>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston,
connecting with thought leaders all around the world,
this is a Cube conversation.
>> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, the Cube.
And we have some news for you.
Pure storage has acquired Portworx,
the Kubernetes specialist, for $370 million
in an all-cash transaction.
Charlie Giancarlo is here.
He's the CEO of Pure Storage.
And he's joined by Murli Thirumale
who is the CEO of Portworx.
Gentlemen, good to see you. Thanks for coming on.
>> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks for having us.
>> So Charlie, the transaction all cash transaction,
north of 300 million, your biggest transaction ever,
your biggest acquisition, give us, give us the hard news.
>> Yeah, well the, the hard news is easy news
for our customers,
we're bringing together two great companies,
Pure, as you know, the, the leader in technology
and data storage and management.
And we're bringing in to our team the Portworx team
that is, that has been the leader
in container orchestrated storage systems.
And it really is going to match, you know, the existing and,
and legacy hardware and application environment
to the new environment of containers.
And we couldn't be more excited.
>> So, so tell us, what was the rationale, sort of,
thesis behind the acquisition?
What are you hoping to accomplish, Charlie?
>> You know, containers is the way that applications
are going to be developed in the future,
with, with no doubt.
And containers utilize storage differently
than traditional application environments,
whether those are our VMs
or even bare metal application environments.
And because of that, it's a very new way of,
of handling data management.
The other thing we saw was a philosophy within Portworx,
very similar to Pure, of building cloud everywhere.
And make it look the same whether it's
in a private data center or in the public cloud environment.
And so by bringing these two things together,
we create a very consistent environment for, for customers,
whether they're utilizing
and going with their existing application environment,
or with the new container environment
for their new applications.
>> So Murli, let me go to you.
First of all, congratulations, you know, this isn't your,
your, your first nice exit.
We've known each other for a long time.
So, so that's fantastic for you and the team.
So, so bring us up to date on, kind of,
where the company, you know, started and where it's gone,
and, and why you feel like this is such a good fit
and a good exit for Portworx.
>> Well, let's start with the company.
You know, we've been at this for five and a half years,
almost six now.
And we started with the very premise that,
that as containers were beginning to be deployed
and apps started to kind of
be seen everywhere containerized,
that data agility needed to match the app agility
that people are getting from containers.
And that was something that was missing.
And so one of the things we did was really kind of take
an entirely different approach to storage.
We turned, kind of, storage on its head and,
and designed it from the app down.
And effectively, what we did was leverage Kubernetes,
which was being used really until then to orchestrate,
really just the container part of the,
of this system to start orchestrating data
and storage as well.
So northbound, you know, containers are being orchestrated
by Kubernetes to manage the apps.
And southbound, Portworx now added the ability
to manage data with Kubernetes.
And what that's resulted in, Dave, is that, you know, in,
in the last several years,
we've gained 160 customers, household names, right?
Comcast, T-Mobile, Lufthansa, GE, Roblox, RBC,
who've all sort of deployed us in production.
And, and really kind of built a leadership position
in the ability to aid digital transformation, you know,
which customers are going through with containers.
>> Hey guys, I wonder if you could bring up that the chart,
I'm going to just introduce some ETR data here.
So, so this is one of our favorite views, X,Y view.
The vertical axis is spending momentum
or what we call net score, higher, the better.
And the vert, the horizontal axis is, is market share.
And you can see I've outlined with that little pink area,
container orchestration and container platforms.
And you can see it's very elevated right there
with machine learning and AI,
a little bit above cloud computing.
Right there with robotic process automation.
This is the April survey of 1,200 respondents.
The July survey, you know,
robotic process automation bumps up a little bit,
which changes the shape.
But I wanted to show this picture to really explain
to our audience the, you know, the popularity.
And this is where people are investing and, and Charlie,
you can see storage, kind of, you know,
right there in the, in the middle.
And you, it seems to me, you're now connecting the dots
to containers, which are going to disperse everywhere.
We often think of containers sometimes
as this separate thing, but it's not.
I mean, it's embedded into the entire stack.
I wonder if you could talk about that.
>> Containers are just the next generation way
of, of building applications, right?
And one of the great things about containers,
when you build an app on containers,
it becomes what's known as portable.
You know, it can operate in the cloud,
it can operate on your own hardware
inside your own data center.
And of course, Pure is known for making data portable
as well, between both private data centers
and hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure.
So by bringing this together, making it possible,
not just for, as we talked about,
container-based applications,
but also for existing application environments,
whether those are VM or bare metal, you know,
we create a very flexible, portable environment.
>> I wonder if we could talk really about, you know,
just sort of the evolution of, I mean, VMs and then,
and obviously containers, the, you know,
the virtual machines when we were spinning them
up in the early days,
storage was like the second class citizen.
