Pure: Let's be direct about attached storage. Hyperconvergence is not for us

Pure Storage posed widened losses of $64.3m in its Q1 ended April 30, up 12.5 per cent from $57.2m at the same time last year, while it saw an upswing in all-flash array sales. Revenues for its first fiscal 2019 quarter were $255.9m, up 40 per cent on the year. The storage firm also posted an attendant upswing in product and …

[WYSIWYG650]

Growth over profit

Wall Street gambling addicts seem to agree with this sentiment as reflected in their over priced shares. Someday and maybe soon, Wall Street will expect profit and not just a growth and sell strategy. Meanwhile other companies are able to grow and be profitable. The only upside for this stock is when they are sold and it will not be much higher than market IMO. They are fantastic marketers and that is a dual edged sword. It gets customers and Wall Street excited but when you over promise and under deliver it will not get them the results they want. Pure's Flash blade has a few cool architecture features but is very limited in scalability and data mobility from edge and especially to and from the cloud.

[Terry P]

Re: Growth over profit

Growth is what analysts want to see from 'new' companies - NTNX, PSTG, etc. They want to see demand for the product, they want to see that the company can sell, be cash flow positive, have repeat business. Think of it as expectations from a child vs expectations from an adult.

Turning a profit means very little and can be stifling to a company to try too soon just to 'please'. Look at PSTG last quarter results - just shy of profit. Does it matter? They could have probably stalled hiring, marketing and some expenses to show a profit but instead went ahead and increased headcount and said to hell with it - Land and expand.

I don't agree with the Pure stance on Hyperconverged but that's just me. Look at NTNX, over half the market cap of Netapp but with a fraction of the people and product portfolio and they've only been around for a tiny amount of time comparatively. Are the investors all wrong?

I thought Flashblade had great scalability. 600-700TB of usable SSD in 4RU or thereabouts (not factoring in any compression or dedup)? Plus the ability to attach them together? I think at those levels you're not looking to push to the cloud you're on site.....but S3 is there if you do have the links to try to even more that kind of data.

If I had 700-800TB to move i'd be using an AWS snowball or such, not a link.

Also, Didn't you say in the past that "Does anyone else agree that a real metric like revenue should be used to determine "ability to execute"?

Correct me if I'm wrong but the proof of your ability to execute is a sale! By this measure, NetApp has a much better ability to execute than Pure."

Seems that now their revenues are a LOT bigger (over 1bn) you're switching to 'WHERE'S THE PROFIT' :) .

My guess is we will revisit and reference this post in a year again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Growth over profit

NTNX has been around for almost ten years now, Netapp for 25. Netapp does 6x the revenue of Nutanix and is actually profitable.

Considering how much money Nutanix is still spending ($750m per year) to grow slower than the overall market I would wager that market cap is as useful as Gartner predictions.

[froberts2]

Customer acquisition over profits only continues to work whilst you are still selling what your existing customers want to buy. At this time, it's not clear how long that will be the case with Pure Storage.

[Terry P]

Is it clear with any company?

[Stefareeno]

HCI will never take off...

... for sizeable environments (or words to that effect). Really? The fact that Pure are not in the server business (the physical building blocks of HCI) means they aren’t really in a position to deliver HCI, so I guess their only available move is to play that whole hyperconverged market down. NetApp, the other notable out-n-out storage company are at least having a stab at it. Ok, whether their offering is actually HCI is... er, debatable... but at least they aren’t trying to bury their customers’ heads in the sand.

[Anonymous Coward]

On Glue

"Pure’s DirectFlash software enables the company to use raw flash instead of dual-ported NVMe SSDs, which its competitors must rely on and which sell at a steep premium to standard SSDs."

Anyone who believe this strategy will pan out is on glue! They are simply painting themselves into a corner Players like Samsung, Micron, WD etc will develop and price drop at a significant pace than Pure's able to keep up with. Same goes for SW development.

Expect a U-Turn in less than 2 years...

[Jbry]

"we can be profitable whenever we want"??? No you can't, not when you're paying HP, Dell & NetApp's B & C players enormous money to come over in hopes they'll bring their account lists...not realizing that C players have bad account lists. Can't believe some of the salaries they have paid people that were on PIP's with other companies. This is why they can't turn a profit, and will be owned by someone else in the next 18 months. Decent product...terrible execution to market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Done.

People are freakin high if they don't see the writing on the wall that external storage aka SANs are completely dying. How many different reports do you need to see that show a line going down and to the right? While HCI explodes. Large environments don't so software-defined HCI? Are you f'n kidding me?! How about Google, AWS, Azure....they're all software-based, scale-out hyperscale/hyper-converged architectures built on commodity x86! It's never been more blatantly obvious that SW is eating the datacenter. A single product, hardware-defined SAN strategy is like being up a creek without a paddle.