Pure Storage

Pure Storage is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its products in stealth mode until 2011. Afterwards, the company grew in revenues by about 50% per quarter and raised more than $470 million in venture capital funding, before going public in 2015. Initially, Pure Storage developed the software for storage controllers and used generic flash storage hardware. Pure Storage finished developing its own proprietary flash storage hardware in 2015.

Pure Storage, Inc.
TypePublic
NYSE: PSTG (Class A)
Russell 1000 Index component
IndustryData storage
Founded2009
FoundersJohn Colgrove and John Hayes[1]
HeadquartersMountain View, California
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Charles Giancarlo (CEO)
Paul Mountford (COO)
Kevan Krysler (CFO)
ProductsData Storage Hardware and Software
Revenue$1.36 billion (2019)
$169.257 million (2019)
-$178.362 million (2019)
Total assets$1.973 billion (2019)
Number of employees
2,800 (2019)
Websitewww.purestorage.com

Corporate history

Pure Storage was founded in 2009 under the code name Os76 Inc.[2] by John Colgrove and John Hayes.[1] Initially, the company was setup within the offices of Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm,[2] and funded with $5 million in early investments.[3] Pure Storage raised another $20 million in venture capital in a series B funding round.[3]

The company came out of stealth mode as "Pure Storage" in August 2011.[4] Simultaneously, Pure Storage announced it had raised $30 million in a third round of venture capital funding.[5] Another $40 million was raised in August 2012, in order to fund Pure Storage's expansion into European markets.[6] In May 2013, the venture capital arm of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), In-Q-Tel, made an investment in Pure Storage for an un-disclosed amount.[7] That August, Pure Storage raised another $150 million in funding.[8] By this time, the company had raised a total of $245 million in venture capital investments.[8] The following year, in 2014, Pure Storage raised $225 million in a series F funding round, valuating the company at $3 billion.[9]

Annual revenues for Pure Storage grew by almost 50% per quarter, from 2012 to 2014.[10] It had $6 million in revenues in fiscal 2013, $43 million in fiscal 2014, and $174 million in fiscal 2015.[11] Pure Storage sold 100 devices its first year of commercial production in 2012[6] and 1,000 devices in 2014.[12] By late 2014, Pure Storage had 750 employees.[13] Although it was growing, the company was not profitable. It lost $180 million in 2014.[14]

In 2013, EMC sued Pure Storage and 44 of its employees who were former EMC employees, alleging theft of EMC's intellectual property.[15][16] EMC also claimed that Pure Storage infringed some of their patents. Pure Storage counter-sued, alleging that EMC illegally obtained a Pure Storage appliance for reverse engineering purposes.[17] In 2016, a jury initially awarded $14 million to EMC.[18] A judge reversed the award and ordered a new trial to determine whether the EMC patent at issue was valid.[19][20] Pure Storage and EMC subsequently settled the case for $30 million.[21][22]

Pure Storage filed a notification of its intent to go public with the Securities Exchange Commission in August 2015.[23] That October, 25 million shares were sold for a total of $425 million.[24] The company hosted its first annual user conference in 2016.[25] The following year, the Board of Directors appointed Charles Giancarlo as CEO, replacing Scott Dietzen.[26] In 2017 (2018 fiscal year), Pure Storage was profitable for the first time[27] and surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue.[28]

In August 2018, Pure Storage made its first acquisition with the purchase of a data deduplication software company called StorReduce,[29] for $25 million.[30] In April the following year, they announced a definitive agreement for an undisclosed amount to acquire Compuverde, a software-based file storage company.[31]

In September 2020, Pure Storage acquired Portworx, a provider of cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes, for $370 million.[32]

Products

Pure Storage develops flash-based storage for data centers[9] using consumer-grade solid state drives.[12][33] Flash storage is faster than traditional disk storage, but more expensive.[5] Pure Storage develops proprietary de-duplication and compression software to improve the amount of data that can be stored on each drive.[5] It also develops its own flash storage hardware.[34] Pure Storage has three primary product lines: FlashBlade for unstructured data, FlashArray//C which uses QLC flash, and the higher-end NVMe FlashArray//X.[35] Its products use an operating system called Purity.[4] Most of Pure's revenues come from IT resellers that market its products to data center operators.[36]

