Pure Storage, a dedicated Thread

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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Saul bought a little lately.

A year ago,Ant wrote:

Pure Storage
Q1&2FY23

latest results as I know there was interest from last quarter when it returned to hypergrowth levels then the details are here:

https://investor.purestorage.com/news-and-events/press-relea…

and the presentation here:

https://s21.q4cdn.com/687136699/files/doc_financials/2023/q2…

Essentially Pure Storage beat and raised across the board and whilst revenue growth dropped back from 50%+ to 30% which was inevitable as last quarter had some pull forwards in some revenue renewals from this latest quarter - so across the 2 quarters they might have averaged a more consistent ~40% growth had the revenue recognition timings been normalised. In any case their subscription revenue growth was maintained at a consistent 35% and the ARR accelerated to 31% and has an ARR business alone of $1bn.

Apart from that though…

Cash Flow went up 3x

Op Inc went up 10x

Op Inc margin went up 5x

It became GAAP profitable which is almost unheard of amongst our companies

Within a day of release 4 analysts raised their targets as a result to between $35-$42.

This company is brilliantly managed, has incredible cash flow, has highly geared leverage and excellent margins.

Q1

  1. Returned to hyper growth with 50.3% Q1 revenue growth at scale with a $2bn+ revenue run rate
  2. Exhibits consistent SaaS level GM at ~70%
  3. Delivers emerging software level operating margin at 12-14%
  4. Possesses a business model that comes with ARR approaching ~$1bn, ($900m+ after Q1)
  5. Announced some potentially monster deals with Snowflake and AWS in the quarter.

Me here:

This company’s been on my radar, again, since Ant wrote that. I can’t remember why I didn’t follow up then.

Yes WSM’s post was also compelling:
Q1

I just listened to the latest two conf calls of PSTG again, and I have to agree. I think your quote from the CEO is spot-on.

‘What also struck me is the difference in tone in the two calls. In Q4 last year they were cautious, spoke of macro headwinds, lengthening sales cycles etc and then guided for mid to high single digit growth and flat growth in Q1.

Then in Q1 they were decidedly more bullish. The tone was very different. And yet, they didn’t raise their full-year guidance, so didn’t really pull the Q1 beat forward. They stuck to “mid to high single digit growth”. And there were a couple of things that they made explicit about the guide which had the distinct feeling of further de-risking to me.

First was that they spoke about the record traction that their new Flashblade//E product - which only launched end April - was getting. But they didn’t pull any of this higher than expected traction through in their guide. They stuck to a “modest revenue ramp in the second half of the year” in their guide. And yet this was their commentary about that product:

“Early interest in FlashBlade//E is off the charts for a new product.”

And in the Q&A:

I’ve been in front of dozens of customers now and the excitement with customers around this product line and with the prospect of replacing their disks, which are troublesome, with all flash products has been very high. And as I mentioned, I think what’s most exciting is that we’re seeing customers appreciate the fact that we can address the majority of their storage needs and to be able to do that with the simplicity, the power, the ease and the reliability of Pure products. So that’s – I have to say the enthusiasm that when any one of us go in with the new pitch, if you will, to our customers, that we feel coming out of it is really palpable.”

And in relation to a question about AI:

“[…]frankly, we are at least as excited that customers now more and more are going to want to put their data that is in cold, hard-to-reach hard disk systems and make that available for analysis by putting it in much more higher performance flash-based systems. And both FlashArray//C and FlashBlade//E are perfect repositories for that. So we think it’s coming out at a perfect time.”

→I cannot see, given the extremely bullish remarks from the CEO about how groundbreaking this product is, that there will only be a modest ramp, and only in the second half of the year. I believe this product will overdeliver handily vs what they have promised/guided to.

Second, they made explicit that they did not include any new orders from Meta in the guide (although two different analysts had to drag that tidbit out of them). And yet, the CEO had this to say about Meta:

“We continue to have an excellent relationship around AI with Meta. They recently fully turned on the first 2 phases of their research supercluster, which they announced a few weeks – a few weeks back, and we look forward to continuing to work with them on that project as they continue to build it out, but also on other projects that they are contemplating in the other parts of the company.”

→ again that does not sound like there will be no orders from Meta this year…

The other thing I noticed was just how much progress they are making on the subscription revenue side (which grew 28% yoy last Q vs -5% for the company overall). This is the progression of % of revenue which comes from subscriptions:

Sub rev % total Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
2021 32.8% 32.5% 33.1% 30.2%
2022 39.4% 34.6% 33.4% 30.5%
2023 35.3% 35.9% 36.2% 32.7%
2024 47.6%

Stockfanatic

  • My investing thesis is based on the following*:

  • Strong growth of subscription business vs. legacy business (hidden within overall revenue)

  • Several strong tailwinds: (1) AI adoption and need for fast data access (flash storage), (2) new product launches incl. solutions with strong ROIs, (3) shift towards flash storage in big data centers, (4) strong partnerships (Meta, NVIDIA, MDB etc.), (5) overall growth in need for data storage etc*.

