 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, Dave Vellante's Mako host. We are at Pure Accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas. One of our CUBE alumni is back with us. We have Rob Lee, the VP and Chief Architect at Pure Storage, Rob, welcome back. Thanks for having me back. It's great to be here. We're glad you have a voice. We're challenging these events are with about 3,000 partners, customers, press, everybody wanting to talk to one of the men that was on the keynote stage. Yesterday, four announcements came out. Really enjoyed yesterday's keynote, but let's talk about one of those announcements in particular, Pure's Bridge to the Hybrid Cloud. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's been a really exciting conference for us so far, like you said, a lot of payload coming out. As far as building the Bridge to the Hybrid Cloud, this has been, I would say, a long time coming. We've been working down this path for a couple of years. We started by bringing some of the cloud-like capabilities that customers really wanted and were able to achieve into the cloud back into the data center. So you saw us do this in terms of making our on-prem products easier to manage, easier to use, easier to automate. But working with customers of the last couple of years, what we realized is that as the cloud hype kind of subsided and people were taking a more measured view of where the cloud fits into their strategies, what tools it brings, we realized that we could add value in the public cloud environment, the same types of enterprise capabilities, the same type of features, rich data services, feature sets, things like that, that we do on-premise in the cloud. And so what we're looking to achieve is actually quite simple. We want to give customers the choice, whether customers want to run on-premise or in the cloud, that's just a choice of, we want to make an environmental choice. We don't want to put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location or another because of lack of features, lack of capabilities, or economics. And so the way that we do that is by building the same types of capabilities that we do on-prem in the cloud, giving customers the freedom and flexibility to be agile. But you mentioned economics, and you were talking from a customer standpoint, I want to flip it from a technology supplier standpoint. The economics of a vendor who traditionally sells on-prem, you would think would be better than one in the cloud because you pay on Amazon for all their services or I guess the customer's paying for it. But you kind of saw your way through that. A lot of companies would be defensive. And I wonder if you could add any comment to that. Yeah, no, I mean, so look, I think the hardware is only one piece of it. At the end of the day, even our products on-prem are really, they're really priced for value, right there. We're delivering value to customers in our capabilities, our ease of use, our simplicity, the types of applications and workflows we enable. And basically everything I just said is pretty much driven by software features. By bringing those same capabilities into the cloud, naturally we, naturally most of that work is really in software. And then as far as comparing the economics directly of on-prem versus cloud, it's really no secret as the industry's gotten more understanding that the cloud isn't the low-cost option in a lot of use cases, right? And so rather than comparing apples to apples on-prem versus cloud, either on performance or economics, right? Our goal is really to build the best product in either environment. So if a customer wants to run on-prem, we want to build the best darn product in that environment. If a customer wants to run in the public cloud, we want to build the best darn product for them in that environment. And increasingly, as customers want to use both environments hand-in-hand, we want to build the right capabilities to allow them to seamlessly do that. Well, I think it makes sense because, as you know, we're talking to some customers last night and they ask them what they have in their data center and they got a lot of stuff in their data center to the extent that a company like Pure can say, okay, you've got simple, fast, et cetera on-prem and that we've now extended that to the cloud, your choice, they're going to spend more with you than they are with the guys that fight that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you look at our approach and how we've built the products and how we're taking them to market, we've taken a very different approach than some of the competitive set. In some ways, we've really just extended the same way that we think about innovation in product engineering from our existing on-prem portfolio into the cloud, which is we look for hard problems to solve. We take the hard road, we build differentiated products, even if it takes us a little bit longer. You can see that in the product offerings. We've really focused on enabling tier one mission-critical applications. If you look at the competitive set, they haven't started there. The reason why we did that is we knew that we had customers telling us if you're a customer and you want to use the cloud and you want to think about the cloud as a DR site, well, when something goes wrong and you have to fail over to a DR site, you need to be sure that it works exactly the same way there as it did on-prem. That's everything from data services, data path features to all the workflows and orchestration that go around it because when your primary site goes down, it's not the time when you want to be discovering that, oh, there's a footnote on that feature and