 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello and welcome to the CUBE's videos of Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Digital business is forcing companies to rethink what data means to them, and that means we have to rethink how we're going to manage, use, take care of our data. A lot of companies are still thinking that we can use old data practices to solve new data requirements, and that disconnect is causing tension in a lot of businesses. So how do they overcome that gap? How do they modernize their data practices and approaches to ensure that they have the options and the flexibility and the capabilities they need as they drive their businesses forward? To have that conversation, we're joined by Matt Kicksmoer, who's the Vice President of Strategy at Pure Storage. Matt, welcome back to the CUBE. Thanks so much, glad to be here. All right, let's start with the obvious. Give us a quick update on Pure. Oh, it's a super fun time at Pure right now. We just rounded our 10th birthday, so a lot of celebration going on at the company, and we're just back from our Accelerate Conference where we launched some new products and had quite a good time in Austin. Well, tell us a little bit about what was the big story from the Accelerate Conference in Austin? Well, a couple of big things. First off, we announced the GA of our Cloud Block Store product. This is where we really take the core Pure Value proposition and bring it to run natively on the public cloud. We GA it on the AWS platform, and we actually also just announced a tech preview on Azure. So that was a big part of it. That product's all about helping customers take their tier one applications and transparently move into the cloud. So I mentioned upfront this notion of an impedance mismatch, a disconnect between the requirements or the drive to use data differently, and that's a major feature of digital business transformation and traditional practices of how data storage and management is conducted. As you talk to customers, how is that challenge manifesting itself in practical as well as strategic ways? Yeah, I mean, if you look at our average customer at Pure, they're in the journey of understanding digital transformation. And it's obvious to say perhaps, but data's at the core of that. And so, let's look at, we do a lot of work, for example, in the audio industry. And you might think, okay, the auto industry, kind of a traditional space. They've been around forever, manufacturing big expensive things. But if you look at a modern car company, number one, they're a software developer. There's an amazing amount of software inside cars. And this is similar with everybody that's in digital business. They're now having to build their own software, get it to market quickly. That's a key part of their differentiation. Number two, they're increasingly IoT companies. And so they're having to learn how to harvest all this data that's coming off of their cars, bring it back to the core, analyze it, use it in real time, and use it in much post real time to design the next car and get smarter about how they do their work. And then number three, they're operating huge technology environments to run these platforms. And so they need to drive down their cost of data, their cost of goods, if you will, to be able to operate successfully and have an edge and be able to develop more. So build software faster, manage storage more efficiently, and move more rapidly and quickly? Absolutely. And then mine all that for insights and do more with that data to build the next product every year, every cycle. So what is it about the old practices that don't lend themselves to being able to be more efficient, faster, and more productive in how they deliver systems? Well, the problem with storage today is if you look at storage just as a layer within the data center, it's probably the least cloud like of any part of IT. You know, the cloud model, I don't mean cloud the destination, I mean the operating model has really been taken well to virtualization and servers and networking layer. But storage, you still have a land of lots of bespoke infrastructure, dedicated silos for each chunk of data, and a lot of manual management. And so when we talk to our typical customer, they're not doing exciting things with data, they're in the drudgery of running the factory of data down there spending all their time just keeping it working and they're horribly inefficient in terms of the infrastructure they have to use because it's so bespoke. You know, the term snowflakes is often used in the cloud world. We've just got a million snowflakes in storage. So I've always thought that, well, it's not just what I think, but there's a general recognition that every business organizes itself, institutionalizes its work, establishes value propositions around what it thinks are its core differentiating assets. And our digital business increasingly that's data. But I think what you just said sounds like that in the storage world, the assets remain the devices, they remain the lones, they remain the physical things, they remain the administrative practices. And we have to find a way to make more of that go away so we can focus more on the data that's being delivered out of the storage. Have I got that right? Absolutely. I mean, I think it's just putting data at the core of the strategy and having people actually build an architecture around it. Today, what we see is a lot of people build their data strategy piecemeal by a project, not having the opportunity to step back and just really think about it from the core. And, you know, at Pure, one of the things we talked about at Accelerate was our vision that we call the modern data experience. And this is just really rethinking the entire experience of storage, hitting the reset button and trying to ring the lessons of the cloud to how you manage data in enterprise. So let's talk about it. If we think about the modern data experience, give us a couple of kind of highlights of what are the two or three things that you absolutely must do differently? Well, the first thing is just cloud everywhere. And again, this is cloud the model, not cloud the place. And so the first thing we do is talk about the lessons of cloud with customers, standardization of services, not having bestowed infrastructure, you know, designing a set of tiers of storage and delivering that, and then really working on automation, standardization and automation so that customers can be self-service. It's easy to say, but when we go into most storage environments