Product history

The first commercial Pure Storage product was the FlashArray 300 series.[4] It was one of the first all-flash storage arrays for large data centers.[37] It used generic consumer-grade, multi-level cell (MLC) solid-state drives from Samsung, but Pure Storage's proprietary controllers and software.[4] The second generation product was announced in 2012.[33] It added encryption, redundancies, and the ability to replace components like flash drives or RAM modules.[33] In 2014, Pure Storage added two third-generation products to the 400 series.[12][38] It also announced FlashStack, a converged infrastructure partnership with Cisco, in order to integrate Pure Storage's flash storage devices with Cisco's blade servers.[39]

In 2015, Pure Storage introduced a flash memory appliance built on Pure Storage's own proprietary hardware.[34][40][41] The new hardware also used 3D-NAND and had other improvements.[42] In 2017, Pure Storage added artificial intelligence software that configures the storage-array.[43] An expansion add-on appliance was introduced in 2017.[35]

The intended uses of Pure Storage expanded as the product developed over time.[37] It was initially intended primarily for server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and database programs.[4][12] By 2017, 30 percent of Pure Storage's revenue came from software as a service providers and other cloud customers.[37] FlashBlade, introduced in 2016, was intended for rapid restore, unstructured data, and analytics.[37] In 2018, Pure Storage and Nvidia jointly developed and marketed AIRI, an appliance specifically for running artificial intelligence workloads.[44][45]