And then through a series of integrations and, you know,
hard work, you had storage much more native.
But every VM is, is, is kind of fat, right?
It's sharing the same, or has its own operating system.
My understanding is containers,
they could share a single operating system.
And, and so, but talk a little bit more,
first of all, is that right?
And where does storage fit in, in containers?
I mean, we think of them, at least in the early days,
as ephemeral, but you're solving a different problem
of persistence.
Maybe talk about that, that problem that you're solving.
>> Sure, Dave, I think, you know,
you characterized this as the right way, right?
There's kind of VMs that have dominated sort of in,
in the world of infrastructure for, for, for,
for the last 10, 15 years now.
But what, what is really happening here
is a little bit more profound, right? Really.
Is if you think about it, this is the transformation
of a data center from being very, very machine-centric,
which is sort of the look-back view of the world.
to being much more application-centered, going forward.
And this is being accomplished, not just by, you know,
what Charlie talked about, which is applications
being deployed in containers, but by the evolution
of using Kubernetes now as the new control plane
for the data center.
So in, in the last couple of years,
something amazing has happened, right?
People have adopted containers and in doing so,
they've realized they need to orchestrate these containers.
And lo and behold, they've kind of deployed Kubernetes.
As they've done that, they've begun to recognize
that Kubernetes now gives them a, an amazing capability.
They can now let everything be application-driven.
So Kubernetes is now the new app-defined control plane
for the, for the data center,
just like VMs and VMware was the, you know,
the kind of compute-centered,
machine-defined data center of the past.
So we're one of those modern day companies for the modern,
you know, digital transformation stack.
And it doesn't just mean, it's just not just a product
like Portworx, but other products in there, right?
Whether it's a Rancher, an OpenShift, or,
or security solutions that are extensions of Kubernetes.
So to your point,
what we've done is we've taken Kubernetes and extended it
to managing storage and data.
And we're doing that in a way that allows it
to be fully distributed, completely automated.
And in fact, what happens is now the management of,
of the app and the data go hand-in-hand, at the same time.
You don't have this separation of sort of responsibilities.
So the person who is really our buyer and buying set
is a very different buyer than traditional storage.
And, you know, you know, traditional storage.
I've talked to you about that part of the business
a long time, many times in the past.
Our buyers are actually dev ops buyers.
So we land in dev ops and we expand in IT ops.
Our budgets are coming from a digital transformation budget,
like move to cloud or,
or even just kind of business transformation.
And our users are really not the classic storage user,
but really the, the person who's driving Kubernetes,
the person who's making automation decisions,
cloud architects, automation architects.
They can now operate storage without having to know storage
through products like Portworx that extend Kubernetes
in, in, and allow it to be all application-driven.
>> So it's much more, so it's much more than just bringing,
I'd say just, much more than bringing state
to what was originally a stateless environment.
It's bringing more data management.
>> Correct.
>> So Charlie, connect the dots for us in terms of
where Pure fits in that, in that value chain.
>> Well, as you know, I mean,
we've developed a large number of products and capabilities
that go well beyond storage into data management.
So whether it's snapshotting, or replication,
or data motion, you know, into, you know, from,
from on-prem into the cloud.
And as we've been doing that, we've been building
up a control plane to do this with, you know,
traditional block and file storage.
Now, this is extending that same set of capabilities
to the container side.
Whether it will be blocked because there are a lot
of container systems that are looking at block,
but even into the object space overall.
So think of this as the integration of data manage,
of a data management control plane
for both existing and new apps.
And, and that data control plane existing,
not just in one location, such as the,
the private data center or the private cloud,
but also into the public cloud, as well,
so that a company can orchestrate their, both their,
their container-based apps,
but also the data that goes along with them,
and the data that goes to their traditional apps
with one orchestration tool.
>> So you mentioned, you know, I think when you said motion,
I think of V motion.
And, and if I want to move a workload
from one VM to another, I can preserve its state,
is that kind of where you're headed with, with containers?
>> Well, in that case you're thinking of it very much
in a push, you know, IT push sense,
rather than just the application calling for data access
and being given, given it through instead of APIs.
So again, they're much more dynamic environment,
rather than, rather than it be a human-instigated, you know,
think of it being as, as a policy and, and pro,
and programmer-initiated set of activities.
>> I'm glad you brought that up,
because we think about, we think about, you know,
we also often think in monolithic terms.
And containers are not, right? It's really like you said.
Even though they run inside of VMs, it sort of breaks that-
>> Well they can, but they don't have to, right?
So they can run on bare metal.
But of course, you know, with, with VMware,
they, they've designed it to be able to run inside of VMs,
as well, if that's what customers are most comfortable with.
>> Sure. Okay, you were going to add some color to that.
