are covered. Should be a great event. Looking forward to it. Yeah, it should be a lot of fun. The queue will be there, of course. So we'll check us out. We'll be broadcasting live. Okay, second talk track, women in tech. You're a woman in tech. You've been years and years in the business. Been a big focus over the past years. The queue has been, have a lot of interviews with great women in tech. Where do you see the state of the industry? Cause the needles doesn't seem to be moving on the percentages. But there seems to be great momentum in real pros. A lot of mentoring, a lot of networking is seeing women VC firms evolving, very rapidly seeing cohorts cutting together. What's your take on women in tech, where we are, what's the challenges, what's the opportunities? Yeah, so we actually, in the Silicon Valley, we actually have, there's several forums that go on for women CIOs and events that are to be able to have some of those conversations and what do we do? And I think it starts with all of us, individually in our organization. So organically is to figure out, how do you make sure everyone feels that they belong? Whether it's women or it's any other diverse group of employees, we have to figure out how to make people feel connected and part of the team. And I think it starts with that. And that's for kind of every discipline and that you can think of in a business. In tech specifically, I think the challenge for women is you tend to not want to be identified as a woman in tech. It's like, I want to be evaluated for my competency, what I bring to the table, my thought leadership, my perspective. And I don't think that's unique to women. I think that's just unique to people that we all want to be valued for what we contribute. I definitely think that as a general kind of population and technology, I have seen, where it used to be that I was the only female for many, many years in meetings, whether it was at vendor briefings or it was in different company forums. I've had some unique opportunity. AT&T was hugely focused on women in tech, women in engineering, all those disciplines. Coming to Pure, super exciting that we are, we also, so as small of a company, relatively sized to AT&T, we have women ERGs, employee resource groups. We have women in engineering, we have women in IT. So we have kind of the ability to get that mentoring and that coaching, the support within the company. And I think that's really valuable, but to your point, I think we have to still do more of connecting outside of our company, figuring out, and whether that's through the different universities to make sure that we're getting the pipeline coming in and then retaining. I think that's the other challenge because the numbers probably don't change much because we still see a significant amount of women leaving the workforce at a certain point or stage in their career. And we need to figure out what's that draw? Why is that happening? So. What's the technology impact? Because as technology becomes consumerized, you're seeing data analytics to a more bigger range of topics and competencies. Not just computer science or WEEE or whatever. A little bit more of a broader perspective. Is that helping at all? Do you see that evolving? Is that getting any lift increasing the population and competency levels? You know, that's a great question. I think we've had a pretty strong, I'll say run at women being in computer science. We haven't seen enough women going into leadership positions. I think this is just kind of an industry, generic kind of comment. I think it definitely helps. The more that you have a broader range of skills and capabilities, I think it's what is more fascinating is we need more women in those roles because as you think about the problems that all of our businesses are trying to solve, they're, it's not one dimension. And so if we only attack our problems with one dimension, one skill set, we just aren't going to be prepared to be able to, it's going to take us longer. And all of us want to be able to quickly, you know, solve the issues that are facing us. Well, here's a personal question. I'll put you on the spot. What's the big learnings for you looking back now that you've seen that you can share as a woman in tech? And if you can put your 23 year old hat on, what would you do differently, if anything, if you're living in today's world? You know, so it's interesting. I was asked this question before I actually came to Pure as I talked to a number of companies in the Valley and it was like, what would you tell your younger self? And I said, one of them is not to be afraid. And I think that so many of us, whether male or female, sometimes you get into a routine and you don't necessarily break out of it or change. And so you tend to maybe take a safer path or a safer direction. And I think if I was to think back, you know, one is don't be frightened. And the other I think is I probably would have, I was probably naive to not realize that I was sometimes the only female. And so I just kind of worked because I didn't think that was a differentiator or it mattered. And when I think about it now, I probably should have done more to do some of the networking that we're doing today. That might have helped. You