“Our Systems Are More Energy and Space Efficient than Competitive Offerings” Says Ramanujam Komanduri

In a largely data-driven business environment, companies would need unique strategies and infrastructure to store the humongous data that they collect. Given the magnitude of data breaches that are costing companies an average of $3.86 million per incident, an effective data protection plan is deemed necessary. Business houses clearly require experts' guidance and support for designing necessary architectures and implementing appropriate data storage solutions. Pure Storage is one such data storage solutions provider that has a remarkable presence in the data storage market. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ramanujam Komaduri, Country Manager, Pure Storage India.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services it offers.  

Pure Storage is the world's most advanced data storage technology and services company. The company was founded by John Colgrove and John Hayes in 2009. We are headquartered in Mountain View, California, US with a presence in key markets across the globe. We entered the Indian market in 2020, powering Indian enterprises with modern data storage and management solutions.

Pure's innovative data storage and management solutions include the FlashArray family, FlashBlade, Pure1, FlashStack, a unified computing system jointly developed with Cisco, AIRI, the first AI reference architecture featuring NVIDIA GPUs, and the Portworx portfolio of Kubernetes solutions. Pure also has a unique flexible consumption portfolio of offerings called Evergreen.

2. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?      

There are several actually. First of all, our decision to go all-flash has put us in an advantageous position. While vendors with legacy spinning disk storage have software that is not optimized to manage flash, Pure's operating system gets the best out of flash. That means we are able to maximize capacity, density, and performance which means our systems are more energy and space efficient than competitive offerings.

Another advantage we have is our innovation in our Evergreen offering which gives our customers several ways to consume their storage either full capital ownership or full pay per use or somewhere in between. Our product Evergreen//Forever gives customers the option to subscribe to technology upgrades without forklift hardware replacements during the length of their contracts. Pure's customer satisfaction is also another key advantage. Our NPS score is among the highest in the industry and speaks to our customers' happiness with their Pure investments.

3. What are the most important data storage trends that you see emerging across the globe in 2023?         

In the upcoming years, enterprise storage will likely be impacted by three significant trends. Firstly, there is the Anywhere Service Economy. IT executives want more discretion and freedom in how they use and consume their IT services.

When a technological refresh necessitates pricey and time-consuming forklift upgrades, the conventional paradigm of buying once every three to five years just does not work anymore. Furthermore, in a dynamic and quick-paced setting, capacity requirements might increase and decrease quickly. IT executives must be able to scale up or down their storage capacity affordably.

Infra as Code is the second major theme. Self-service IT experiences and scale-out, on-demand solutions that go beyond the constraints of physical architectures are integrated through an infrastructure-as-code platform. In essence, it enables businesses to build a cloud-like operating model on top of existing infrastructure to provide users of storage with a cloud-like experience.

The rise of cloud-native modern apps makes this even more important because DevOps teams must quickly deploy their apps without having to worry about infrastructure. For their on-premises infrastructure to better enable the agility required to quickly pivot in the face of unforeseen changes, organizations desire a new experience.

Third, ESG KPIs and playing a role in the organization's transition to sustainability are tasks that IT leaders are receiving more and more responsibility for. There is a lot of electricity used in data centers. The appropriate technological decisions can significantly save energy costs and release a priceless real estate footprint. Customers have told us that the money they saved on their energy bill covered the cost of our solutions.

4. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of them.

Pure Storage delivers some of the most efficient and scalable storage solutions available. It helps companies push the boundaries of what's possible. Our all-flash-based technology, combined with the customer-friendly business model, drives business and IT transformation with Smart Storage that is effortless, efficient, and evergreen. Pure Storage offers two flagship products: FlashArray//X, optimized for structured workloads, and FlashBlade, ideal for unstructured data.

Pure Storage has recently expanded its FlashBlade offerings with the new FlashBlade//S. The new offering leverages QLC flash to enable much greater storage densities at a lower cost. The performance characteristics of FlashBlade//S make it an excellent solution for workloads such as rapid recovery and ransomware mitigation, modern analytics, DevOps, healthcare imaging and genomics, and artificial intelligence.

Evergreen//Forever provides quick, continuous expansion and upgrades. Software options include Pure Cloud Block Store, Pure1, Purity Operating Environment Pure Fusion, Portworx by Pure Storage, and Purity Operating Environment Pure. Both ordinary and challenging data management tasks are made simple by these goods and services. Overall, our solutions are a breeze to integrate and run, scalable, efficient, and good for the environment – thus helping organizations achieve their business and sustainability goals.

5. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?        

I believe the storage and management industry will continue to expand globally, and we can already see this in India. The pandemic hastened many organizations' aspirations for digital transformation. As a result, the expansion of data, especially unstructured data, has experienced another acceleration.

As businesses explore new ways to effectively store, manage, move, analyze, and safeguard their data, the strategic importance of data storage and management in overall IT strategy has increased.

6. What's your growth plans for the coming years?

In India, Pure continues to execute well on its strategy of providing the most advanced, reliable, and energy-efficient technology to satisfy the mission-critical data storage and management needs of its customers and this has been demonstrated by its continued ability to outpace the market. According to the IDC Quarterly Enterprise Storage Tracker, in Q3, 2022, Pure grew 590.5% while the overall market in India declined by 2.8%.

The transformation of India into a digital economy is taking place at an astonishing pace, accelerated by the pandemic. Pure's technologies are a critical enabler for this digitalisation, and we are grateful to our customers and partners for putting their faith in our ability to support their digital transformation.

7. What is the skill sets that you specifically look for while hiring talents at an initial stage?        

We want to hire from the top quartile of talent. So, the philosophy in the company is that your ability to learn and adapt is equally as important as your qualifications. As a result, we simply don't hire anyone with experience in the storage industry.

8. Kindly brief us about your role at Pure Storage and your journey in this highly promising sector.

As a Country Manager for Pure Storage, it is my responsibility to grow the company's business in India sustainably. This means working closely with our customers and partners to ensure that they understand how Pure can help them and to ensure that their experience meets the very highest customer satisfaction standards that the company has set.