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We have three very esteemed guests here with us today and we are going to talk about Evergreen subscriptions. So you heard Charlie and Sean talk a lot about Evergreen and that's what we are going to get into a little bit more detail for those in the back. If you want to move up, we have seats in the front row. I will not call, call unless you want to come
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up here and ask questions. Uh but let's get started. So hopefully you are at the right place. Everything everywhere all at once is gonna happen in this room. And uh I am your host. Uh My name is Tana Gandhi. I run product and technical marketing for our digital experience business unit and this is
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the business unit that does everything Evergreen. So um also joining me today, like I said, we have three esteemed guests. Um We have Kyle from Colo House, we have Kendra from uh Health Edge and then we have Cube from A and uh these are customers who have been with pure um for varying amounts of time. They've seen us through the journey and they
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are actually looking forward to sharing their experiences with you. Uh But before we get into what our guests have to share, uh I'll spend a couple of minutes and do a quick overview of Evergreen portfolio. And um you heard a lot about it from everybody at the keynote, but let's let's do a double click into what these Evergreen subscriptions are all about.
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And the goal behind Evergreen subscriptions is to give folks like you our customers a way to align your it strategy with your business strategy and your finance strategy. And we do realize that customers are at various places in their journey. And therefore we have a portfolio of Evergreen subscriptions. So Evergreen Forever is the most traditional way of acquiring pure storage.
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Although it's nothing like traditional because this is the subscription that not only helps you buy the product, it also gives you updates and upgrades and controller up upgrades and everything non disruptively. Uh Evergreen Flex is a combination of ownership and uh consumption economics. And then Evergreen one is our storage as a service subscription.
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So um today we have guests here who are using Evergreen one as well as Evergreen Flex and we'll get into a little bit more detail about why they chose one, what benefits they saw from it and what they can share with the audience. Uh Folks like yourself as you are thinking about making your choice um in, in a quick recap. Uh Again, we offer customers two ways to
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acquire our products, whether it's flash or Flash blade one, you can purchase the product two, you can get it as a subscription if you're getting it as a subscription. That is evergreen one. That is everything included. It includes specific slas that we guarantee and not only do we guarantee the slas if we don't meet the slas,
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we make sure that we give you service credits and we take on the remediation action on our dime. Uh the other two ways uh which is flex and forever are ways for you to buy the product for customers who need assets on their books, but still like the consumption economics. We have Evergreen flex and for customers who want to say no, I just want to go ahead and buy it and I'm very happy to subscribe to your
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updates and upgrades. We have Evergreen forever. Um So, and all of this are supported by our Evergreen architecture, which makes sure that you get those continuous updates and upgrades that makes sure that there is never any scheduled downtime for maintenance or upgrades and it makes sure that your investments are always protected and your storage never goes obsolete.
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So a little bit about how we manage it. We manage it through pr one. If you are not familiar with pure one or it's been a while since you've seen some of the newer capabilities in pure one. We have a demo in the demo zone. Please go see us over there in the DX booth and we have pure one, the latest version running showing you all the cool stuff,
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all the latest anomaly detection capabilities, the new data protection assessment, everything that you want. I know about pure one. and as far as evergreen one goes, uh this is very unique in the industry because we are able to guarantee these concurrent slas. So, um you know, think about it this way when we guarantee your performance and we guarantee the energy usage,
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we don't dial these up and down. We make sure they're always available to you. So you know, up time, always have a buffer capacity in case you need to go and take care of spiky workloads. Um Never any scheduled downtime, we guarantee performance. We guarantee energy efficiency as low as two watts per tips. So think about it.
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Your toaster oven uses 1500 watts, but we can guarantee two watts per tips. And then the latest one that Sean talked about, Sean Hanson talked about is our ransomware recovery S A. Uh Again, if you want to have more details on this, we have a booth, a lot of people there who will be able to help you.
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Evergreen Flex is another very unique offering that we have. This is where you still want assets on the books. You want to show them that you own them, but you want to take advantage of that flexible consumption model on top of it. So it's kind of like, hey, I like the consumption mechanism, but I like to own the,
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the process, the whole box myself. This is, this is for you. So with that, why don't I stop talking because you're really here to talk to our guests and uh we kind of uh move over to them and see what they can share with us. Uh I am told this is being recorded and the only way I'm gonna get this recorded is if I have a slide up,
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so I'm gonna put the slide up. Uh So they are recording the audio but they need the slide up. So, all right, why don't we go ahead and start with some introductions? Uh Why don't we start at the end of the room over there and say, hey Cuba, why, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself about your company and what product you chose?
