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>> We're back with Steve McDowell,
the Principal Analyst for Data & Storage
at Moor Insights and Strategy.
Hey Steve, great to have you on.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
You've got a really interesting background
and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and
what's your research focus?
>> Yeah, so my research, my focus area
is data and storage and all the things around that,
whether it's On-Prem or Cloud
or, you know, software as a service.
My background, as you said, is a blend, right?
I grew up as an engineer.
I started off as an OS developer at IBM.
I came up through the ranks and shifted over
into corporate strategy and product marketing
and product management,
and I have been doing
working as an industry analyst now for about five years
at Moor Insights and Strategy.
>> Steve, how do you see this playing out
in the next three to five years?
I mean, cloud got it all started,
it's going to snowballing.
You know, however you look at it percent of spending
on storage that you think is going to land in as a service.
How do you see the evolution here?
>> IT buyers are looking at
as a service and consumption base is,
you know, a natural model.
It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility
all of the goodness that I get from public cloud,
but without all of the downside and uncertainty
on cost and security and things like that, right,
that also come with the public cloud
and it's delivered by technology providers
that I trust and that I know, and that I worked with,
you know, for, in some cases, decades.
So, I don't know that we have hard data
on how much adoption there is of the model,
but we do know that it's trending up,
you know and every infrastructure provider at this point
has some flavor of offering in the space.
So, it's clearly popular with CIOs
and IT practitioners alike.
>> So Steve, organizations are at a
they're different levels
of maturity in their, their transformation journeys,
and of course, as a result,
they're going to have different storage needs
that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives.
From an IT buyer perspective, you may have data on this,
even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service
actually fit in and can it be a growth lever?
>> It can absolutely be a growth leader.
It gives me the flexibility as an IT architect
to scale my business over time without worrying about
how much money I have to invest in storage hardware.
Right?
So I, I get kind of, again, that cloud like flexibility
in terms of procurement and deployment,
but it gives me that control by
oftentimes being on site within my premise,
and then I manage it like a storage array that I own.
So, you know, it's beautiful for for organizations
that are scaling and it's equally nice
for organizations that just want to
manage and control cost over time.
So, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits
and certainly growing in adoption and in popularity.
>> How about from a technology vendor perspective?
You've worked for in the tech industry for companies?
What do you think is going to define the winners
and losers in this space?
If you running strategy for a storage company,
what would you say?
>> I think the days of of a storage administrator
managing, you know, rate levels and recovering
and things of that sort are over, right?
What these organizations like Pure delivering
but they're offering is simplicity.
It's a push button approach to deploying
storage to the applications and workloads
that need it, right?
It becomes storage as a utility.
So, it's not just the, you know
the consumption based economic model of as a service.
It's also the manageability that comes with that
or the flexibility of management that comes with that.
I can push a button, deploy bites to you know
a workload that needs it,
and it just becomes very simple, right,
for the storage administrator, in a way that, you know
kind of old school On-Prem storage can't really deliver.
>> You know, I want to, I want to ask you,
I mean I've been thinking about this
because again, a lot of companies are,
are you know, moving, hopping on the as a service bandwagon.
I feel like, okay, in and of itself,
that's not where the innovation lives.
The innovation is going to come from
making that singular experience from On-Prem
to the clouds across clouds maybe
eventually out to the edge.
Do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service?
>> Well, there's two levels of innovation, right?
One, is business model innovation, right?
I now have an organizational flexibility
to build the infrastructure to support
my digital transformation efforts,
but on the product side and the offering side,
it really is as you said,
it's about the integration of experience.
Every enterprise today touches
a cloud in some way, shape or form.
Right, I have data spread, not just in my data center,
but at the edge,
oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud.
I don't know where my data is,
and it really lands on the storage providers
to help me manage that and deliver that
manageability experience to to the IT administrators.
So, when I look at innovation in this space,
you know, it's not just a a storage array and rack
that I'm leasing, right, this is not another lease model.
It's really
fully integrated, you know end to end management
of my data and yeah and all of the things around that.
>> Yeah, so to your point about a lease model is
if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah.
You can shift CapEx to OPEX,
but you're still committed
to you have to over provision, whereas here
and I wanted to ask you about that.
It's an interesting model, right,
because you got to read the fine print.
Of course the fine print says you got to commit
to some level typically, and then if, you know,
if you go over you you charge for what you use
and you can scale that back down
and that's got to be very attractive for folks.
I wonder
if you we'll ever see
like true cloud like consumption pricing,
that has two edges to it, right?
You see consumption based pricing
in some of the software models and you know yeah,
people like it, the, the lines of business maybe
because they're paying in by the drink,
but then procurement hates it
because they don't have predictability.
How do you see the pricing models?
Do you see that maturing or do you think we're
sort of locked in on, on where we're at?
>> No, I do see that maturing, right?
And when you work with a company like Pure
to understand their consumption base
and as a service and you know,
when you work with a company like Pure
to understand their consumption base
and as a service offerings, it really is
sitting down and understanding
where your data needs are going to scale.
Right?
You buy in at a certain level, you have capacity planning.
You can expand if you need to.
You can shrink if you need to.
So, it really does put more control
in the hands of the IT buyer than,
well certainly then traditional CapEx based On-Prem,
but also more control than you would get,
you know working with an Amazon or an Azure.
>> Well the next 10 years,
it ain't going to be like the last 10 years.
Thanks Steve!
We'll leave it there for now.
Love to have you back.
Look at, keep it right there.
You don't want to miss this next segment
where we dig into the customer angle.
You're watching theCube production of
At Your Storage Service,
brought to you by PureStorage.
One more.
Okay, thanks Steve!
We'll leave it there for now.
I'd love to have you back.
Keep it right there,
At Your Storage Service
continues in a moment. You're watching theCube.
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