ESG Videos

Announcer: The following is an ESG on location video.

Mark: Welcome to Pure Accelerate 2018 right in the middle of San Francisco at the solid old Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Whenever you come to one of these events with Pure, you're gonna get a lot of orange, some very questionable sartorial choices, I have to say, but you're also gonna get a lot of interesting things and a lot of difference. The theme of new meets now I think is a very interesting one. And to talk about some of the manifestations of that, I'm gonna had it immediately to my colleagues because there's a lot to get through.

Alex: This is my first Pure Accelerate and what actually struck me about the show is how the company is trying to stay ahead of the curve so to speak in the all-flash market. They have architected the FlashArray//X to be sold at a zero dollar premium to the FlashArray//M. They are actually looking ahead and trying to work with customers to deal with the new lease accounting standards that will affect their op-ex and it will be a surprise to them by offering their own storage as a service. And finally, the offering of their new AI ready converged infrastructure platform, the AIRI and how they want to help customers get to market faster with their own AI offerings.

Tony: So one of the things that really struck me here at Pure Accelerate had nothing to do with either of their major storage products. Pure 1 gives them an arguably enviable advantage in the business operations management space. So going beyond the maintenance and the monitoring of arrays they have been doing for nearly a decade, it allows them to reach up into the stack and use their deep understanding of workloads and infrastructure to provide an insight into the actual business processes and applications that customers really worry about.

Scott: We've had a number of impressive announcements this week. And really probably the big news is what's standing next to me right now is Pure announced an entire portfolio of the FlashArray//X all built on an NVMe architecture, so we're not just talking one product, we're talking a full portfolio with an NVMe architecture. You might say, "Well, MVMe, that's one of the big trends right now. How is that big?" Well, the big part of this news is Pure is announcing it as having a zero dollar price premium, which is just incredible because many of us in the industry have been predicting NVMe as the technology of the future.

But Pure is actually bringing that future back to today. And this is something, I think, that really represents an element of Pure's DNA that we've come to expect over the years. Pure has figured out a way to identify technologies that we all assume will become available three to five years from now and figured out how to deliver those today. If I'm an enterprise and I'm trying to consolidate my infrastructure and I'm trying to span both traditional workloads, as well as these new emergent elements and I have all these disparate siloes of technology, of SAN and DAS, trying to figure that out.

What Pure has done is they're able to hit low enough latencies with the FlashArray//X that now we can have one architecture that spans the traditional and the emergent and creates a core element of what Pure is calling the data-centric architecture. That essentially will be a core foundation for businesses as they try to compete in this ever digitally defined economy moving forward.

Mike: The one area that I was really interested in hearing more about was under the converged umbrella here at Pure. The first being around FlashStack. So they announced a pre-validated, pre-integrated design jointly with Cisco around modernizing the Oracle data warehouse workloads. And one of the key things there is it's extensible to other modern workloads and artificial intelligence. And then on the artificial intelligence front, they have another solution. They recently announced AIRI and that's really...was released as a goal to simplify AI at scale.

And while it's doing that, it's also helping data scientists be more productive because of that simplification. But one of the things I learned is there's some organizations that really know what they're doing already and they can really consume something at that scale but there's also a number of organizations that are still just getting started. And with that in mind, they released AIRI Mini here at the show.

And really, what that's gonna do is take that level of simplification and bring it down a bit to organizations that are really just looking to get started with artificial intelligence. The AIRI Mini, I think, is really gonna serve as a really positive cost-effective solution for a number of organizations that are being told they need to do artificial intelligence but they don't know how to get started.

Mark: So obviously, Pure has made great strides. It's sitting at $1 billion on the traditional flash side, on the AI side and a whole bunch of other things including their new, interesting approach to consumption. Clearly a great deal of progress. But companies or at least successful companies are also based on more than just technology. There is culture and there is vision. From the culture, we may laugh to some degree at all the orange everywhere. You've got the puritans running around. And yet, I think there is meaning to all that.

There is a genuine sense of community within the company, of purpose within the company, and that's represented in its customers as well, those we've had a chance to speak to. But I think vision is what really matters. The culture was here for many years. Vision is what really matters. And I can't remember the first time I had a conversation with a puritan about the necessity to have an ACT 2.

You can't just be a flash storage company. And so I think what I got this time from this event was a genuine feeling that they know what ACT 2 is and they are actually really moving towards it. Whether or not you really want to buy into the data-centric architecture term, that's fine. But what I really heard was enough to convince me that whatever else you think, Pure has done enough and is, more importantly, doing enough to be centric to people's data architecture moving forwards.