Coffee Break: A Look Back at 4 Years and 47 Episodes

Have you tuned in to Coffee Break? Find out more about our monthly webinar series and check out some of the best episodes.

Andrew Miller

3 minutes

Dec 16, 2024

Future of Data Storage Thought Leadership

Summary

Coffee Break is a monthly Pure Storage webinar series that covers a range of solution-focused topics from AI and cyber resilience to VMware and virtualization to updates on Pure Storage solutions.

“Welcome to this month’s Coffee Break sponsored by Pure Storage!”

Amazingly, this month, I won’t be saying that phrase to kick off “Coffee Break,” a monthly webinar series I host and produce here at Pure Storage. For the first time since the series began (47 months and 47 episodes ago), we’re taking the month of December off.

So you don’t miss your “coffee and content fix” too much this month, I thought a blog post to look back at the origin of Coffee Break and highlight some of the best episodes might make sense. After all, I didn’t want to leave folks hanging.

As “Lead Principal Technologist, Americas” at Pure Storage, my role is at times a bit hard to describe. However, one facet is the Coffee Break webinar series. The series debuted in January 2021, and as mentioned earlier, this will be the very first time we haven’t released an episode in 47 months.

Huge thanks to those who have attended in the past. We typically see signups and live attendance run into the thousands and have since the very beginning.

Wondering why? Well, from the start, we’ve tried to make it more podcast than webinar. To be honest, working with my esteemed Marketing peers, we’ve tried to do at least somewhat the opposite of what I saw didn’t work well when I attended so, so many webinars and events as a customer and then as a partner SE.

That’s led to the following formula which I’ve heard keeps folks coming back each month:

Good audio/video
Relatively more energy than most webinars/podcasts + a bit of humor
Guests each month who are truly Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) outside of being employed at Pure Storage
First half: Educational focus around an industry topic or solution area (AI, VMware/Virtualization, Databases/SQL Server, File, Storage as a Service, Kubernetes, Cyber Resilience, Cloud, and more!)
Second half: Company focus with what Pure Storage is doing in said space….or an update in that area since we last covered it

Who’s the audience? While Coffee Break’s flavor is very much geared to a technical audience (or sometimes what I call a “recovering technical” audience), we have everyone from admins to engineers to Directors to CIOs to partners attend. The common value I’ve heard is that we link technology foundations to business value without being “too buzzword-ey” about it (actual attendee quote).

Now, if that sounds interesting, you can find all the previous Coffee Breaks organized chronologically in the Pure Events Center. If you’d like to see all previous episodes organized by topic, visit this short Google Slide deck (slides 2-5). If you’re mobile or want to play on the big screen, check out our ”Coffee Break Series” YouTube playlist, which has the most recent 15 episodes or so.

Since the episodes are more solution and industry focused, they’ve aged pretty well. In the last couple of months alone, I’ve had people mention to me that they’ve listened to replays on many different topics: file, AI, Pure Storage hardware engineering, FlashBlade® architecture, and more.