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Hello, everyone. I'm from Costa Rica. And the company who I work for is a, who is a distributor for Latin America, but it's a value add distribution. So we, we try to build some business unit with value and we try to in other business, try to, to build a cloud for Latin America partners in, in this case with pure. So at this time,
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I can say that the alliance with pure have been great and specific with Evergreen. Uh at this day, maybe the first uh we achieved the first sale in the war, I think um because we are seeing in this probe in, in the, in the operational mode, a new way to find new clients. So that's the main business that we, that we do at this time.
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All right. Awesome. And how about you, Kendra? Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company and your journey with pure so far. Yes. So my name is Kendra Rosa mccormick. I've been with health edge for almost five years. Um is both a software development and hosting company.
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So we own and have developed our own health care software doing claims, adjudication, rep pricing, um things like that. So our clients are large health health insurance companies, smaller health insurance companies, hospitals and we host that software within our data center, two separate data centers for the majority of our customers. So we are a evergreen one customer using flash array and
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that has been a great match for our business model because we've seen rapid, rapid growth in our business and the evergreen one has allowed us to grow our technology at the same pace as our business, which we weren't able to do as well before. All right. Awesome. And Kyle, how about yourself? Hi, everybody. Kyllo with Colo House Cola House is a
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infrastructure provider. We operate a breadth of managed services from Colo private cloud, bare metal network services across a portfolio of 10 data centers domestically and various pops. Both domestically and internationally. We really focus on helping customers deploy application and data where it needs to be and uh we optimize for cost performance and security.
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And we kind of view ourselves as playing between the book ends of customer owned environments and public cloud. We don't venture into really either of those um but provide kind of private uh flavors if you will of infrastructure between those two book ends. Um Cola House is a, is a recently formed company out of an acquisition of six separate entities.
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So we've been going through a lot of integration efforts, storage and our infrastructure platform is obviously a big part of that. We have selected pure as the platform that we will consolidate to and have gone through probably a majority of that consolidation. We today consume a little bit of forever evergreen forever that we had from legacy
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deployments, but now primarily deploy in Evergreen one. All right. Awesome Kyle. And uh so you have both forever and evergreen one, right? But you're moving from forever to Evergreen one. What's why, why make the switch? What's the difference?
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That's a good question. It's probably really built in the economics. So as a service provider, um we try to be as flexible as we can for the customers that gives us a spectrum of customers who in some instances have completely, you know what we call virtual data centers or physical dedicated environments where they want an array dedicated to them, we have other multi tenant arrays and we also have demand,
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you know, across our 10 plus locations where we need to put a raise. And so the ability to start small and deploy a raise, you know, almost on an as needed basis has been kind of the driver for that prior, that would have been somewhat cost prohibitive with the Capex model of having to buy everything up front. But being able to start at,
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you know, sometimes as small as you know, 50 to 100 terabytes and grow into that and scale with our business. Uh The economic model has really enabled us to scale out larger than we have prior. All right. Awesome. And that's, that's what we hear is a very big advantage of as a service.
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Uh Kendra as another company who's using as a service evergreen one. What were your motivations for moving to storage as a service? Yes. So we were, we had previously deployed a hyper converged environment, LVX rail um where you buy entire nodes that include storage, compute power networking all in one rack. And what we found was it was very expensive to
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scale that environment because you can't scale your compute and your storage separately. So as our business started to grow very rapidly, we're looking at $150,000 per node just to, you know, if we need more storage, um we had to buy all of that. And so going to the to pure evergreen one allows us to scale our compute and our storage separately. They're both growing rapidly but at slightly
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different paces. And so it was definitely a financial decision for us to be able to continue to scale at a much lower cost um for the for the the long future. All right. Yeah. Uh so you said it was a financial decision, but did you see any operational or labor saving with Evergreen One, Kendra? For sure, the, the support from Evergreen One,
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which we've already utilized several times in our, our journey with pr um with the, the guaranteed slas of performance, you know, we've had to swap out a raise to, you know, to meet the those performance require. And I say we, it's really pr right, pr has come in, our pr team has reached out to us um to let us know that, hey, you probably need, you know, some more performance here.
