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.