 Good afternoon, and welcome back to Detroit. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are live, day two of our coverage of KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon North America. John, we've had great conversations all day yesterday, half a day today so far. We're talking all things, well, not all things Kubernetes, so much more than that. We also have to talk about storage and data management solutions for Kubernetes projects, because that's obviously critical. Yeah, I mean, the big trend here is Kubernetes is going mainstream, has been for a while, the adoption's crossing over, it's crossing the chasm, and with that you're seeing security concerns, you're seeing gaps being filled, but enterprise-grade is really the story. It's going enterprise, that's managed services, that's professional service, that's basically making things work at scale. This next segment hits that part, and we're going to talk about it in great length. With one of our alumni, Morali Tiramali, is back, VP and GM of Portworx Peer Storage. Great to have you back, really. Yeah, absolutely, delightful to be here. So I was looking on the website, number one in Kubernetes storage, three years in a row. Yep. Awesome. What's Portworx doing here at Ku Klun? Well, I'll tell you, our engineering crew has been so productive and hard at work that I almost can't decide what to kind of tell you, but I thought what I would do is kind of tell you that we are in forefront of two major trends in the world of Kubernetes, right? And the two trends that I see are one is as a service. So is trend number one. So it's not software eating the world anymore. That's old, old, old news. It's as a service, easy-fying the world. The world wants easy. We all are subscribers to things like Netflix. We've been using Salesforce or other HR functions. Everything is as a service. And in the world of Kubernetes, it's a sign of the maturity that John was talking about as a platform that now as a service is the big trend. And so headline number one, if you will, is that Portworx is leading in the data management world for the Kubernetes by providing, we're going all in on easy as a service. So everything we do, we are satisfying it, right? So if you think about this, that there are really most of the people who are consuming Kubernetes are people who are building platforms for their dev users. And dev users want self-service. That's one of the advantages of Kubernetes. And the more it is serviceized and made as a service, the more ready to consume it is. And so we are announcing at the show that we have the basic Kubernetes data management as a service, HADR as a service, we have backup as a service, and we have database as a service. So these are the three major components of data and all of those are being made available as a service. And in fact, we're offering and announcing at the show our backup as a service freemium version where you can get free forever, a terabyte of stuff to do for Kubernetes forever. Congratulations on the announcement, totally in line with what the market wants. Developers want self-service. They want also on simplicity, by the way, they'll leave if they don't like the service. So you know that. Before we get into some more specifics, I want to ask you on the industry and some of the point solutions you have. What, it's been two years since the acquisition with Pure Storage. Can you just give an update on how it's gone? I'll see as a service, you guys are hitting all your marks. Developers love it. Storage is a big part of the game right now as well as these environments. What's the update post-acquisition? Two years, you had a great offering. So yeah, so look, John, you're a veteran of the industry and have seen lots of acquisitions, right? And I've been acquired twice before myself. So, you know, there's always best practices and poor practices in terms of acquisitions. And I'm really delighted to say, I think this acquisition has had some of the best practices. Let me just name a couple of them, right? One of them is just cultural fit, right? Cultural fit is great. Entrepreneurs, anybody, it's not just entrepreneurs, everybody loves to work in a place they enjoy working with people that they thrive when they interact with. And so the cultural fit with Pure is fantastic. The other one is the strategic intent that Pure had when they acquired us is still true. And so that goes a long way, you know, in terms of an investment profile, in terms of the ability to kind of leverage assets within the company. So Pure had kind of disrupted the world of storage using Flash and they wanted to disrupt, higher up the stack using Kubernetes and that's kind of been our role inside their strategy and it's still true. So culture, strategic intent, product market fit as well. You weren't just an asset for customers or acquisition and let the founders go through the next thing. You were part of their growth play. Absolutely, right? The beauty of the kind of product market fit is, let's talk about the market, is we have been always focused on the global 2K and that is at the heart of Pure's 10,000 strong customer base, right? They have very strong presence in the global 2K and we allow them to kind of go to those same folks with the offering. So, saucepying everything that you do, what's for me as a business, whether I'm a financial services organization, I'm a hospital, I'm a retailer, what's in it for me as a customer? Yeah, so what's in it for me is two things. It's speed and ease of use, which in a way are related, but one is when something is provided as a service, it's much more consumable. It's instantly