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We're going to arrange a new array and they come into our data center and they take care of it for us. Um So I have a very small team, you know, we have 50 customers, we have about 8000 virtual machines. I have a team of eight onshore and 10 offshore. It's not a very large team. Um And so having that true partnership with pure um and having them as a resource to come
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in and help us with these um with these changes is is a huge benefit. Awesome. That's fantastic. And Cuba, you have a slightly different use case, right? Because you're actually building a business on top of it. So please tell us about that and uh what your experience has been.
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Yeah, we, we start, I I didn't uh mention that we, we have the, the, the flex one because the the name is um but we start looking to pure in terms of security. We are, we are talking about the right. But we, we are seeing this in terms of security also because last year we went uh we was uh attacked
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by ransomware, ok? It's, it's, it's nothing to say because II I think all the companies are or will be targeted in some time. So we are trying to, to build some infrastructure that we can recover after that because we can build a security platform up front in the perimeter and, and all that. But the thing is how we took the data and how
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we protect it. So with pure uh right now, well, last, last year after that attack, we some of our clients uh we take, I don't know, four weeks to recover the data. So it was so big uh window to recover all the data. So right now with pure, we are recovering data in, I don't know,
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23 clicks, five seconds, something like that. So we start building services around that uh to our clients, building a network for for backup and fast recovery, intrinsic security. Uh because we have ransomware uh features inside the box. So uh and, and this is uh by a, by a snapshot. So it's just one click.
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So we, we start uh thinking in that and beyond that in the operational model, uh we, we have uh like uh advantage of payment and after that, we have monthly payment. So it is a good combination because uh for, for example, in Latin America, leasing, for example, leasing cars, it doesn't work fine and as uh in India or us.
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So we are used to put some money up front and after that pay money. So it's the best of the world. We, we did that. Yeah, I and, and that's the reason we have a portfolio of Evergreen offerings, right? Depending on where you are.
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So why don't we, why don't we switch back to you, Kyle? And, and by the way, I wanna open this up to the audience as well if you have any questions, uh feel free to ask our panel here. Um They're, they're basically uh going to share their experiences with you. But, but Kyle, um again, you mentioned that the business um the business model alignment with
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Evergreen One work really well for your company. But what about operational savings or labor savings? Have you had an opportunity to work with any of the Evergreen One slas yet? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, like I shared earlier we've consolidated or in the process of consolidating six separate storage platforms on the pure.
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And for anybody who's managed, you know, even more than one you're aware of the complexities of the multiple platforms introduced the inefficiencies. So we don't, you know, we don't, I don't necessarily view it as, I guess we saved headcount, but we didn't reduce headcount. We just have had headcount avoidance, you know, our team like,
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right, tends to be on the smaller side and we try to keep it as tight as we can and it allows us to have engineers that can manage the storage as well as the UTE and the hypervisor. And we aren't building a separate storage team to do that. So certainly having the assistance and the maintenance, having the insight from pure one, having the support team on the backhand has allowed us to scale out storage in a multi
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location and multi array format. You know, I think we're somewhere in the dozen to 14 array across those 10 data centers type situation and we're able to do that very efficiently. All right. Awesome. So talking about pure one, tell us a little bit more about your experience with pure one. Yeah, I mean, you know, everybody's favorite uh single pan and glass conversation.
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So um it, it's been super helpful for our team to provide insights as a service provider. You know, that's really interesting for our operations team to manage it themselves the way we think about that in that insight is also how do we push that out to our customers? So if we can uh watch performance and we can share that if we can provide growth rate, analytic and have proactive conversations with customers about how they're consuming storage
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and what their trends might be so that we can get ahead of problems. It puts us in a very positive situation where we are being a value added partner as opposed to just, you know, providing storage and the waiting for them to come to us when they run out or have a problem. All right. Awesome. How about you, Kendra?
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Do you use? Does your team use? Yeah, it's definitely become a great tool for us to have at hand as we look to price our offerings to our customers more accurately. Having the data available to us allows us to really evaluate the true usage between a smaller customer, a larger customer, the growth analytics so that we can price our product accurately and
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not price ourselves off, off any of the deal tables. Yeah. No, that, that makes sense. Um Also kind of curious, Kendra, if you've used our support services and how has that experience been? Yeah, it's been great. Um You know, luckily we don't, we haven't really had any major issues.
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Um And any time we've needed support for the most part, our peer team has come to us proactively. Um So it's, it's really a true partnership between us and pure um supporting our environment. It's not us having to reach out to them. Um It, it's definitely um both ways. All right.
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Awesome. And as part of evergreen one, you also get a customer success manager assigned to you, right. Uh Have you worked with your customer success manager? And what's that been like? Um Terrible. No, I'm just kidding. Um He's sitting over there. So, uh no, it's,
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it's been awesome. Um You know, I, I always say that some of the, the, the best, some of the biggest reasons that we went to pr and have stayed with pure and have expanded our footprint with pure is that relationship between us and everybody on our peer team all the way up the chain. It's not just a customer service, customer support rep it's everybody.
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And that makes a huge difference for us when selecting vendors because we need them to understand our business, understand our challenges and they've even come to us with say, you know, hey, we understand that this is a big challenge for you and your business right now. Let's sit together and figure out a way to help you solve that problem. Uh And that's, has definitely stepped up and, and done that for us.
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All right. Awesome. Um How about you, Cuban? Have you uh worked with our uh customer success managers or support team yet? Yes, of course. I think the, the, one of the best things in pure that I love it is a sport because support the support team will do anything for you for a reason. Yes.
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Yeah, it really works. All right. Great. Um, so Kyle, I'm kind of curious if you can share, um, what is next for your team with pure? Like what, what are your growth plans? What are you thinking will happen next?
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We, we, we have a lot of plans. Um, you know, we are always looking in to become more automated and more uh flexible uh in in the cloud. You know, the, you know, the topic of the of the of this panel is around cloud. You know, when we think about cloud and what customers want and how particular small and mid
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size businesses are consuming infrastructure. You know, the the we're always looking for interoperability and so I kind of shared earlier, we don't extend ourselves into public cloud management, but we're always looking for how we can interoperate better and how we can help to extend customer environments when that is part of their cloud plans or cloud journey.
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So pure, more of the software elements of pure looking into more port works and uh and other components like that are a big part of our road map. Also, you know, we are on the, you know, admittedly uh we're on the all flash boat, we've moved all of our backup into all flash. So we run mostly on capacity arrays today, you know, we, when we talk about backups, too many times,
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we've seen kind of like you were sharing, you know, backups are all about recovery. And so when we have customers, they're always happy to see, you know, a low cost storage option for backups until they have to recover and the platform won't perform. And so we are trying to add more and more capable built in at a stronger and stronger price point.
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And that oftentimes require us to sell value as opposed to selling price and having things like Pier One and having the pure storage, uh a raise and being able to show customers what that experience is like. What recovery looks like, how much faster it is is a huge sales tool for us. So we're trying to embed that more and more not just into our product road mapping capabilities,
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but also into our sales process, right? Awesome. And talking about uh backup and recovery and ransomware. So we recently announced the new SL A for Evergreen one for ransomware recovery and Kendra, you actually agreed to test it for us. So tell us how, how that went. Great. I mean, luckily my, my business has not had an experience of red yet.
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I don't want to jinx it, but just to, to have the understanding that Pier is there as a partner again in that as well. Um is a huge um you know, helps, helps us sleep at night for sure. Um, you know, we work with health care data which is a, you know, needs to be a and security is, is very, very important to our business and to our
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customers. Um, so, so far the, the test has gone well, um, it's a, you know, a clear continuation of the relationship between pr and, and their customers and helping them solve problems. All right. Awesome. Very good. Uh Cuba turning over to you. What do you think is next for you with
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Evergreen Flex? I think in this we have right now two missions for Latin America. The first one is to build the, the fast recording network in terms of uh recovery of recovery uh from our data centers in Latin America. And the second one is to fill out all Latin American market with Evergreen subscription.