know, we talk a lot about the difference between mentoring and sponsoring. And it really gets into that either needs to be enough, you know, sponsors, both male and female who can help to, you know, not just develop but have the conversations, you know, make sure that people are included, those kind of having a voice at the table. And I was very fortunate. I worked under some amazing leaders, both male and female who made sure that I had a voice. But I, you know, I'm not a timid flower anyway. So I wouldn't have, you know, I'm not gonna sit there and sit back and not do it and not speak up. But I think that's something that not everyone is as comfortable with speaking up and being okay that maybe I'm not right or. So I think that I would tell my youngest, don't be afraid. And the second is to do more to help get other others who maybe don't feel as if they belong as much to be able to have that same voice. Awesome, well, congratulations. You're awesome and excited for the event and looking forward to hearing more. Yeah, it should be a lot of fun. Okay, next talk track, you were a customer of Pure before you joined the company. Yes. You were at AT&T, you were, you know, you had the keys to the kingdom. All the vendors pitching you, big infrastructure around tons and tons of workloads. And this is what, six, seven years ago, Pure was in the growth phase. Now they're helping the company in a much larger experience. But back then you took a risk on a technology. Tell us about that story because you made a big bet. Did it work, actually worked out you're here. I'm sure AT&T still has Pure. Yeah, they do. Tell the story. Yeah, so, you know, first it starts with, you know, I had an amazing team. I had a great team of folks who didn't want to accept the status quo, what was happening in the storage industry. And so as we were hearing, you know, like you said, the pitches about what's new, what's different, they were willing to stand up and say, hey, you know what, I think we need to look at this company. And you know, it is hard when you are, you know, kind of at that time, I would say Pure was somewhat of a unicorn in the sense that you try to have somebody who's that small non, you know, private health company to work with a big behemoth, like AT&T, there's a lot of different things, whether it's contractual, you know, the legal, the T's and C's, all that stuff. I mean, put aside the, you know, all of the technology, it's all of that. That's really hard for companies to navigate. Pure had an amazing technology. And what happened is, they came in and they said, hey, this is what we can do. We can transform your business. It's not just about the economics, we'll prove you that part. But we can actually help you to deliver faster for your application teams. We can help you with all these areas. And we can do it all within like two weeks. So the key was being able to stand up and say, I'm going to do this and then prove it in this very small window because when you're at a large enterprise, you don't have unlimited resources. It's very constrained of, I mean, it's not any different than a startup, but you have very limited resources as well because you're trying to run big scale. And so they were able to prove out everything they said. And then plus more, it was things like we started seeing efficiencies in the data center. We started to see that things like that where we thought we were going to have to expand and buy, you know, additional ports, we were able to not have to do it. So there was a lot of these like side benefits that we weren't expecting. We got those plus what we asked for. So we did, we took a bet on Pure. They were a great innovative team to work with. And, you know, ATT's had it, you know, their legacy is very much a innovation. And so it kind of was that match to say, we need to bring in companies who can help us to continue to innovate. We're a little skeptical at first and say, oh, we can do it in two weeks. Yes. So it's almost like a bet, you know, you go, okay, let's see what you can do. Let's see how it works in two weeks. So, and that's, so they came in and it was all proved out. So we, we actually, you know, move forward. And, you know, today AT&T is, you know, hundreds of rays, which is, you know, a very large footprint for any company to have it with the size and it spans, you know, production application, you know, tier one applications to things that are specific use cases. So it kind of spans a large. And not a lot of war stories around critical failures either. You said you had some successes with them before we came on camera. Yeah. She had that story, because storage is one of those things where you was going to have something might go down. The question is, how severe is the problem? What were some of the experiences you had? Yeah. So I, you know, I can say that, you know, I left AT&T last summer. So up through that point, we had not had any 7-1 outages. So when you think of a large company, it's not unusual to have incidents, outages. I mean, that tends to happen just with the size of your footprint. AT&T was very successful working with Pure on having, essentially having a product that had big stability. And we didn't see those outages. And not just on running