Following an exciting Pure//Accelerate 2019 conference, I had the opportunity to capture an industry perspective from our guest speakers at the Global SI track. Our second guest is Andy Stone, Pure’s own CTO for the Americas. His role includes working to bring innovative, next-generation data storage and protection to clients.
Here’s what he had to say:
Q: What are the key industry trends that are interesting you at the moment?
A: I’m definitely interested in container-based architectures and security. The world of serverless applications can get us to infinite scalability, and an on-demand payment model, but it will also bring a number of new architecture challenges specifically in the area of data security. As the world continues to evolve toward a more privacy-oriented mindset, these new architectures must account for the security of their services from the beginning, which leads to the need for new solutions and thinking in the security space.
Q: What are your clients asking for from you this year that they were not last year?
A: I think what customers are looking for, in-general, are any technologies or advancements that can actually help them meet the goals and objectives of their digital transformation initiatives. There’s been a tremendous hype and amount of talk about digital transformation and the evolution of business, but the execution can be challenging, especially to derive the full benefit that was expressed in the initial business case. So any help or guidance to further that position is generally welcome.
Q: Tell us about a big project that Pure Storage was involved in that you are proud of. What were the outcomes?
A: Pure has had some tremendous success in helping our customers achieve valuable outcomes using our technology to get access to data more quickly and reliably. If you look at our FlashBlade™ solution with Splunk, for instance, we have helped clients bring that data to the forefront such that it can be quickly analysed to help identify application-related issues much more quickly than with other solutions due to its ability to scale Splunk’s searches. In another example, Pure and NVIDIA are working with PAIGE.AI to help revolutionise clinical diagnosis and treatment in oncology. It’s exciting to see Pure’s solutions being used in such forms to help better the world.
Q: If you were a strategist for an SI thinking about new Services offerings for next year, what would you invest in?
A: At Pure we continue to see demands for more innovation in the space, especially as more and more data moves to the cloud. Being able to make data accessible whenever and wherever is becoming increasingly important. It’s also interesting that some companies are starting to re-balance a bit and move some workloads back on-premise. I think over the next several years, we will continue to see the struggle for balance and the desire to not get heavily locked into a single cloud provider. This will mean that customers will need solutions that allow them to span environments in order to process and take advantage of data assets regardless of residency.