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I think it's the, the two majors uh mission for us right now. All right. Very good. Awesome. Um Let me also ask you of all the things that you heard in the announcement other than the Shaq segment. Uh What were you most excited about? Let's start with you, Cuba. Why don't you tell us what,
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what stood out for you? I think the, the, the, the relationship that he has with the insurance uh company. I, I think the, the, the loyalty that he has is uh for, for me, I was talking with my colleagues before was one thing that made click on. So it's the same for, for technology.
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I think when we find a good partner, uh in this case, a good vendor uh that is in alliance with you, that is our loyalty. So that, that's, that's pure for us. And I think the, the the sharks are common was right. Yeah. What about the announcements that Sean laid out? Like?
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What, what do you think you are most excited about from either Charlie what he laid out as the vision for the company or the new announcements. What did you, what resonated with you? Uh Well, it was a lot of announcement but the, the no disk and the 26 I think it was the number uh is amazing because for us as a distribution uh partner,
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uh we have to send a lot of this to, to a lot of countries. So yeah, it will be nice. All right. All right. How about you, Kendra? What stood out from the morning announcements for you? Um Definitely the same amount of storage and
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less physical footprint. You know, we're, we're facing as we continue to um expand our business and our footprint. Um rack space and cage space. We're into uh two separate co location areas. So we have to pay for our, our cage space, our power, everything in there, and we're running out a cage space in one of our data centers. And so as we talk about reducing or,
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or balancing our opex in order to, you know, to price our products appropriately. Um Having to expand cage space is not something that I really want to spend money on right now. So if we can start packing in, you know, the same amount of storage, if not more storage in the existing rack space, that would be a huge benefit for me.
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All right, awesome. And how about you, Kyle? Yeah, two things stood out for me. I think the, you know, addressing ransomware and the recovery soas and what safe mode is doing I think is really great. You know, a lot of these capabilities are becoming table stakes, right? I think we have customers in the market just
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expect these things to be there and to be a part of solutions for security to be built in. So making that more simple for us so that we can make it more simple for our customers is a really big deal. And I think again, driving towards more density at cheaper price points, right? Not all workloads need the performance of the X series. So we love what capacity tier has done.
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Excited to see what the E tier is going to be and what that means economically so that we again can get these great capabilities, managements and insights into lower and lower price points. So we can push that out more data is our number one month, over month recurring revenue product, it gets added every month by every customer. And so having those scale economic options are pretty exciting for us.
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All right. Fantastic. Uh Again, uh opening up to the audience here, if you have any questions for our guests, please feel free. Uh Otherwise I'll keep talking until we run our own time or I get booted out of the room. Um So Kyle, when, when you are choosing your deployment, your hardware deployment, your infrastructure, how important is sustainability for you?
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How important is energy efficiency? We sometimes hear that this is a European problem and maybe people in the US don't care so much about it. So tell, tell us your perspective, having operated this in Amsterdam, I can tell you it definitely is a European problem but, but it's, it's on everybody's mind, I think said it.
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Well, we have to pay for this, right. Data centers are a massive consumer of power. Power is a massive line item on my PNL. We watch it closely. We trend it, we have customers who consume it and we have to pass through price increases to customers and that's never a fun conversation. So anything we can do to be efficient is good for the bottom line.
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But I like this larger story of about, about uh you know, the no water bottles. I think that uh that got shared. I mean, the, the idea of just being cognizant of what we're consuming and what we're producing is always good business, but there certainly is an economic driver for us as we try to be efficient. Um And, and again,
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everybody uh you know, pure included ourselves, nobody wants to compete on price. That commodity game is not a fun one to play. And so you want to sell on value, right? I think Pure puts a lot of effort into its features and functionalities. We do as well and you try to sell that, but your cost can't be, your cost can't be out of line.
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So any of that efficiency allows us to keep price where we need it to be so that we can really have that value, sell and not have sustainability or cost. A distraction from what we're trying to accomplish now. Great great point, right? Good for the environment. Good for the business, right? Yeah.
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Um How about you, Cuber? What uh what are the sentiments in Latin America around energy efficiency? And how important is that in making your decision? Oh, it it is important. Uh Actually, well, I'm from Costa Rica. So less space, less power and less carbon is nice.
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So um in, in Latin America, the power is uh the power costs are high. So if we have new technology with less power and less will be even better. Alright, excellent.