that's not supported in the cloud version, that sort of thing. And so, like I said, the focus that we've put on the product development that we've done towards cloud block stores really been around creating the same level of enterprise-grade features and enabling those applications in the cloud as we do on-prem. We don't make the Amazon storage, we make the Amazon storage better. What's that commercial? That's essentially what you've done. That's essentially what we've done. And the great thing about that is that we've done it in close partnership with Amazon. We had Amazon on stage yesterday and they were talking a little bit about that partnership process and ultimately I think why that partnership has been so successful is we're both ultimately driven by the same thing, which is customer success. In the early days of working with Amazon as we started coming up with the concept of cloud block store and consulting them on, we're thinking about building it this way, what do you think, what services should we leverage in AWS to make this happen? It became pretty clear to them that we were setting out to build a differentiated product and not just tick off checkboxes. And that's when their eyes really opened and said, hey, we really would like you to do a differentiated product here. Hey, if this takes off, we're going to sell a lot of EC2, S3. What are some of the things, sorry, Dave, that you've been with Pure about six years, what are some of the things that have surprised you pleasantly that the customers have catalyzed from an architecture perspective, that the customer feedback coming back to your team and the guys and girls engineering the product, where customers are demanding a certain thing that maybe wasn't something that was an internal idea, but really was catalyzed by customers. Anything that just really, you think is just very cool or very surprising? Yeah, no, I mean, I think a couple of things. I think personally, one of the things that surprised me was when I joined Pure in 2013, we're all about simplicity, right? You talked to Kaws, who I think you had on the show earlier, in the early days who tell you our differentiator is going to be simplicity. And I got to say, when I first joined the company I was a little skeptical. I was like, all right, I get it. Simplicity is a thing, is it really a differentiator? I very quickly was surprised based on customer feedback that no, it really is very, very meaningful. And that's something that we take all the way through engineering, right? Everything down to how we design features and put them in the user interfaces. If there's an engineer that wants to put a configuration hook or a knob or an option in the user interface, we kind of stop and say, well, gee, how would you document that? How would you suggest a user make a decision to set that value? They'll describe it and say, okay, well, gee, we can make that decision, can't we? Why don't we just make it simpler? And so that's been a big surprise. I think from a customer catalyzed point of view, what I'd say is we've been really surprised at a lot of the use cases that the FlashBlade product has been put into play for. And I think AI was one of them. When we first set out, we had really targeted FlashBlade at addressing a segment of the commercial HPC chip design, hardware design, software development market. And it's actually a set of customers, very large web property customer that came to us with an AI use case. They said, hey, we've got a ton of data, video, images, text postings, and we want to do a lot of analysis of this, right? We want to do facial recognition, we want to do content and sentiment analysis. We've got the GPUs, we think you guys have the right storage product for that. And that's really taken off. And that was very much a customer-driven area. We talked a little bit about that within video yesterday, about some of the customer catalyzed innovation where AI is concerned. Absolutely. What do you see as the critical, technical skills that Pure needs in the next decade? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you kind of have a networking background, internal networking, I guess. You got guys from Veritas, right? That obviously strong software file system. What do you see as the critical skill? Yeah, that's a good question. We have a very diverse team. We in engineering typically hire and look for people with strong systems backgrounds that are willing to learn and want to solve hard problems. We typically haven't hired very specific domain areas. My background is in language runtimes and compilers, distributed systems, so a bit all over the map. You know what I'd say is that the first phase of Pure, the first kind of decade, was really about reinventing the storage experience. And for me, I look at it as taking lessons from the consumer experience, bringing them into the storage and enterprise world. The iPhone's example that's used a lot, there's a couple of examples you can think of. I think the next phase of what we're trying to do, and you heard Charlie talk about this on stage with a modern data experience, is take some lessons from the cloud experience and bring them into the enterprise. So the first phase was about consumer simplicity for a human. I think the next phase is really about bringing in some more of the cloud experience for enabling automation and DevOps and management orchestration. So what kind of work, I mean you got a lot of work to do to get, we envision this massively scalable distributed system where you have that cloud experience no matter where your data lives. That's not there today. And you don't want to ship your data around, there's going to be too much data. So