back to article Is Pure Storage a solid business or is skepticism justified?

BTIG analysts attended Pure Storage Live, a customer and partner event, in New York City on Thursday, June 27, and came away thinking Pure is the real deal and not another ultimately doomed storage wannabe. Their note points out that: "The market continues to be extremely skeptical that the differentiation is sustainable; it …

  1. Stephen McLaughlin

    Pure Has Some Solid Products

    I've setup a few Pure flash solutions and am impressed with their modular design and the management interface. So for I have not run into any issues and the inline deduplication/compression ratios are impressive. I'm not sure how they are doing in the marketing and sales effort, but from a technology perspective they are excellent storage units to work with.

    1. MassXvelocity

      Re: Pure Has Some Solid Products

      Similar experience here. Been running 9 Pure systems across the globe for a bit over 3 years thus far and nary a peep. Bit of bleating about 'disk space remaining' from time to time as the lads migrate content from ferrous oxide based systems. Upgrades, expansions, maintenance, no complaints...stuff works as advertised. Best "lawn dart" we've owned in some time.

  2. Dave 13

    Lawn dart

    One trick pony. Very light on storage services and doesn't play well with others. Given the rate of VC burn, I give them 50% chance of making it far into 2017. Maybe Cisco will buy them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Lawn dart

      ...and this is the bit I don't get which no one seems to be able to answer and I asked before on another thread.

      Looking at el reg they got some $470m from the IPO. Their now-public filings have them growing that cash to over $630m....yet they are still reporting 'losses'. Are they just reporting losses while the market is bad like the banks - writing off earnings during bad periods. How are they up over $160m in the bank??? No furher shares have been released for sale.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Lawn dart

        they had 200 in the bank at the time of IPO.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      What services do you want? They're there, or coming. Also you clearly have no clue what you're talking about with the "far into 2017 comment"

      1. cowardanonymous2016

        Can you please expand upon your comment. Services are there or coming. I realize that dedupe and compression are already there, what services do you speak of?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          To the person asking about services - when people use the word services they tend to mean 'Professional Services'. I.e people work, set up, migration, etc. Not features.

          The issue with Pure is that they don't have a services organization to facilitate migrations or custom pieces of work - read into that how you want. Make a LUN, move your VMs over. No complexity involved.

          Is it good or bad? Depends if you're a partner or a customer who does their own work. Services have normally been good business for partners and resellers - contributing up to 10-20% of the deal value and being high margin. They would lose this with more simple setups.

    3. steerInLights

      Re: Lawn dart

      Their current burn rate is ~63M per quarter, and with their cash on hand (~630M) quick math shows us they will be in business for the next 10 years. This of course assumes they do nothing other than stay the course, but predicting they won't make it far into 2017 when companies like Violin are still limping along seems a bit trollish don't you think?

      1. brucmod

        Burn Rate

        I think you mean 10 quarters, not ten years.. Current burn rate would get them thru 2.5 years..

        1. steerInLights

          Re: Burn Rate

          Indeed I did, good catch mate!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not a very unbiased report from El Reg

    I'm not sure what's going on here with the Register but there's a lot that has to be accounted for that's missed in this article:

    1- Pure's revenue growth is impressive BUT the fact that they're still reporting losses shows that they're burning the cash to build the revenue--NOT that the growth is coming from the strength of the product as is being implied.

    2- Pure doesn't offer much in the way of anything really. Provision a volume, present it to a host. Done. Is that the major difference that customers are looking for? Of course not. Replication is sketchy at best. Performance under numerous benchmarks is subpar as compared to other flash arrays. Even the data reduction itself is flawed when one considers the strength of Pure's numbers comes from the way reduction is calculated. Counting snapshot space in reduction savings is shady business.

    3- Pure has no real scalability. Buy one Pure and it's great! What happens when you have 3 or 4? Can't move volumes around, can't manage them efficiently. Reporting is also an issue. No granular reporting metrics is a major flaw.

    4- Probably the most significant omission in this reporting is the fact that Pure's executives are under investigation: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/updated-investor-alert-investigation-pure-141000302.html How do you have a report about Pure's business and not mention this fact? And of course there's always the fact that they lied to Gartner: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/20/pure_storage_financial_figures_gartner/

    I'm disappointed by the reporting.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not a very unbiased report from El Reg

      Press releases sent out by ambulance chasing lawyers in an effort to drum up business are a far cry from your claim that "executives are under investigation". In fact, the link you refrence clearly states what it is: "This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions, under applicable laws and ethical rules." Just wanted to clarify...

    2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Not a very unbiased report from El Reg

      "I'm not sure what's going on here with the Register but there's a lot that has to be accounted for that's missed in this article"

      Read our previous coverage then: we've written loads about Pure.

      C.

  4. DaveN007

    How will they do in a world where no one cares about storage?

    We all know that the mega-trend is "cloud". Increasingly, the decision about storage platforms is being taken out of the hands of the infrastructure teams that have historically cared about what Pure offers. IT leaders want to know how a service can be delivered, They care as much about the storage array as I care about the brand of spark plugs in my car. (Not at all.) The IT professionals who care about storage need to learn new skills or they will increasingly become marginalized. This poses a problem for a company that only sells storage. EMC, the largest storage company, has given up that fight. Companies like Pure can grow for a while, but they are living off of the carcass of a giant dead animal. Individuals will make money along the way, but anyone who thinks there is any such thing as a storage array that will change the world is not being honest with themselves.

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