ready. It's like instant oatmeal, right? You just get it, just add hot water and it's there. So, the world of IT has moved from owning large data centers. That used to be like 25 years ago and running those data centers better than everybody else. To move to, let me just consume a data center in the form of a cloud, right? So, sassifying the cloud part of the data center. Now, people are saying, well, I expect that for software and services and I don't want it just from the public cloud. I want it from my own IT department. This is old news. And so, the big news here is how fast Kubernetes has kind of moved. Everything, you know, you take a lot of these changes. Kubernetes is a poster child for things happening faster than the last wave. And in the last couple of years, I would say that as a service model has really kind of thrived in the world of Kubernetes and developers want to be able to get it fast. And the second thing is they want to be able to operate it fast. Self-service is the other benefit. So, speed and self-service are both benefits of this. Yeah, and the thing that's come up clearly in the Cube, and this is going to be part of the headlines, we'll probably end up getting a lot of highlights from telling my team to make a note of this, is that developers are going to be the business. If you take digital transformation to its conclusion, they're not a department that serves the business. They are the business. That means they have to be more productive. So developer productivity has been the top story. Yes, security as a service, all these things. These are examples to make developers more productive. But one of the things that came up when I want to get your reaction to is, is that when you have disruption in the storage vision, you know what disruption it means, because there's been a whole discussion around disruptive operations. When storage goes down, you have back in DR and failover. If there's a disruption, that changes the nature of invisible infrastructure. Developers want invisible infrastructure. That's the future steady state. So if there's a disruption in storage, it can't affect the productivity and the tool chains and the workflows of developers. So how do you guys look at that? Because you're a critical component. Storage as a service is a huge thing. Storage has to work seamlessly and let keep the developers out of the weeds. John, I think what you put your finger on is another huge trend in the world of Kubernetes. We're at KubeCon after all, which is really where all the leading practitioners both come and the leading vendors are. So here's the second trend that we are leading and actually I think it's happening not just with us, but with other folks in the industry. And that is, you know, the world of DevOps. DevOps has been such a catchphrase for all of us in the industry last five years. And it's been both a combination of cultural change as well as technology change. Here's what the latest is in the world of DevOps. DevOps is now crystallized. It's not some kind of mysterious art form that you read about. How people are practicing DevOps is it's broken into two things now. There is the platform part. So DevOps is now a bunch of platforms. And the other part of DevOps is a bunch of practices. So a little bit on both these, the platforms in the world of Kubernetes, there's only three platforms, right? There's the orchestration platforms, you know, EKS, the open ships of the world and so on. There are the data management platforms, people like Porkworks, and the third is security platforms, right? You know, Palo Alto Networks, others, Aqua are all in this. So these are the three platforms and there are platform engineering teams now that many of our largest customers, some of the largest banks, the largest service providers, they're all operating as a Kubernetes platform engineering team. And then now developers, to your point, developers are in the practice of being able to use these platforms to launch new services. So the actual IT ops, the ops are run by developers now and they can do it on these platforms and the platform engineering team provide that as an ease of use and they're there to troubleshoot when problems happen. So the idea of DevOps as a ops practice and a platform is the newest thing and Porkworks and Pure Storage are leading in the world of data management platforms there. Talk about a customer example that you think really articulates the value that Porkworks and Pure Storage delivers from a data management perspective. Yeah, so there's so many examples. One of the longest running examples we have is a very, very large service provider that you all know and probably use. And they have been using us in the cable kind of set up box or cable box business. They get streams of data from cable boxes all over the world. They collected all in a centralized large kind of thing and run elastic search and analytics on it. Now, what they've done is they couldn't keep up with this at the scale and the depth, right? The speed of activity and the distributed nature of the activity. The only way to solve this was to use something like Kubernetes, manage with Spark, bringing all the data in into deep, deep, deep silos of storage which are all running not even on a sand but on kind of very deep terabytes and terabytes of storage. So all of this is orchestrated with the help of Porkworks and there's a platform engineering team. We are building that platform for them with some of these other components that allows them to kind of do analytics and make some changes in real time. Huge kind of set up for that. You guys have the right architecture. I love the vision. I love what you guys are doing. I think this is right in line with Pures. They've always been disruptors. I remember when we first interviewed the CEO when they started, they stayed on path. They didn't waver. EMC was the big player. They ended up taking their lunch and dinner as well. They beat them in the marketplace. But now you got this traction here. So I have to ask you, how's the business? What's the results look like? You're the GM, cloud native business unit of a storage company that's transformed and transforming? