Exclusive Interview With Pure Storage Chairman and CEO Charles Giancarlo

Charles Giancarlo, 62, is chairman and CEO of Pure Storage Inc. since 2017. Previously he spent 8 years at Silver Lake Partners from 2007 and before was almost 15 years at Cisco Systems with a period at Linksys. He also spent some time at Kalpana (acquired by Cisco in 1994 following Crescendo Communications and Newport Systems), at Adaptive Corp. and Telecom Systems. He’s board member at Zscaler, Arista Networks, Vectra Networks and Attivo Networks and chairman at Soraa and Alliance of US startups & inventors for jobs. He’s active on the education side at Brown University and UC Berkeley. He’s also the co-founder of Digital Dollars Foundation. He was board member at Accenture, Avaya – even interim CEO a few months -, Imperva, ServiceNow, Blue Jean Networks, Skype, Netflix, Mercury Payment Systems and Equinix. He initiated ItsOn and was board advisor at Coraid. He started his career at Siemens in Germany in 1980. According to proxy statements filed for FY20, he made $8,725,179 in total compensation. Of this total $518,333 was received as a salary, $361,895 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $7,842,176 was awarded as stock and $2,775 came from other types of compensation. 

StorageNewsletter.com: You got the Covid-19? How are you? How is it changing your life?
Giancarlo: Thank you for asking. I very much appreciate it. I had a very serious case but was fortunate in not having to be hospitalized. Now, I’m back to full health. In fact I have just come back from a week long holiday during which time I went for a 17 mile hike at 10K foot altitude. It was relaxing and I’m back to 100% health.  

Having experienced Covid-19 first hand, I am all too aware of the significant impact this virus can have on individuals and those around them. The experience has helped me shape Pure’s response to the pandemic, including our approach to employee reintegration.    

Did the Covid-19 impact Pure Storage business? 1FQ21 results show a subscription peak.
We were able to be there for our customers when they most needed us in the ways that they needed us. Across all industries, we enabled our customers, some of whom were on the frontline fighting COVID-19, to meet their unique demands during this time. Examples include major government agencies, a global collaboration network, and many enterprise customers where we were able to deliver solutions in just a few days from their first phone call. In each case, we helped customers and our partners to remotely install and manage our products and solutions within an hour or two of delivery. Performance like this was made possible by our strong and resilient supply chain and customer support who have gone the extra mile to serve customers with critical needs.

There is no doubt that as a result of the pandemic there is an increased customer demand for greater remote management, automation, consolidation and flexible consumption models. We are also seeing increased risk aversion from buyers. Did we see growth in subscription services? Yes, absolutely there was greatly increased customer interest in our Subscription Services. Those services enable customers to consume storage in truly flexible, multi-cloud environments and include our non-disruptive Evergreen services, Pure as-a-Service, and Cloud Block Store.

You also made a RIF (reduction in force)? Is it a classic annual team shake or this time was it driven by other objectives?
We completed a planned workforce rebalancing initiative at the beginning of the year, prior to COVID-19, to align our employees with company priorities and areas that are strategic to the business. Even during this time we continued to hire and boost our workforce.

Plus, I’ve told my team that it is my personal goal is to avoid any layoffs and furloughs this year. We’re committed to getting through this time in the best way we can.

You delivered a strong FY21 with $1.64 billion with 21% increase from previous year but you continue to accumulate losses, how do you see your profitability trajectory?
Our operating cash flow was positive for last year and in Q1, reflecting the healthy state of our business. We are focused on delivering efficient growth and will be responsible about how we manage our expenditures, while steadily investing in our growth.

The company continues to focus essentially on market share then revenue, but not profitability, as we just covered. Will you continue this strategy concentrated on market share to install Pure for the long runner?
Profitability continues to be important to us and we have been profitable on a non-GAAP basis for the last three years. It is worth highlighting that we continue to take market share — we not only significantly outperformed the external storage market in the past quarter, but we also outpaced the growth of the overall all-flash market. This is strong performance given that our primary competitors are largely flat to down, in some cases seeing Q1 storage revenue declines of as much as 18% year over year.