today, they just don't operate like this, right? It's still very bespoke. And so giving customers the tools to be able to design their storage layers, their tiers, if you will, and deliver those services in a non-demand fashion. So one of the things that we've uncovered and we talked to customers is as they try to do more exciting and advanced types of workloads in clouds and discovering that the range of data services provided by the cloud are not as robust, they're not as numerous, they're not as usable as some of the data services that you historically were able to get out of on-premise technology. Now you mentioned that you are bringing your core management infrastructure into the cloud. Are you able therefore to provide a more rich and complementary range of data services without undermining or compromising in that cloud experience? I think the key is that cloud experience that increasingly you need that cloud experience and it's not either or it's both. And so folks have realized that the cloud isn't a panacea, they can absolutely do their work on-prem with data at a lower cost and larger scale and higher performance. They can leverage the cloud for agility and what's strategic is to have that bridge that allows them to go back and forth depending on the needs of the project. And so when we say cloud everywhere, that assumes that you're going to want to use things on the cloud, in the cloud and on-prem and you need a strategic layer of technology for data that can bridge both sides. That's a key part of what we try to deliver. So as you talk to your customers, are they utilizing pure as a way of or basically the pure approach to the modern data experience as a way of getting other elements of IT and other elements of the business to think differently and to use data as the foundation for thinking about IT and digital business differently? Absolutely, I mean, I'll give you an example. One of our customers is a manufacturing customer. They run a large SAP instance. They wanted to have more agility in how they developed their SAP application. And so they use pure on-prem to host that application but they leverage our cloud block store offering to be able to do test dev in the cloud. And this allows them to easily spin up instances, copy production data to the cloud to be able to do test dev around it. And so it's brought new levels of cloud agility to what was a traditional kind of on-prem app. That's a great example. Are there any other types of things beyond just test dev that you can think about where the ability to have the certainty associated with pure and the flexibility associated with the cloud is changing the way IT is thinking? I think another big one is DR. You know, if you look at DR investments, folks don't necessarily want to have a dedicated second data center. And so being able to leverage the cloud as the DR site not only reduces the cost of DR, but that data is already there. So it then unlocks test dev and other use cases around the cloud. And so that's a big one. And we see people interested in around cloud block store. Now, pure, even before the modern data experience was one of the early talkers or early storage companies to talk about how important a multi-cloud was going to be. Absolutely. How does pure as a target facilitate the practical reality, the pragmatic reality that large enterprises are going to source cloud services from multiple different providers? Yeah, I mean, I think customers are earlier in their journey right now around cloud. So for them, it's more about hybrid cloud than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a place they want to get to eventually. But incumbent upon that means a standardized set of services so that storage can speak and be the same, whether it be on this cloud, on that cloud, or on-prem. And look, there's work to do on both sides of the equation, right? If you look at on-prem storage, tier one block storage, we saw that as a gap in the public clouds. That's why we brought to market cloud block store. If you look at what most people use in the public cloud, it's object storage. Well, most enterprises don't have an object store on-prem. It's one of the reasons we had an object interface to our FlashBlade product. And so this isn't just about bringing things to the public cloud, it's also about bringing some of the public cloud storage services on-prem and making sure they can connect. Obviously, pure is associated with storage devices, even though you modern date experience and what you did at Accelerate is introducing new service classes into how you're going to engage your customers and how customers can source your expertise in their business. But how is that changing pure? I think you picked up on a really interesting thing there around service classes, because one of the things, from the earliest days of pure, one of our goals was to deliver on the all-Flash data center. We obviously brought out tier one Flash products to go after the highest end, but we realized that if we wanted to be able to go after all data across the data center, you needed to be able to serve more than one class of data. And so another big push that we now said Accelerate this year was a QLC-based Flash device, the Flash Ray-C. And this allows us to really go after that second tier of larger scale and tier two application data in enterprise to be able to bring that same all-Flash cloud experience to this tier two data. So what's next? I think a big piece of that is, we just announced that, so going after that is a large piece of it. The other thing we're really working on is driving up the level of automation and intelligence within the product line. If you look at the first generation of Pure, it was all about simple, right? We have a SaaS-based management experience with Pure One and we delivered consumer simplicity to this enterprise storage landscape which was remarkably refreshing to folks. But if you look at this next generation, customers are looking for more intelligence and automation. And so the way you deliver simple to a more sophisticated customer today is open APIs, smart automation, plug-in with the orchestration frameworks they're using. And so we're doing a lot of work not only in our API level and our automation level, but also behind the scenes with our Meta AI engine to understand workload and to make intelligent decisions for the customer without them having to deal with it. Matt, I want to thank you once again for being on theCUBE. Likewise, thanks Peter. And thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time.