>> Yeah, I think, I think, you know, what, what,
what Charlie is describing is really kind of a new paradigm.
That's a self service paradigm where application owners and
application drivers, people who are creating apps,
deploying apps, now can, can self-service themselves
through a Kubernetes-based interface.
And, and it's all automated, right?
So in, in a, in a funny way, one way to think about this is,
somebody who, who's, you know, deploying apps,
they are doing that with the help of Kubernetes.
Their hands never leave the Kubernetes wheel,
and now all of a sudden they're deploying, you know,
data, and storage, and doing all of that
without an intimate knowledge of the storage infrastructure.
So that kind of idea of automation driving
and its app-driven self-service model really enables
that agility for data in addition to the agility for,
for the app layer.
And, and I think, Dave, the key thing here is, you know,
why, why it, why has that container bubble floated
to the top of, of your, of your,
of the graph that you just showed?
It's because I think modern day enterprises
are doing two things that are imperative for their success,
right?
One of them is the fast enterprises are going
to eat the slow.
So they need to move fast, and the way for that fast
to be translated from an app agility
to the agility throughout the whole stack,
is enabled by this.
The other thing that they are doing is data is the new oil.
And folks really need to be able to leverage their data,
whether it's their own data, external data,
but bring it all together in realtime, mine it,
and they can't do that
without automating the heck out of it.
Right? And that's what Kubernetes enables also.
So the combination of data agility, and being able
to kind of create that ability to mine in realtime the data
through an app-oriented interface is,
is completely revolutionary if you think about it.
And in my view, going forward,
what you're going to start seeing is that Kubernetes
is going to start revolutionizing, not just the app world,
but the world of infrastructure.
The world of infrastructure is going to change significantly
with the advent of Kubernetes being used
to manage infrastructure.
>> Yeah. We often say in The Cube
that data is the new development kit.
And, and you're talking about, you know,
infrastructure as code is the perfect instantiation here.
So Charlie, I, I wonder,
are developers sort of a new distribution channel for you?
Do you see that evolving?
>> You know, we did a lot of studying
before bringing the two companies together.
And about 40% of the buyers of, of this environment
of Portworx are customers that we do talk to regularly
in the IT group, and about 60% in the dev ops environment.
So, you know, one of the beautiful things
about this is we have a good headstart
with the people we're selling to today.
But also, it opens up a whole new buying area
for us with dev ops, and one that we plan on investing in
as we go forward.
>> So, Charlie, I would imagine this is a pretty fast close,
right?
I mean, what's the timeframe?
>> Yeah, these are two California companies and,
and luckily we've, we, we scoot under the, the legal radar
of, of HSR.
So we think we'll be able to close this within 30 days.
>> Great. And, and how will you organize it?
>> It's going to be, it's going to be a,
a new business unit reporting directly to me as,
especially as we go through the, you know,
the early days of, of integrating.
But really, we want to learn from the way
that Portworx has built a successful business,
make sure that we combine the best
of both organizations together, and really understand,
you know, how to best tie together our go-to-markets in the,
you know, with the combination of, of legacy and container.
>> So, so Murli you're going to hang out for a while?
>> Absolutely. I, you know, I was, I was talking
to my team earlier and I said, look, the journey
of business success is like 1,000 steps.
And the part of a startup is only the first 250 steps.
I'll tell you, I think we've kind of run up
those first 250 steps pretty fast,
but we're going to sprint through the next 750 steps
with, with, you know, in the company of, of, of Pure.
Because look, Pure is, has always been well known
as a disruptor in the business for a long time.
And we are a relatively new disruptor
in the Kubernetes space.
I think this is this, this level of our joint ability
to disrupt that market end-to-end is going to be just,
just astounding, astonishing.
I'm just really looking forward to, kind of, taking this
to a greater level of accelerating our, our business.
>> Well, Charlie, I mean, you see in the data,
pick an analyst firm,
the vast majority of new applications are being developed
using Kubernetes and containers.
But give us the last word, give us the,
the summary from you and your final thoughts.
>> You know, I think, you know,
for both Pure and Portworx customers,
what they're going to see is just a great marriage
of two great companies.
I think it's a marriage two great technologies.
And they're going to see the ability to be able
to orchestrate all of their data across, you know,
their existing as well as their new application environments
and across both their development of their private cloud
and the public cloud environment.
So this is a, you know, a great addition
to the advancement that customers are seeing
through orchestration.
Orchestration both of their application environment,
but just as importantly, the orchestration
of their data storage and management.
>> Excellent. Well, gentlemen, thanks so much for your time.
Really appreciate you coming on The Cube.
>> Thank you, David. >> Always good to see you.
>> All right. >> Pleasure.
>> And best of luck to you both.
And thank you for watching, everybody.
This is Dave Vellante for The Cube,
and we'll see you next time.
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