The Six Five team discusses Pure Storage Accelerate 2024.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: We sprinted from the Palazzo to the Conrad because over there it was Pure Accelerate, Pat, and we had the chance to both sit down on The Six Five with Charlie Giancarlo, CEO and chairman. We also spent a couple of days with the broader executive team. What was your take?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so a few overall themes here. First of all, no surprise AI. And AI was really looked at two vectors. First of all helping enterprise build out their AI estate and then using AI in a copilot form and storage operations. And then there was this thing about getting more AI efficient in your operations. There was also a theme about enterprise data accessibility across all forms of data wherever it’s located. And Dan, I love hybrid multi-cloud fabrics and not only is this a hybrid multi-cloud fabric, but it’s also across different types of data. Security was a big topic, cyber resiliency and some of the features that the company is adding to help enterprise on that. And then upping the game on storage as a service with not only extending it to GPUs but also putting in some hardcore SLAs. So just ticking off some of the announcement, Pure fusion, right?
This is all about unifying the array, optimizing storage on the fly across multiple forms of data and obviously in the cloud. I talked about the AI Copilot that they’re putting on that to manage and protect data. And then related to Evergreen one for AI, it’s essentially doing storage as a service across new types of use cases, hence enterprise AI. And that’s the guarantee as they use it. Guaranteeing storage performance for GPUs across training, across inference and also HPC. And those are three very different type of environment. And when it came to security, we talked about the cyber resiliency.
And by the way, the thought here is why pay the cyber resiliency players when you can get it directly integrated into your storage platform. Also on security, there were secure application workspaces, which essentially this is their Kubernetes play with Portworx securing workloads in a multi-tenancy environment. And then finally I talked about these SLAs as storage as service. So service level agreements. These are guarantees, not to be confused with the Tommy Boy guarantee for brake pads here. But SLA number one, enhanced cybersecurity and recovery resilience SLA, I won’t go into the details, you can read about it. New security assessments out there. But no, a very interesting play. By the way, check out our video. Charlie makes some very provocative statements about his play into the hyperscalers and of course we get his points of view on all these announcements.
Daniel Newman: So you hit a lot of the announcements really well, Pat. And so I won’t belabor some of that. What I will say is the company continued to be very focused on its experience, the Copilot, very interesting. I see an opportunity. The best story we had, it was Sean, I don’t remember his last name off the top of my head, but he was the GM of one of their business units. And he was saying to us about I think it’s his brother-in-law or someone that’s in the storage actually works in government, I believe in storage and how he was asking about keeping up and the idea of these people being able to keep up with the technology innovation that’s going on so quickly, it’s almost impossible. So I see that as such a great application of a copilot to figure out how’s the best way to configure, to implement, to utilize, to leverage the technology.
This is a great case of fine-tuning an LLM to give and create benefit for a particular use case, Pat. So the other thing I want to point out is I started talking about the spreadsheet. I think I said something when we were on with Charlie, I said all the bean counters are going to have to start playing with their spreadsheet, but if Pure can convince one hyperscaler, not for its own internal use, but to start actually making Pure Storage part of their outbound go to market consumption model, Pat, that could be an incredible, one hyperscaler could be an incredible growth engine. And the way they’re building, the way they’re able to accomplish pricing, the way they’re able to accomplish durability of their systems and then usability of their systems and experience within their systems and the way they’re built, like a layer cake there is a real opportunity because they’re so specialized and focused on Pure Storage that they could actually become a resell product through the hyperscale challenge, Pat, that could be massive. Charlie, you could see he lit up when I threw that out there. Start adjusting your spreadsheet, folks.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, man. He did. He did. And his confidence was off the rails.
Daniel Newman: You almost wonder, like I said, he didn’t say anything. This is just you and I insinuation, it’s always like he’s got something brewing.
Patrick Moorhead: Well it’s not always. I got to tell you though, there was extra special and we’ve spent a lot of time with Charlie and he seemed the most confident I’ve ever seen him about the future prospects and what he’s doing and how as customer conversations are going.
Daniel Newman: You could definitely sense things are moving directionally well for the company. And so you hit that on all cylinders. Adding the innovation, you’re talking about SLAs, building in cyber resiliency, creating and fusion, Pat. The idea of being able to work backwards compatible to make all your storage available to AI, that’s red-hot. That is red-hot. And so if you’re Pure Storage, you have to feel really good about it because that’s a big problem that we’re trying to solve. And you got all these companies trying to solve it in these companies that are storage, but we’re not storage.
Patrick Moorhead: Data problems. And by the way, you can’t solve your data problems unless you solve your storage problems too.
Daniel Newman: And so he’s basically saying, “Look, we’ll let the Databricks do the Databricks stuff, if you want to worry about data pipeline or if it’s on-prem, it can be like a Cloudera or can be a MongoDB.” Whoever they are from the data, he’s basically saying, “We’ll give you the data prep and readiness and we’ll make it backward compatible so you can make all your data available without all the complexity of creating data lakes.” And that’s like dude, look, we’ve been dealing with this for years. Let’s get all the data in one place. Did they just crack the code? Did they just solve the problem? It’s a really good question.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