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We just hit the two year anniversary, right, John? And so what we did was just kind of like step back and hey, you know, we're running so hard. You just take a step back. And we've tripled the business in the two years since the acquisition, the two years before. And we were growing through COVID. So, you know, that's quite a feat. And we've tripled the number of people, the amount of engineering investments we have, the number of go to market investments have been awesome. So the business is going really well. Though I will say that I think, you know, we have, we can't be, we're watching the market closely. You know, as a former CEO, you have to kind of learn to read the tea leaves when you invest. And I think, you know, what I would say is we're proceeding with caution in the next two quarters. I view business transformation as not a cancelable activity. So that's the good news, right? Our customers are large enterprises. All they're going to do is say, hey, they're going to put their hand, their hand was always going right on the dial. Now they're kind of putting their hand on the dial, going, hey, what is happening? But my own sense of this is that people will continue to invest through it. The question is at what level? And I also think that this is a six month kind of a watch where we put the dial. So Q4 and Q1, I think are kind of, you know, we have our watch kind of watch the market sign. But I have the highest confidence. Where's your gut tell you? You're an entrepreneur. My gut says that we'll go through a little bit of a cautious investment period in the next six months. And after that, I think we're going to be back full full in the crazy growth that we've always been. We're going to grow, by the way, in the next two quarters. I think I'm more bullish. I think there's going to be some, you know, weeding out of some over investment pre COVID or pre bubble. But I think tech's going to continue to grow. I don't see it stopping. And the investment is going to be on these core platforms. See back to the platform story. It's going to be in these core platforms and on easy-fying everything. Let's consume it better rather than let's go kind of experiment with a whole bunch of things all over the map, right? So we'll see less experimentation and more kind of, let's harvest some of the investments we've made in the last couple of years. And actually be able to enable companies in any industry to truly be data companies because we talked about as a service, we all have these expectations that any service we want, we can get it. There's no delay because patience has gone from the pandemic. So it is kind of tightening up the screws on what they've built, adding some polish to it, adding some more capability. Like I said, a combination of harvesting and new investing. It's a combination I think is what we're going to see. Yeah. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to? You talked about some of the growth things in the investment, but as we round out Q4 and head into a new year, what are you set out about? Yeah, so I mentioned our as a service kind of platform. The global 2K for us has been a set of customers who we co-create stuff with. And so one of the other set of things that we are very excited about and announcing is because we're deployed at scale, we have upgraded our back end. So we have now the ability to go to million IOPS and more for the right back ends. And so Kubernetes is an add on which will not slow down your core base infrastructure. Second thing that we have is added a bunch of capability in the disaster recovery business continuity front. We always had like metro kind of distance DR. We had long distance DR. We've added a near sync DR. So now we can provide disaster recovery and business continuity for metro distances across continents and across the planet. That's kind of a major change that we've done. The third thing is we've added the capability for file block and object. So now by adding object, we're really a complete solution. So it is really that maturity of the business that you start seeing as enterprises move to embracing a platform approach, deploying it much more widely. You talked about the early majority, right? And so what they require is more enterprise class capability. And those are all the things that we've been adding and we're really looking forward to it. Well, it sounds like tremendous evolution and maturation of Portworx in the two years since it's been with Pure Storage. You talked about the cultural alignment. Great stuff that you're achieving. Congratulations on that. Great stuff ahead. And having fun. Let's not forget that. That's important too. Life's too short to do anything else with that. You're right. We will definitely, as always on theCUBE, keep our eyes on this space. Moralee, it's been great to have you back on the program. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure as always. For our guest, I'm John Furrier. Lisa Martin here, live in Detroit with theCUBE at KubeCon, cloud native con at 22. We'll be back after a short break.