‘You will be getting involved at a very strategic level with the customer, not at the storage management layer, but really at the strategic layer in IT management,’ Pure Storage CEO Charles Giancarlo told partners before the opening of Pure//Accelerate 2025.
Pure Storage Wednesday used the opening of its Pure//Accelerate 2025 conference in Las Vegas to officially roll out a number of new products and technologies. The most important was the introduction of what the company called Enterprise Data Cloud.
Pure Storage Chairman and CEO Charles Giancarlo, however, took to the stage a day earlier at the Pure Partner Summit to unveil Enterprise Data Cloud to the company’s channel partners.
Giancarlo, who rather than his characteristic gray beret wore a black one with the words “I Love Our Partners” stitched on the back, explained that Enterprise Data Cloud takes data management beyond the array level to build a cloud across multiple arrays.
[Related: Pure Storage, Nutanix Unveil New Hyperconverged Infrastructure With Pure FlashArray]
“Instead of our storage solutions operating like independent data silos, we have created a control layer that operates above all of the storage arrays and has them operate together as a cloud of storage in the customer on a global basis,” he said. “It’s a very different way for enterprises to be not only managing their storage, but it gives them the opportunity to manage their datasets in a very comprehensive way on a global basis.”
Giancarlo also used his time with partners to talk about the importance of AI to Pure Storage and vice versa, what he sees as customers’ top concerns, as well as his vision for partners.
Here is more of what Giancarlo had to say during his presentation to partners.
Top Of Mind For Customer CEOs And C-Level Executives
‘What about artificial intelligence? Have you guys discovered the killer app yet for artificial intelligence?’ would be another one, but artificial intelligence in general. And then, ‘Can you help us protect our data? Can you make us more immune to cyberattacks or to ransomware?’ Those would probably be the top.
Pure Storage’s Role In AI
We actually have multiple roles. So any discussion around artificial intelligence immediately gets into a number of different things. [First], we are now able to satisfy our customers’ need for artificial intelligence storage solutions at every level of scale and performance. So there’s the product side of this, if you will, for customers that are interested in building artificial intelligence inside their own environment. But then, of course, there’s what we’re doing ourselves with artificial intelligence to make it more effective for our marketing, for our sales teams, for our partners, to be able to find and execute on opportunities in the field. And then there’s what we are using artificial intelligence for within our own products to make it easier for customers to manage their large storage environments, whether that is for the purpose of diagnosing issues, planning for the future or making things more secure. And then, finally, and we think this is going to be a big part of tomorrow’s conversation, is the ability to create an environment where customers can get easier access to their production data for the purposes of AI, which is not necessarily the AI machines themselves but, rather, making that data much more available on a global basis.
Vision For Pure Storage Partners
First of all, as you know, we’ve been dedicated to partners. I’ve been, personally throughout my career, dedicated to a partner model for a wide variety of reasons. First of all, it is the nature of our business that our customers’ lives are getting increasingly complicated. You know, when I think back on the early part of my career, there was very little for IT managers to be focused on, maybe the PBX and the one or two computers they had in the organization. And now, if you think about the complexity of running an IT shop, it’s just very, very hard with new technologies coming on all the time. So partners play a major role in educating customers, in offloading a lot of the job and the complexity of planning for customers, and, of course, becoming the first line of support for customers. So just so many reasons why customers are increasingly relying on partners to do part of their job for us as well. You know, we sell one portion of a data center solution. In order for that to become a true solution for the customer with compute, with networking, with power distribution, whatever it may be, it takes a village, if we want to use that phrase. And then finally, we are still even at $3 billion a relatively small sales force, 750 sales teams worldwide. You [partners] multiply us by a factor of 10 or more. So they’re all very good reasons why we continue to be committed to partners.
