Nexo is buying Vauld, marking more DeFi consolidation

5

Pure Storage

Power Score: 66.51

Momentum Score: 36.0 (2)

HQ: Mountain View, CA

CEO: Charles Giancarlo

On Power

When Pure Storage was starting its business as a flash storage hardware and software provider in the early 2010s, flash was expensive and had limited adoption across the enterprise. Still, Pure had found a niche, and as the price of flash has dropped — falling 10x in less than 10 years — its revenue grew 50% per quarter leading up to its 2015 IPO . Now though, as flash storage has become commoditized, Pure has focused on growing its hybrid cloud subscription services that offer Pure's management capabilities across both cloud and on-prem for heavy-duty workloads like chip design, analytics and AI. As CTO Rob Lee noted , the hybrid focus — and the software layers built on top — have been designed for "extending our reach, helping customers work with their data a couple of more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of storage." That expansion has paid off: Pure reported in August that its subscription services were now more than 34% of its revenue .

On Disruption

The amount of data that businesses store has exploded, but datasets are still stored in different silos , making analytics and operational decision-making difficult. It's a problem compounded by hybrid approaches, underscored by the fact that deduplication has become a service on its own. Pure recently announced a new platform that makes it easier to combine and then analyze datasets stored in different places, moving itself up the stack and away from being solely a storage provider.

Tea Leaves

As Pure moves into the data analytics space, it's entering a massive market but one that's crowded with dozens of vendors, from well funded startups like Alation and Collibra to big cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Pure will have to both partner and compete with the cloud vendors: It will rely on its underlying infrastructure for its multi-cloud offerings, but is also building management software that directly competes with the Big Three's built-in capabilities. The estimated $216 billion market is so big, though, that there's likely to be more than one winner here.

They Said It

" Right now, storage is very fragmented. When storage is fragmented, it also means that data is fragmented. And when data is fragmented, you don't have a single source of truth and you can't get the best insight out of your information" — Pure Storage CEO Charles Giancarlo in an October 2021 Protocol Interview

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