CEO Charles Giancarlo’s Keynote Address - Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure

In keeping with a longstanding Pure//Accelerate tradition of making bold predictions for the future of IT, Charles Giancarlo highlighted three imperatives businesses will have to contend with as the pandemic eases and the economy improves. First, 2021 will be as challenging as 2020, but for different reasons. The future workplace is a hybrid work environment in which employees must leverage digital tools to collaborate with peers both in and outside of the office. Contrary to popular opinion, that most workplaces will stay wholly or partially virtual going forward. Charles Giancarlo believes the pendulum will swing back towards the office as quickly as it's safe to do so.

“People are social animals. Young employees actually have a significant part of their social circle in the workplace and do not have convenient workspaces in their apartments,” says Giancarlo. Once the majority of employees are back in the office FOMO fear of missing out will encourage others to come in as well. Self-reports of productivity stayed very high during the pandemic. But often at the cost of group productivity, especially on creative endeavors. Having some teams supercharged by being in the office will put more pressure on other teams to collaborate in person and make up for lost time.

Second, creativity and collaboration will be supercharged by the return to the office. New creativity by reunited teams will drive an AI-renewed economy, placing new vendors, new systems, and new application environments on everyone’s agenda.

Third, chief among these new technology trends will be the renewed interest in cultivating a modern data experience. The pressures of the pandemic have made it more obvious than ever before how important data infrastructure is to digital transformation. Even during a pandemic, Pure has delivered multiple systems and software upgrades to our product lines. We were able to provide safe reliable data services to customers who increasingly had to shift their business operations online, thanks to a modern data infrastructure. What does our modern infrastructure solution look like? A cloud model for operating on-premises data storage which facilitates the adoption of a true hybrid cloud. Automation across applications and infrastructure.

Watch the video to learn more about what modern data infrastructure looks like in 2021.