Sramana Mitra: Timing-wise, how fast can that revenue mix change? How fast does the consequent profitability impact going to reflect based on how many Pure Storage customers you can immediately sell the Portworx stuff to? Murli Thirumale: Pure Storage has about 8,000 customers. A good majority of those is what I would call classic enterprise
Sramana Mitra: Now, I’m going to switch my question to Pure Storage and the strategy for a company like Pure Storage. They are trying to move up the stack. Based on what we have discussed for the last half hour, we understand why they acquired Portworx. If you put the Chief Strategy Officer hat on
Sramana Mitra: What does the ecosystem look like in terms of competitors? Does Portworx have competitors? Murli Thirumale: Yes, we do. I’ll give you an example of the competitive environment by giving you a few use cases so that we can talk about why our competitors are not able to do what we do. An
Sramana Mitra: Let me double-click down on one more layer based on what you have said. Is Portworx sitting on top of the traditional storage players? Is it like a caching solution on top of the existing one? Mohan Thirumale: Yes, it’s not unlike caching, but it’s doing two things. One is exactly what you
Murli Thirumale: What has been driving the world in the last five years has been app agility. It’s how you develop apps anywhere really quickly. Apps are changing, and it’s a very competitive environment. People are using an application to win in their business whether it’s in banking or if it’s a service provider. The
I’ve known Murli for 20 years and love how he marries strategy and deep technical domain knowledge. This conversation is extremely technical, and you’d get a precise view of what’s happening in the storage industry as a player like Pure Storage tries to move up the stack and acquire a startup like Portworx.