you want to ship metadata and have the intelligence to bring the compute to that data. What do you got to do? What's the work that you have to do to actually make that seamless, that there's that over used word again? It's not seamless today. Yeah, so look, I mean, I think there's a lot of angles to it. And we're going to work our way there to your point. It's not there today, right? But you're starting to see us lay the groundwork with all the announcements that came up today, right? Under the umbrella of, hey, we want to end up creating a more portable, more seamless, more agile experience for our customers. You can see where as we bring more storage medias into play, different classes of service, different balances of performance and cost, bringing those together in a way so that an application can use them in the right combinations, you know, bringing AI into play to help customers do that seamlessly and transparently is a big part of it. You can see multiple location kind of agility that we were bringing into play with Cloud Block Store, enabled by Cloud Snap and Snapshot Mobility, things like that. And then I think as we move beyond the block world and we look at what we can enable with applications that sit on top of file and object protocols, there's a lot of greenfield there, right? So we think object storage is very attractive and we're starting to see that as the application vendors, as the applications that sit on top of the storage layer are really embracing object storage as the cloud native storage interface, if you will. That's creating a lot of ways to share data, right? We're starting to see it even within the data center where multiple applications now are able to share data because object storage is being used. And so, like I said, there's a lot of angles to this, right? There's bringing multiple discrete arrays together under the same management plane. There's bringing multiple different types of storage media a little bit closer together from a seamless application mobility perspective. There's bringing multiple locations, data centers, clouds together from a migration, a DR perspective. And then there's bringing a global namespace type of capability to the table. And so, it's a long journey, but we think it's the right one. And what we ultimately want to do is have customers be able to think about, be able to provision, be able to manage to not just an array, but really more of like an AZ, right? I want a pool. I want it to be about yay fast, but I'm willing to pay about yay much for it. And I need this types of data protection policies for it. Please make it happen. And anywhere, so you see it as technically feasible to be able to run any app, any workload, on any cloud or on-prem without having to recompile the application, make changes to the application. That's what I really kind of meant by seamless. You see that as technically feasible in the next, call it five to 10 years, I'll give you. I think it'll take a long time, I'll get there. And I think it'll depend on the application, right? I think there are going to be some combinations that, look, I mean, if you have a high frequency, low latency trading database, there's physical limitations. You're not going to run the application here and put the storage in the cloud, right? But if we step back from it, right, the concept, yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of things are becoming possible to make this happen, right? Fast networking is everywhere. It's getting faster, you know, application architectures are making it more feasible. You know, the media costs and what we're able to drive out of the media are bringing a lot more of those workloads to flash. AI is coming into play. So, like I said, it's going to depend on the application, but I think we're entering a phase where the modern software developer doesn't want to have to think too hard about where physically, what six sides of sheet metal is my data sitting on, they want to think about what do I need from it? What do I need from it in terms of capacity? What do I need from it in terms of performance? What do I need from it in terms of data service capabilities, right? And, you know, and I need to be able to control that elastically, I need to be able to control that through my application, through software. And that's kind of what we're building towards. Last question, Rob, as we wrap up here, feedback that you've heard the last day and a half on some of the news that came out yesterday from customers, analysts, partners. Yeah, you know, I'd say if I were to net it out, I think the one piece of feedback we've gotten is, wow, you guys have a lot of stuff, and it's really nice to see you guys talking about stuff that's available today, right? That, you know, a lot of GAs on that screen. A lot of GAs on that screen. And, you know, I think I had an analyst say to me, you know, it's really refreshing to kind of see you guys take A, both, you know, the viewpoint of the customer, what you're delivering to the customer, what you're enabling, and then B, you know, I go to a lot of tech conferences and I hear a lot about like way off in the future and vision, and the feedback we got was you guys had a really good balance of reality today, what you're helping customers with today, what's available today to do that, and enough of the, hey, and here's where we're headed, so. We actually heard the same thing, so good stuff, Rob. Well, congrats on the 10th anniversary, and we appreciate you joining us on theCUBE. We look forward to next year already and whatever city you're going to take us to. Me too, me too, thanks a lot. All right, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching.