Giancarlo tells CRN that most storage vendors treat storage as a commodity, while Pure Storage invests 20 percent of revenue in R&D.
‘[HPE GreenLake and Dell Apex] are just financial models to enable customers pay a subscription for storage rather than as capex. Or rather it‘s really more like a lease model in most of those cases. Whereas we’re bringing technology into the data center that allows the customer to both manage and to offer storage services and data management to their developers as APIs,’ says Pure Storage CEO Charles Giancarlo.
Could you see Pure Storage becoming the No. 1 provider of storage arrays and in the near future revenue-wise?
We’re steadily climbing up the market share ladder. We were, well, probably nowhere five years ago. We‘re probably in the number four spot now, I think, very much in line to take over the number three spot. We’re already way up there at number one or two in the all-flash segment. So we very much aspire to be one of if not the most significant player in the storage market. But we have competitors that are many times our size that we still have to overtake.
Are you ready for the day that Pure Storage maybe becomes number one, and everybody starts pointing to Pure Storage as their target and their goal to beat?
We‘re already the target of most of our competitors right now because we don’t compete in the same way they do. When I joined the company just five years ago,
in doing my background research on the company, everybody, including all of the competitors, pointed to data storage, saying it’s a commodity, and it was a race to the bottom. And our competitors have invested in it as if it were such, spending less than 5 percent of their revenue on R&D. And we‘re the one company that looks at data storage and management as high technology. We’ll invest this year about 20 percent of our revenue in R&D. And so, I think that really sets us apart. We play a very different game from our competitors. And so far, it’s working for us.
Source: Pure Storage CEO: NetApp, Dell, HPE Aren’t True Cloud Storage | CRN