Another disappointing quarter for Pure Storage as expanded sales team fails to close large deals

Better have a cloud strategy

After 20 years at storage vendors where you were competing with other storage vendors the competition is now cloud. Previously you just had to be better than the incumbent storage providers, EMC, HP, Dell NetApp, IBM etc. That's usually quite achievable for a startup with a half decent product - Pure has done this exceedingly well.

Now you are competing with AWS, Azure, Google etc and the move from CapEx to OpEx. Pure's announcement about targeting Dell/EMC refreshes is a tougher proposition than it was even a couple of years ago. Several of the existing storage vendors have better cloud offerings than Pure does so for companies moving that way. they are less likely to ditch the incumbent for another non-cloud vendor.

If the growth slows without a plan for being profitable, the share price is going to take a battering.

<edit> I just checked the after hours trading. The share price has taken a battering.

I do hope the typical corporate trend of "we need to show increasing profits EVERY QUARTER!!!11oneoneoneoen" replete with frothing at the mouth gets over soon, otherwise there won't be anyone left to sell stuff to the few companies that *must* stay on prem with their data for various reasons.

Prune Storage

Never liked them as a company, never liked their culture, didn't like the way they overstated their numbers to Gartner just before the IPO and there am quite happy to see them suffer. Although, sadly, the guys at the top will still be rich and it will only be the small peeps who suffer. But hey, capitalism.

/StorageTroll

Every big CIO at a major corp wants to cap storage costs and move them to the cloud. The big storage costs has always been user content such as home drive, emails, downloads, app data etc. With Office 365 + OneDrive, more company wants to move this bottom-less pit over to the cloud and storage freed. The biggest cost imo is the total cost of storage. Your SAN, NAS, backups, and extra redundant hardware. The cloud will wipe away majority of these running cost.

One hit wonder

It's enterprise so it take a few years (maybe even a decade) to realize that Pure has ONE product - their FlashArray line. All the other "stuff" is just past prototype stages (maybe a few real customers). They have been working on FlashBlade since 2013 and it's still not the hit that FlashArray was. They're struggling to find a second act and looks like time is up. All the marketing fluff about cloud, backup, NVME, etc - there is nothing there...if it was a real product with a go-to-market plan, we would start seeing real traction. Their "enhanced" partnerships with Commvault, Veeam, Veritas, Cisco - all dying companies. Sad to see Pure (a previous up and comer) reduced to alliances with the old guard.

Problem is, once its in, I don't make any more sales.

Once a Pure storage is installed, I basically never make a storage sale to that account again. Back in the Day's of Clariion / VNX / VMAX, storage adds, performance upgrade, and forklift upgrades were super common and an easy bread and butter item. Now, with SSDs, dedupe and compression, and evergreen.... once I sell pure into an account, aside from hoping I don't get cut out of a service renwal, thats it for revenue from storage in that account. Customers are happy, so thats good, but theres no churn for new gear. So, from Pure's side, they are going to need a constant supply of new accounts and reps courting them to make new array sales. Aside from that, they'll only have the revenue from renewed service agreements for their bottom line.