Pure stock is a disappointment for several years, oscillating between $10 and $20 with moves outside sometimes. Is it due to your debt or other factors?
Pure focuses on the things it can control. As I noted previously, we continue to take share in the overall market and against our competition. Our innovation cadence has been strong. We delivered the 7th generation of FlashArray this year. We also announced the release of Purity 3.0 on FlashBlade, which adds significant new features to the world’s most performant file and object platform, expanding its broad range of use cases to include modern analytics, rapid restore and ransomware. After seven years, competitors are still playing catch-up to Pure’s Evergreen program of continuous non-disruptive upgrades, which provides customers a subscription to innovation rather than a contract for obsolescence. And with Pure, customers have a choice on cloud. With Cloud Block Store on AWS, which operates natively on the AWS infrastructure, customers can experience the very same data services, interfaces and management on the public cloud as they do in their private clouds. This enables them to more easily move data and applications between different cloud environments.

Furthermore, Pure has also perfected the cloud consumption model with Pure-as-a-Service, which delivers the ultimate flexibility for storage consumption by offering a single unified subscription, allowing users to move data seamlessly between on-premises or in-cloud and only pay for what they actually use. Tying all this together is our Modern Data Experience, which is at the heart of our strategy and ensures we are focused on helping customers transform their storage operations to be simple, reliable, fast and flexible.

You had many CMOs in the last few years. Are you looking for a gem you never found?
Marketing continues to be a very important part of Pure. And in this current environment, the role of Marketing and the CMO is even more critical as all companies strive to find new and innovative ways to connect with customers. At Pure, we’ve also had to make the pivot toward more digital formats and in June, we hosted our first ever Pure//Accelerate Digital event where we welcomed more than 9,000 customers, partners, media and analysts.

The CMO role is critical in enabling this strategy and we are currently recruiting.

Cloud puts pressure on many storage vendors and therefore they promote a hybrid model. Is it real or just to limit and control the inevitable erosion?
We’ve all heard that COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation and cloud adoption. At Pure, we think of Cloud as a way of operating rather than as a destination. Enterprises prioritize simplicity, automation, agility, and flexibility, traits that should exist in both the private and public clouds. This is how we are developing our products to address hybrid cloud.

Pure changed the storage industry from our founding by focusing on delivering simplicity, reliability, and efficiency. For a variety of reasons, there are always going to be workloads and applications that need to be on-premises. By making on-prem just like cloud we have given customers a choice: leverage private or public clouds, depending on the workload, economics and business objectives. However, a challenge for enterprises is how to bridge the two environments. This is where Pure’s Cloud Block Store comes in. It enables enterprise applications to be more easily adapted for both public and private cloud environments.

As always, we are focused on what our customers are telling us and what they need. In this case it’s about choice and the ability to have the best of both worlds without compromise.

You jumped into unified storage with your recent FlashArray software update (Purity 6) now exposing block and file, you had this already with FlashBlade with file and object. What is the plan here? Go to a full unified multi-protocol offering block, file and object?
Our overall goal is to provide our customers with a Modern Data Experience, a single platform that can cover ALL of our customers’ data needs. Those needs range from block to file to object, so it’s natural that we are pursuing multi-protocol designs to enable our customers to benefit from consolidation. We don’t have to have 8-10 disparate storage products like some of our competitors do.

With respect to file and object, we’re in a particularly good position. We launched FlashBlade four years ago and it has quickly become the fastest-growing product in the file and object space. It has completely transformed what is possible for high-end, scale-out file and object. Designed to deliver massive scale-out bandwidth, FlashBlade has been adopted for big data, real-time analytics, AI, technical computing, cloud-native applications, and even high-performance backup and recovery. We continue to round-out FlashBlade’s features, and with the recent addition of replication both between data centers and to the cloud, it can take on more and more mission-critical file and object workloads.