References
  1. Dietzen, -Scott (June 17, 2014). "Predicting what's in store: A flash flood of data". CNBC. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  2. Malik, Om (October 4, 2010). "Zimbra Executive Heads To Hot Storage Startup". Gigaom. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  3. Hesseldahl, Arik (August 12, 2015). "Pure Storage Files to Go Public Later This Year". Recode. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  4. Mearian, Lucas (August 23, 2011). "Start-up Pure Storage emerges with all-SSD array". Computerworld. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  5. Higginbotham, Stacey (August 23, 2011). "Pure Storage brings hard disk pricing to Flash storage". Gigaom. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  6. Darrow, Barb (August 15, 2012). "Pure Storage scoops up $40M in validation of all-flash push". Gigaom. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  7. McLaughlin, Kevin (May 29, 2013). "Hot Startup Pure Storage Just Became The CIA's First Flash Storage Investment". Business Insider. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  8. Farrell, Michael B. (October 23, 2013). "EMC sues ex-employees who joined rival". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  9. Hesseldahl, Arik (April 22, 2014). "Pure Storage Raises $225 Million at a $3 Billion Valuation". Recode. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  10. Morgan, Timothy (September 2, 2014). "Pure Storage, EMC, And IBM Lead The All-Flash Array Pack". EnterpriseTech. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  11. Solomon, Glenn (October 18, 2015). "The Pure Storage IPO In Context". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  12. Morgan, Timothy (May 15, 2014). "Pure Storage 250 TB All-Flash Array Takes On Disks". EnterpriseTech. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  13. Kim, Eugene (November 23, 2014). "How A Five-Year-Old Startup Is Winning Deals Over A Huge $60 Billion Company". Business Insider. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  14. Kim, Eugene (October 7, 2015). "A big tech IPO flopped and now the company is worth less than when it was private". Business Insider. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  15. Bort, Julie (November 6, 2013). "Startup Pure Storage Hired 44 Employees From EMC — And EMC Is Suing". Business Insider. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  16. Donnelly, Caroline (November 6, 2013). "EMC claims Pure Storage stole trade secrets and staff in lawsuit". IT PRO. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  17. Lawson, Stephen (November 27, 2013). "Flash startup Pure Storage fights EMC in trade-secrets battle". PCWorld. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  18. Darrow, Barb (March 16, 2016). "EMC, Pure Storage Both Claim Victory in Patent Decision". Fortune. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  19. Bray, Hiawatha (September 2, 2016). "Pure Storage spanks EMC in court". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  20. Clark, Don (September 2, 2016). "Pure Storage Wins New Trial in EMC Patent Case". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  21. Ray, Tiernan (October 19, 2016). "Pure Storage Rising: Settlement with EMC a Positive, Says Wells". Barron's. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  22. Clark, Don (October 19, 2016). "Pure Storage, Dell Settle Litigation Launched by EMC". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  23. Vanian, Jonathan (August 12, 2015). "Fast-rising startup Pure Storage files for an IPO". Fortune. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  24. Driebusch, Corrie; Demos, Telis (October 7, 2015). "Pure Storage Ends Below IPO Price in Market Debut". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  25. Breeze, Hannah (March 21, 2016). "No risk of Pure Storage being acquired". CRN. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  26. Condon, Stephanie (August 18, 2014). "Pure Storage names new CEO". ZDNet. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  27. Kovar, Joseph F. (February 1, 2018). "Pure Storage Reports 48 Percent Revenue Growth As Full Year Sales Pass $1 Billion". CRN. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  28. Condon, Stephanie (April 5, 2017). "Pure Storage surpasses $1B in annual sales". ZDNet. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  29. Gagliordi, Natalie (August 1, 2018). "Pure Storage buys StorReduce in first ever acquisition". ZDNet. Retrieved October 1, 2018.
  30. "Pure Storage Quarterly Report". August 24, 2018. Retrieved December 4, 2018.
  31. Dignan, Larry (March 27, 2018). "Pure Storage buys Compuverde to expand hybrid cloud storage". ZDNet. Retrieved April 9, 2019.
  32. "Pure Storage acquires data service platform Portworx for $370M". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2020-09-17.
  33. Mearian, Lucas (May 16, 2012). "Pure Storage's next-generation flash array offers high-availability option". Computerworld. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  34. Konrad, Alex (May 1, 2015). "$3 Billion Startup Pure Storage Moves Into Hardware, Announces 'Evergreen' Sale Model". Forbes. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  35. Kovar, Joseph F. (April 11, 2017). "Pure Storage's All-NVMe FlashArray//X Targets Enterprises Running High-Performance Web-Scale Applications, Data Analytics". CRN. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  36. Kovar, Joseph (August 25, 2016). "Pure Storage Q2 '17: Record Revenue Puts Company In Prime Position For Future All-Flash Storage Growth". CRN. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  37. Burgener, Eric (December 2017), IDC MarketScape: Worldwide All-Flash Array 2017 Vendor Assessment, IDC
  38. Raffo, Dave (May 19, 2018). "Pure Storage flash gets arrays bigger, smaller, cheaper". SearchStorage. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  39. Kovar, Joseph F. (December 11, 2014). "One More For The Cisco Stable: Pure Storage Intros All-Flash Converged Infrastructure". CRN. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  40. Kepes, Ben (June 21, 2016). "It's all go in solid state world. Pure Storage ups the ante". Network World. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  41. Kovar, Joseph (May 1, 2015). "Pure Storage Unveils First Custom-Built Hardware For Its All-Flash Arrays". CRN. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  42. Dignan, Larry (November 13, 2015). "Pure Storage adds 3D memory, Oracle and SAP systems, predictive support". ZDNet. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  43. Dignan, Larry (June 12, 2017). "Pure Storage outlines AI engine, bevy of software updates, 75-blade all-flash system". ZDNet. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  44. Miller, Ron (March 27, 2018). "Pure Storage teams with Nvidia on GPU-fueled Flash storage solution for AI". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
  45. Condon, Stephanie (March 27, 2018). "Pure Storage and Nvidia introduce AIRI, AI-Ready Infrastructure". ZDNet. Retrieved May 19, 2018.
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