Our mission is to deliver data storage that transforms business through a dramatic increase in performance and reduction in complexity and costs. Our innovative technology replaces storage systems designed for mechanical disk with all-flash systems optimized end-to-end for solid-state memory. At the same time, our innovative business model replaces the traditional forklift upgrade cycle with an Evergreen Storage model of hardware and software upgrades and maintenance.
Our next-generation storage platform and business model are the result of our team’s substantial experience in enterprise storage and web-scale infrastructure, as well as frustration with the industry’s status quo. This deep industry understanding led to the development of our three-part integrated platform: the Purity Operating Environment, our flash-optimized software, FlashArray, our modular and scalable all-flash array hardware, and Pure1, our cloud-based management and support. Our platform can deliver a 10X acceleration in business applications over legacy disk-based storage. It is also designed to be compatible with existing infrastructure, substantially more reliable, and power and space efficient.
Our business model builds on our technical innovations to reverse the traditional storage business model. Instead of moving data between old and new systems via forklift upgrades, we keep business data and applications in place and upgrade technology around it. Our platform and business model are designed to add value to customers for a decade or more, reducing total cost of storage ownership while increasing loyalty.
Our innovations help rebalance the data center by closing the performance gap between legacy storage technology and servers and networks. But it is the simplicity of our platform and business model that is revolutionizing the enterprise storage experience. Together, our innovations have helped our customers realize the promise of the cloud model for IT and the benefits of Moore’s Law. This has yielded industry-leading Satmetrix-certified Net Promoter scores, based on the results of customer satisfaction surveys.
Since launching FlashArray in May 2012, our customer base has grown to over 1,650 customers. Our customers include large and mid-size organizations across a diverse set of industry verticals, including cloud-based software and service providers, consumer web, education, energy, financial services, governments, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications. Our platform is used for a broad set of storage use cases, including database applications, private and public cloud infrastructure, virtual server infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure. Our platform helps customers increase employee productivity, improve operational efficiency, make better decisions through faster, more accurate analytics and deliver more compelling user experiences to their customers and partners.
We sell our platform predominantly through a high touch, channel-fulfilled model. Our sales force works collaboratively with our global network of distribution and channel partners, which provides us broad sales reach while maintaining direct customer engagement.
In March 2016, we announced a new entry-level model of our FlashArray product, called FlashArray//10, and FlashStack Mini, a new converged infrastructure solution that combines the new entry-level FlashArray with UCS servers and networking from Cisco, and virtualization software from VMware or Microsoft for a complete solution. We expect that the new entry-level FlashArray and FlashStack Mini will be generally available in June 2016.
In March 2016, we announced our new FlashBlade product, an elastic scale-out system that delivers all-flash performance to terabyte-scale and multi-petabyte-scale data sets. Elasticity software implements a common object store in the FlashBlade system, as well as storage services such as data reduction, encryption and data protection, and scale-out protocol services such as NFS (file) and S3 (object). Following an early access phase, we expect that FlashBlade will be available on directed basis for production use in the second half of calendar 2016.
Key elements of our growth strategy include:
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Relentlessly Innovate and Maintain Technology Leadership. We will continue to invest in product innovation and technology leadership and plan to enhance our flash-optimized software, modular and scalable hardware and cloud-based management and support. We have released multiple generations of our FlashArray products since our founding in 2009 and release enhanced software versions of our Purity Operating Environment with new features periodically. In March 2016, we announced our FlashBlade product, an elastic all-flash scale-out system. We believe that continued innovation is critical to addressing the complex and changing requirements of data storage and that maintaining our technology leadership will help us expand our addressable market. |
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Continue to Drive Large Customer Adoption. We believe that our market is large and untapped as a significant number of enterprises, service providers and government organizations have yet to adopt all-flash storage throughout their technology infrastructure. We intend to grow our base of customers by promoting our platform, increasing our investment in sales and marketing and teaming our network of channel partners. We are investing in our account teams to cultivate strong relationships with our larger customers, which, in collaboration with our channel partners, should allow us to further penetrate large enterprises across all verticals, industries and geographies. |
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Further Leverage our Channel Ecosystem. We have been successful in using a channel-focused model to drive our sales, and we continue to believe that by partnering with the channel and service providers, we can reach the broadest number of customers. By investing in training, demand generation and partner programs, we believe we can enable many of our partners to independently identify, qualify, sell and upgrade customers, with limited involvement from us. We intend to continue to invest in our channel to add scalable distribution partners, systems integration partners and service provider partners, including providers of cloud-based infrastructure offerings. |
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Drive Greater Penetration into our Existing Customer Base. We believe our over 1,650 customers represent a significant opportunity for us to realize incremental sales. We sell additional products and services to our customers as the data within their existing application deployments naturally grows and as customers migrate additional applications to our platform. We estimate that we have only penetrated a small portion of the total footprint in many of our larger customers. |
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Cultivate our Inspirational Culture. We believe our culture is a critical part of our success. We strive to maintain an exciting and supportive atmosphere that attracts great talent and inspires our employees to excel and deliver a differentiated experience for our customers. The five core values upon which our Puritan company culture is based are customer-first, creativity, teamwork, persistence and ownership. These values permeate our company and help define our business, customer, shareholder and employee objectives. |
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Leverage our Technology Ecosystem. We have developed strategic relationships with a number of technology vendors to allow integration of our platform with their offerings, enabling a streamlined experience for our customers. We have developed FlashStack, our converged infrastructure offering which incorporates best of breed solutions from Cisco, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, and we also have developed a variety of application-specific solutions, including optimizing our platform for high performance database applications such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft and virtual infrastructure such as VMware, Citrix and OpenStack. |
Innovative Technology and Business Model
Our next-generation storage platform is comprised of three integrated components, all designed from the ground-up for solid-state storage: the Purity Operating Environment, our flash-optimized software; FlashArray, our modular and scalable all-flash array hardware; and Pure1, our cloud-based management and support. These three components are complemented by our innovative business model, which is designed to improve our customers’ experience related to the procurement, upgrade, expansion and ownership of storage.
The heart of our storage platform is the Purity Operating Environment, our proprietary software that runs across all FlashArray generations and is included with the purchase of our hardware. Key features of our Purity Operating Environment include:
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FlashReduce: Data reduction technologies to reduce the effective cost of flash. FlashReduce combines inline deduplication, inline compression, and background reduction technologies to maximize the amount of data that can be stored on the flash media, thereby reducing its effective cost per gigabyte. Our proprietary FlashReduce technology employs a variable block size reduction and can deliver up to 2X better data reduction as compared to the leading competitive products, resulting in an average of greater than 5-to-1 data reduction across a wide range of use cases and data types. |