On the other side of the file market, we often received requests customers for integrated file capabilities on our FlashArray product. In response, we’ve just announced FlashArray File Services. These capabilities came from our acquisition of Compuverde last year, and the team worked hard to make this a fully-integrated, native experience within Purity 6.0. FlashArray File Services is ideal for more common IT workloads like file sharing and user data, whether as part of a unified system with block workloads or as a dedicated file system. The combination of FlashBlade and FlashArray File Services enable us to cover the market for most file use cases. And importantly, they are all part of the same Purity platform, enabling a common user experience – the APIs and management – so using them together is synergistic for customers.

Pure acquired StorReduce in 2018, its first acquisition, then released ObjectEngine and killed it. What is the plan here? Why this sudden decision?
StorReduce combined data reduction, object storage technology, and hybrid cloud backup – all areas that we remain committed to helping customers with.

We found that customers prefer to utilize their own data protection software with our FlashBlade product and this continues to be a major use-case for FlashBlade. We call this rapid recovery. For most customers, restoring backed-up data could take a day or two, regardless of the use case. But with FlashBlade, customers are able to recover within an hour allowing their systems to be up and running very rapidly. We found customers preferred to stay with the environment that they had directly on FlashBlade and therefore we stayed focused on that as a use case.

Object storage and cloud connectivity also remain key focus areas for FlashBlade. Customers are looking to FlashBlade to provide both fast file and object access and to better connect Object Stores to the cloud. So we’re focused on helping customers with not just backup-oriented but also primary and hybrid object use-cases with FlashBlade, and working with key data protection partners to support high-performance backup and restore solutions.

The second acquisition, Compuverde, seems to be a better fit. I think it is integrated in the last FlashArray release. Why not instantiate it in the cloud? Any details on that?
We are super excited about the Compuverde technology and delighted with the way it has contributed to the evolution of our FlashArray product line. We made the decision early on to integrate the mature file system and protocol stack from Compuverde natively into FlashArray rather than bolt it on as an additional layer.

Both file and block workloads benefit from global data reduction and leverage the same pool of capacity. Now customers can consolidate additional workloads onto FlashArray and expect the same effortless management, efficiencies, and Evergreen as they have with their block workloads.

Our cloud implementation of Cloud Block Store is based on the same Purity software that operates on FlashArray. Our FlashArray File Services is now fully native on Purity. We are currently evaluating customer interest in enabling these services as part of our Cloud Data Services strategy.

AFA WW market is not increasing as much as before. What’s your strategy and roadmap beyond AFA?
When we first started the company we set out to create the all-flash data center and have made all-flash technology accessible for every organization and every workload. Through the years, we have delivered flash innovation after innovation to help solve our customers’ most critical challenges and enable them to deliver the best possible solutions and services in the market. There is plenty more for us to do to make the all flash data center a reality. We introduced last year our FlashArray //C product which, for the first time in the industry, has brought a flash solution to address the secondary storage economics. We are seeing great success with this unique offering.

Last year, we also introduced our Modern Data Experience strategy and we continue to deliver on this roadmap — bringing simplicity and reliability to all enterprise storage. Through our portfolio of products and services, we’ve begun to lay the foundation for storage to be dynamic and provide a cloud-like experience via shared services, flexible on-demand consumption and responsive to the needs of the application. That is our future.

Hobbies or other passions?
I’m involved in education, in particular I’m on the board of trustees for my alma mater, Brown University and University of Berkeley, School of Engineering. On a personal front, I ski, bike and hike in the mountains.

Read also:
Pure Storage Chaiman and CEO Charles Giancarlo Positive for Covid-19
Probably caught virus while traveling in Spain on March 10.
by Jean Jacques Maleval | June 3, 2020 | News
Pure Storage: Fiscal 1Q21 Financial Results
Sales down 25% Q/Q, up 12% Y/Y, and expected to be flat next quarter [with our comments]
June 2, 2020 | Press Release
Charles Giancarlo CEO, Pure Storage
Replacing Scott Dietzen becoming chairman
August 25, 2017 | Press Release
Charles Giancarlo Board’s Director, Tintri
Formerly EVP and CTO for Cisco
October 5, 2016 | Press Release