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June 16-18, Las Vegas
Pure//Accelerate® 2026
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NVIDIA GTC San Jose 2026
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March 16-19 | Booth #935
San Jose McEnery Convention Center
8:45 Webinar
techfest22 Keynote: Making the Complex Simple
Watch Pure’s founder, Chief Visionary Officer, and “father” of storage simplicity as he describes how the world has been simplified by technology. And find out how Pure continues to tackle complexity with products and solutions that are simple, easy, and accessible.
This webinar first aired on June 8, 2022
Click to View Transcript
So uh Thanks RJ. And um I just wanted to uh start by noting this is the original pure storage swag, the very first hoodie we did um and I was asked to wear it today because it's almost exactly 10 years ago today that we first shipped flash array which also not coincidentally happens to be the same time as the peak disk shipment. Alright, so think about it from the time that we shipped the first all flash away from pure,
that's when this shipments peaked and they've been going down ever since and part of our job is to keep shrinking them down to uh next to nothing. Uh So actually it's warm enough now I'm gonna get rid of this. Um Anyway so I wanted to talk a little bit about simplicity, about ease of use. Uh You know you heard charlie start talking
about it, you heard matt talk about it. It's been something that's been key to pure uh for our entire existence and it's something that we feel very strongly is key to the adoption of technology uh to the uh you know, customer experience. It's one of the most basic attributes of the company. So let's take a look at some examples of simplicity and action.
Uh We'll start but just thinking about something like a phone, right? Everybody can use a phone. Uh Pretty much everybody learned how to use the phone a couple of years before your parents wanted you to learn how to use a phone and uh you know it's simple, it's easy as I said, everybody can use it. So why don't we take a look now at how easy it
is to use a phone? Okay, so go ahead and lift up the box. You have four minutes to dial that phone number with that phone. Move your butt over. I don't want your butt in the video.
Seven oh no zeros all the way over. How I restarted. 85,008,500. Oh, you didn't know I didn't it just five seconds to do it. We did it. Okay. So as we know, every teenager knows how to use a phone, uh you know, this phone is 1000 times more complicated than
that phone. Uh Today, everybody knows how to use this. People obviously don't know how to use that. Uh and uh you know, it's just a good lesson that what was simple is not necessarily always simple. Uh you know, when you do something all the time, when you do something on a regular basis, yes, it's easy. You learn it, you get used to it.
Uh it's simple, but when you don't do it, you kind of forget. So at pure, one of the things we have to do is continue to reinvent simple all the time. It's a lesson that we've taken to heart through everything we do. Now, there's another aspect of simplicity. Uh once you make something complex, it's a little difficult to make it simple.
And why don't we take a look at an example of something that was once simple. That became a little more complex. So could we uh, roll the next video if you can use some exotic booze, there's a bar in far Bombay, Come on. And
so, um, you know, flight right? First plane uh, couple of hand controls, Maybe a couple of foot controls, easy to fly. Uh, the 7:47 a marvel of technology. The plane, Alright. It's high tech actually in production for 54 years. Right?
Most of this audience is less than 54 years old, I think I'm not. But uh, most of you are um, that plane's been in production 54 years now, you can see the 7 47 100 cockpit, The original cockpit, Uh, that cockpit, 980 dials, gauges and buttons. It needed a flight engineer. Now, can you imagine if every time we sold you
a product, it came like, hey, I get one of our engineers to go out and sit with you all the time to run it, You had to have the pilot, the co pilot and a flight engineer. Now, they simplified the cockpit. So in the nineties, he came out with the 7 47 400 then 7 47 8. They got rid of 600 buttons, dials and gauges. They don't need the flight engineer anymore.
Now, is it simple? It's only got 385 controls, right? The, and you talk to pilots and they're like, oh yeah, it's so simple now, it's just like really easy if you learned 980 yes, 600, is pretty simple. Uh but nobody, none of us would go in and say wow. Yeah, that's really simple.
I can fly it, it's just got a handful of controls. Um you know, at pure as we release new products and flash blade? S as we come out with pure fusion as we develop court works, import works data services. We keep a huge focus on simplicity from the beginning, you cannot start with the product complex, start with controls for customers,
start with knobs and dials and then take them away. It does not work. The only way to do simplicity is to do it from the beginning and to get everybody focused on it. Every one of our engineers focuses on it. Uh you know when you have some new feature and an engineer develops the interface and
nobody knows how to use it until the engineer explains it. And then after the engineer explains it, it seems really logical. That is not simple and you can't ever do that because yes, the engineer might think logically, other engineers might think logically, users will not have the same mindset.
So just to wrap up some of our thoughts and simplicity, let's take a look at, you know how something like services have evolved over time. So you know what about something like food delivery as a service? Very modern concept. So why don't we take a look at how that's changed now? Fast efficient delivery service milk to you in
sanitary containers sealed within a few hours from the time it left to cow's milk untouched by human hands. So you know when I was a kid, you know, yep, milk came to the front door every day, nice and cold. Fresh uh and really convenient was in a box every day you put out the old uh milk and new milk would come fresh to the box from you.
So I don't know the food delivery as a service has advanced that much over the years. It's gotten a little more diverse in what it can do. But you know, the key is to keep it simple for the customer to keep it as a service that is utterly flexible and that's why we have so much of a focus on evergreen flex and evergreen one and of course evergreen forever to just keep your storage refreshed all the
time. Uh So with that, I just want to thank you. I want to remind you that we will keep the products simple, easy accessible. It's a huge focus
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