Videos

Patrick: I think we're at a fantastic point in technology and in the industry today where data is underpinning pretty much every enterprise we talk to. And clearly, we are a data company.

We host all of our customers' data. We allow them to get a value from that data. The rise of the importance of data is really key to our customers and key to us and driving the fantastic growth we're seeing.

Mark: So, let's stick with that data side of things for now. I mean, I want to talk more about the industry more broadly in a second, but from the data perspective, the storage perspective, what are those pros and cons in the industry that you see?

Patrick: Yeah, I think the pros and cons are the ever-growing datasets, people needing to be able to access them quickly. The larger the dataset, the more challenges there are in being able to access and get insight from the data. It's where we play a key part, being able to provide that fast for datasets, irrespective of their size.

In the world of modern data analytics, there's no such thing as cold data. You know, the day of the data lake, we view, we've talked about it for quite a while, as being over. We turn it the data hub, and what underpins the data hub is our FlashBlade technology that provides performance for unstructured datasets that drive the modern world of analytics and AI.

With the data hub, we're able to provide performant environment for all types of data in all use cases, so you don't have to copy that data around from one environment to another. Data hub can provide performance, scalability, and flexibility across all of our customers' data needs.

Last year, we announced our strategy to accelerate. This year, we GA'd our Cloud Block Store, which is our first foray into providing our services in the public cloud. And that really ties into the idea that customers are largely not wanting to be all one or all the other: all public cloud or all on-prem.

Mark: What's big beyond cloud?

Patrick: Big beyond cloud is all enterprises we talk to are under cost pressure on an ongoing basis, do more with less. And so, the simplicity play that we bring allows them to not have the management of their data platforms as something they do every day.

One of our biggest problems is they say the Pure Storage platform is the one that just runs and they forget about in the data center. And in some ways, that's great for us. In other ways, we'd rather they didn't forget about Pure, obviously. So, the simplicity that we bring allows them to just think about how they run the environment in a different way.

We see an ever-increasing amount of hyperconverged, and people are drawn to the hyperconverged area because of the promise of simplicity. But actually, as we look at our technology, it's designed from the ground up to be simple. It's not simple because it simply has one vendor's badge on the rack. It takes a lot of effort behind the scenes and in engineering and development to make something that is truly simple to operate, and that's what we do in our partnerships, especially with Cisco and our FlashStack model allow us to bring best of breed simplicity plus flexibility to the IT infrastructure environment that our customers put in their data centers.

Mark: But, as you say, sometimes that's a double-edged sword because if you're really that simple, then they don't notice you all the time.

Patrick: It's often the challenge, but we always try and make sure that we remind them of the value that we're always bringing to them..

Mark: I suspect you probably do. And just to very briefly, in closing here, something...I understand why you're out and about, on the doorstep, if you like. That's what you hear people talking about. Is there anything where it's just a little more difficult, perhaps by being part of a more traditional provider set or being more integrated with on-premises. Anything there that makes life more challenging or…?

Patrick: No, I don't think so. We're talking about something we call the modern data experience, which combines simplicity, the concept of fast, be it performance or time to value, a subscription to innovation. And the fact that, as we were talking about earlier, the cloud is everywhere and we need to embrace the cloud.

And so, the modern data experience I think is really resonating with our customers and they're able to relate that to their own environment and to the challenges that they're trying to address with their business services, their applications, their operational model, and how they're hosting their technology and their datasets going forward.