By John “Coz” Colgrove and John Hayes from Pure Storage
Technology companies may often be described as disruptive in their early years – but the real question is how do they sustain these qualities? What does it mean to be a disruptive, anyway?
1. Disruptive tech existentially challenges incumbents
One classic characteristic of a disruptor is their ability to introduce something new to a given market that existentially challenges incumbents. This happens much faster than anyone expects and yet there is often a long history leading up to that point of disruption. For example, flash has dramatically changed the enterprise storage industry today, but it was first used in consumer products over a decade ago, based on technology (called NAND) invented in the 80’s.
2. Disruptive tech enables you to stop using another product
The more products eliminated, the better. (Hello, iPhone!)
3. Disruptive tech solves the main problem in question better than any other product can or has
Familiarity is important, but so is a return to fundamentals and that means building features that exist for the customer’s benefit rather to serve as workarounds for technology limitations.
4. Disruptors triggers a rethink of how the product is used
Very disruptive products redefine the boundaries between a product’s initial intended use and the unimaginable. Meaning, over time and in a good way, the product is so disruptive it delivers customers benefits which they only knew prior as previously inconceivable.
Pure Storage: Built to Disrupt
Pure Storage was created in 2009 with disruption in our DNA. Our big idea was that legacy enterprise storage providers had gotten stale – they’d stopped innovating. Appreciating that many enterprise technology buyers are reluctant to take a risk on a new company, for Pure, it was out of the question to endeavor to offer a product that was just a little better. We wanted to come up with something dramatically better. We combined the power of world-class engineering talent with a plan to disrupt enterprise storage using the power and speed of flash. We got the smartest people we could find and we gave them one simple mission: Uncomplicate data storage, forever.
Flash was at the crux of this: it solves almost all performance problems so we could focus on cost, reliability and simplicity. Now, a unified data platform is the next iteration of disruption.
We built Pure to change the industry from the beginning and going forward we will continue to emphasize the importance of innovation. We always want to top what we’ve done before. But more than that, we live to find the best solution, the solution that is unimaginable, to build storage technology that customers really do love.