Pure//Accelerate 2025 News
Certainly a lot of just product updates, which are very exciting in and of themselves. But really what we’re announcing [here], which is a very big deal, is the concept of, and this is the big reveal, an Enterprise Data Cloud. What does that mean? It means that instead of our storage solutions operating like independent data silos, we have created a control layer that operates above all of the storage arrays and has them operate together as a cloud of storage in the customer on a global basis. It’s a very different way for enterprises to not only be managing their storage, but it gives them the opportunity to manage their datasets in a very comprehensive way on a global basis. It’s not a lot different than when many of us in this room, if not most of us, used to use an external hard drive on our desktops or laptops and then switched over to the cloud to keep our files. We can get access to them anywhere in the world where we can easily share anything out there with a couple of clicks of a mouse. And it just really made our lives a lot easier. And this is what we’re seeking to do in the enterprise as well: make their lives a lot easier when it comes to managing their data.
Customer Feedback On Enterprise Data Cloud
It takes about two minutes before the lights go on. And the reason why it’s such an easy message is because, literally, everybody has gone through this transition as a consumer. You know, we’ve gone from the external hard drive to the cloud, and we’ve never gone away from that because the idea of being able to get access to your data from anywhere at any time from any application, to be able to manage it on a global basis with policy, just makes so much sense. The more amazing thing is that enterprise data storage has stayed in the current paradigm of separate arrays for every application stack. The amazing thing is that’s been around for so long. I mean, it’s really time to kill the idea of vertical stacks and go to a horizontal data cloud in the enterprise.
Enterprise Data Cloud’s Impact On Partners
This is really the most exciting part of this announcement for partners. It really is. Because if you think about it, one of the challenges that we saw at Pure, we’ve realized this, is that we made our arrays so easy that Coz’s [John Colgrove, Pure Storage’s co-founder and chief visionary officer] 9-year-old could set this up and be able to operate it. Which is really amazing. But that takes away the opportunity for some serious value-add for our partners. And we did realize that going to an Enterprise Data Cloud, where it allows an organization to be able to set up policies by which their data is handled on a global basis, means that these policies have to be thought about, they have to be strategized, and then they have to be put into code in what’s called our Fusion, which is the capabilities in Purity that make this happen. This is a huge consulting opportunity that is going to be operating at the highest level of compliance and security inside an organization. You get to plan, to conceive with your customers, how they want their global data sets to be managed. What’s the geo fencing they’re going to put in place? What is the political fencing? What are the role-based access controls they want to put in place? What is going to be their snapshot policy? What’s going to be their security policies associated with this? What’s going to be their backup policies? How are they going to keep the records? Because it’s going to be done over time in Purity and in Fusion. What are going to be the catalogs that they keep for their records for replication of the data? So just think about that. You’re getting involved. You will be getting involved at a very strategic level with the customer, not at the storage management layer, but really at the strategic layer in IT management. It’s really exciting. It’s going to be great work. And I think it’s going to be yet another opportunity to have a truly strategic relationship with your customer,
Pure Storage Differentiators
Well, you’re going to hear this a lot, but it’s the fact that we have a unified data plane. We have a unified platform model. Everything in Pure runs on Purity. Purity is a unified operating environment. It runs at every level of scale, from the smallest to, frankly, the largest, where Purity is going to be going into the hyperscalers. It runs from the highest performance now on our FlashBlade//EXA, which you’ll be hearing more about, to our most price-sensitive storage with our E family of FlashBlade. It runs with all of the features and capabilities, and it’s all on Evergreen [storage subscription] as well. Because we have that unified platform, it makes it just that much easier for us to place this consistent control plane above it, to allow it to operate like a cloud rather than a bunch of independent arrays.
Impact Of R&D Investment
Almost since the beginning, certainly since being a public company, we reinvest about 20 percent of our revenue in R&D every year. How that makes us different is we are the one player that has treated storage consistently as high technology, rather than as a commodity. And that’s what really sets us apart. When you think of storage as a commodity, you get what you pay for. But when you think of it as high technology, again, you will get what you pay for, and a lot of it.