it, but actually doing the non-disruptive upgrades. So the ability to actually take the technology, do the next generation and not have any outages, that's pretty unusual for any company to experience. And so I looked at it as from a scale, highly unusual, but that was the success. Great success. Okay, finally, you're here at Pure now. You're CIO. Not as big as AT&T, but still, public company, and they have a lot of employees that are maturing as a company. You're running Pure at Pure, obviously you can't eat, unless you're doing a bake-off internal, better assessment. How are you using Pure now? How's it going? What's some of the, share some of the architectural details without giving away any secrets? What's it like? And what are you guys doing that's innovative? So, you know, we are a much smaller organization, obviously, than where I just left. But it's really important for us to have that same innovation and capabilities. We actually use Pure, but we use both Flash Array, we use Flash Blade, so both of our, I'll say, premier products. We also use Pure One, which is kind of the telemetry visibility allows you to do what-if analysis, look to see how you're doing from a capacity perspective. So we actually use three of our primary products to actually run our data warehouse, and then we are doing some of it just to be able to do some of our security. So we actually run Splunk and Tableau, and using those type of tools and capabilities. We run them on our environments, and we're able to do a lot of things that the feedback that we're getting is like, oh my gosh, we can't believe that you guys are able to do this. And we have a very lean IT organization. So to do some of the things we're doing from a security analytics and threat detections and all that, those are things that aren't very common for, I mean, a lot of companies, we're all trying to be better on it, and we are able to use our own technology to kind of help substantiate what we're trying to solve for. That's awesome. So, super exciting. That's awesome. Final point on the CIO perspective, great to have you and get this CIO perspective. Again, both as a customer, and then working at Pure. CIOs out there right now are challenged with transformation. Digital transformation has been like buzzword, that's been kicked around for years, but now you're starting to see the rubber hitting the road. Real development pressure, modernization around app development, CICD pipelining to multicloud hybrid cloud. All this has now pretty much got some visibility into architectural decisions. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing CIOs today in terms of thinking about the holistic, five to 10 year horizon as they start to make investments and think about either aging out or containerizing pre-existing workloads to cloud native apps and on-premise capability of your thoughts? Yeah, I think that it kind of boils down to a couple aspects. One of them is modularization of your applications. That's why containerization has become such a big deal. Being able to do things like have your data separate from your application and not have everything so integrated at that level where you then are, you get somewhat confined. You have issues within, I have to have this application running in this location, I also need to have the data has to be coexisting with it and so you run with all these constraints. So I think that for, depending on the age of your organization, the first challenge is trying to figure out how do I start to almost break apart my application environment, my infrastructure, so I have more ability to have more modularity between what needs to happen and where it needs to happen. So I think to me that's one of the biggest aspects. We're super fortunate because we're a big SaaS shop. Most of our applications, we're dependent on our vendors for the SaaS providers to have kind of worked through some of those issues. But that's one aspect. I think the second is the ability to navigate between on-prem and off-prem. So the hybrid solution is really, I don't see that going away. I think that all of us are struggling with the whole notion of whether it's the economics, it's the ability to, like you said, move a workload to the right location for the right optimization and the right tooling, et cetera. And so I think it's that flexibility. You can't get to any of that if you don't have the first part done. And then when you start talking about your digital strategy, none of that works when you start wanting to get into AI and ML until you have some of those things done and you've put that data strategy in place. So you then have that ability to have the thread across your whole ecosystem. And I think that's what our challenge is. And automation is key, but you got to automate manual attachments, meaning you have people to do it, then you got to automate that so the skill gap still is always going to be. It's still there. Great. Well, Cathy, thanks for spending the time and sharing your insight here and the CUBE conversation. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Absolutely, thank you for having me. Here at CUBE Conference, here at Pure Storage's headquarters in Mountain View, California. I'm John Forrier. Thanks for watching.