Pure as the driven CEO: El Reg chats to Scott Dietzen on taking the flash array high road Scott Dietzen is leading Pure Storage along the flash array high road, determined not to cede any advantage at all to flash array rivals and driving Pure to stay in the flash market forefront by investing for growth. He's been in the CEO chair at Pure for five and a half years now, and three months post-IPO sees the firm …
startups(visible or not ) and small biz (by IT standards) are trying to become the next big thing in this area?
Come on now. There have been more than enough articles on storage and in particular flash storage these past months for some people to take a guess.
My take on this is that all is most certainly not rosy in this segment. How many articles have there been this week alone about Flash Storage Supplies cutting lots of jobs?
So, El Reg. Stop embiggiening one maker after another and do a decent review of the whole market segment. Warts and all expose. Sort of like Worstall used to do on a weekend?
How's about it then?
Or are these small companies like so many in the 'bright ideas' sector just pushing bullshit in the hope of getting bought out (thus making the bullshitters millions) by a bigger player?
C'mon Steve, Chris has done articles about how there are too many people in each of the current storage niches and fairly often at that. They are pretty memorable since Violin has featured in many of them. To be honest, he's done far too many in my opinion, but I'm not a storage geek, nor interested really, so it's not that exciting.
Obviously I still read them, otherwise I'd not of seen this, but my interest is possibly incorporating some of the golly gee-whiz features in my designs here. And I'm especially interested in Flash/PCM/whatever in the DIMM slot on the motherboard as I know we'll be able to take much of the kernel and operating systems and beat some sense into them given that our assumptions in their design will no longer be true.
Pure's stock price has continued to languish well below the IPO price, investors clearly do not seem to have as rosy a view as the reg seems to have.
Pure is a one trick pony that's seen it's tech advantage disappear as the larger vendors with bigger budgets and buying power caught up and have become faster at rolling out newer, more cost-effective media into their flash devices.
When you strip away Pure's funky marketing and look beneath the covers you have to ask how they will continue to remain relevant in a challenging segment of the market.
Their dedupe may be better than competitors but, considering they charge a premium for their product, any cost benefit has been lost by their inability to scale and introduce better priced flash into their systems.
Dietzen puts a lot of money lately into PR/marketing and all websites are full of the same old thing: "look how awesome flash is". Dude, the world has moved on! Everyone has got some flash stuff now with their own twist, prepare to sell cheap or die.
There aren't many deduplication or compression algorithms, nor can Dietzen re-invent physics. He can go on about how good his 32k block IOPS is vs. whatever else, reality is that one trick ponies like him (see Netapp) are struggling to stay afloat in the market of today.
Shares don't lie - they are a reflection of what you do. You are not profitable nor showing improvement from last quarter, you will be punished. It is his fault for wanting to IPO.
I can see Pure having the same issues as Violin with their shares. Or Nimble ...
1) FWIW Vmware NetApp and a bunch of other Tech stocks have slumped by a greater % than pure in the last 3 months so the comments on their stock is garbage.
2)The Market hasn't moved on at all. Tintri, Tegile, NetApp and soon to be Nimble have all released half baked Flash Strategies trying to play catch up. As SSD prices drop and HDD revenues continue to fail i expect Flash to really take off.
3) i reserve judgement on whether Pure will see the same struggles as everyone else until they release their q4 numbers. Watch out if they blow up there numbers again.
*there* didn't blow up anything so far, ...well - except the deep pockets of their VC's that is.
They managed to report numbers 3 times for a quarter and make a mess of it every time.
Not to sure about your number 2) - half baked or not, these companies might have more power than you think [little bird told me that partners love Tintri - makes them a ton of money]
And on 1) > anyone with no strategy looks bad on the market now, that includes emc, pure and co.
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