To sum it up: I believe the investing case for PSTG is that revenue growth might (!) see some significant acceleration and that this is currently not priced in (rather low valuation, poor growth on paper atm, low interest in stock as attention is focused on other tech stocks like NVIDIA/SMCI etc.)

Me here: I held a position in Pure Storage 4 years ago and ad some appreciation of the founders and the direction of the technology.

I need to look more into current competition. Bert Hochfeld at Tickertarget.com hasn’t any recent articles on Pure Storage, as far as I know from a quick search. Anyone?

I started a 3.7% position today with the cash I had and sold an equal amount of my Rediculously overweight position in Tesla and am looking to add more to PTSG, as my confidence increases.

Best

Jason

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In fact, there is a very recent article from Bert:

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My thesis, in a nutshell:
*) Better reliability vs. spinning-disk
*) Much lower power consumption, heat generation vs. spinning-disk
*) Takes less space vs. spinning disk
*) And, as-of-recently: Same cost vs. spinning disk

If I were a Sales guy, I’d want to work for them; all you have to do is talk to ppl about how their Storage lives are about to get better, and for no additional cost vs. spinning disk

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Yes, flash storage is the future vs Spinning disks. That is NOT a differentiator for Pure Storage. They have some keen advantages in the market, but flash memory isn’t anything unique to Pure.
Note that Micron (for one) makes the Flash memory chips and the SSD storage systems as well. Complete vertically integrated.

Currently, the hardware market is set to reap the benefits of AI, whether that be chip level (NVDA especially, AMD secondarily) or Storage Systems and other Network infrastructure. That has happened for the last 30 years. Extremely cycliclal and margins go up and down, with bloodbaths weeding many out from time to time.

It’s perhaps a good short term play. They move swiftly and their software component sets them apart somewhat. But beware of Micron (one of my customers). Seagate (another customer) is also in a world of hurt long term. Spinning disks are on the down trend and competing with Micron in this space is going to be a (long term) painful experience. But Pure could 5x first, who knows how long these cycles run with AI driving demand for all Storage products. I am personally NEVER invested in hardware after too many painful experiences despite being a chip guy with nearly 40 years under my belt.

It’s just too damn hard to maintain a competitive advantage in this space. Beware.

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Thanks to those who’ve already added to this thread.

Bert’s Seeking Alpha article, link is two posts back, It’s from June 7th this year. I’ll call it an excellent deep dive/recommendation fro Bert.

Regarding competition, I found these specifics helpful also.
“In my view, based on anecdotal checks and other 3rd party research, fungibility is probably at a low ebb in enterprise storage these days. Just for completeness I have linked here to a presentation by G2 with regards to Pure’s leading competitors. I have also linked here to a direct comparison between Pure and Dell. While I almost invariably try to use 3rd party analysis to look at competition for a potential recommendation, most of the time the reviews are so anodyne as to be useless for any investor. That is not the case here-the reviews posted about Dell by Gartner are about as negative as it gets, while Pure is given kudos.”

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Nice one Jason - yes that was a great deep dive that Bert did.

Whilst I agree with MFChips that Pure needs to differentiate vs other Flash players as opposed to spinning disks where the story is now a no-brainer, I do believe that Pure has a differentiated advantage.

I had previously raised the point that they (Pure) are the only flash player that originates their own operating software for their flash storage products vs the competition who do not produce native optimised original software which the CEO likens to using a laptop as a typewriter.

However the differentiation doesn’t end there. There is an innovators dilemma going on here in the sense that Dell/EMC, HPE & NTAP etc have always had to defend their original legacy storage business - in the same way that Kodak used APS to try to stave off digital photography whilst clinging too long to a legacy business, (or Blockbusters with physical VHS/DVDs and retail presence etc).

When Pure came out with All Flash Array, the competition was using hybrid. When the competition finally came around to AFA, Pure was moving on to ALL Non Volatile Memory Flash etc. They have always used the cutting edge of technology as well as business model innovation to lead the competition. I expect that to continue.

WRT the hardware point… Pure operates a Storage as a Service business which whilst contains hardware within the value chain, isn’t really the “solution” or the business model as evidenced by its current 70% Gross Margin, latest $1.2Bn in ARR and its 2022 FY Non GAAP Operating Margin of 16.6% and $609m of free cash flow, (22%).

BTW one issue that muddles comparisons between players is sometimes the terminology. Pure uses the term ARR to represent Annual Recurring Revenue, some of the competitors - especially HPE use ARR to mean Annual Run Rate. I think I have seen a similar confusion at play in cyber security between challenger and incumbent. You have to dig a little deeper to see what they are calling out by way of “as a service” to mean the recurring revenue on a like for like SaaS/annual recurring revenue basis.

Ant

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Hi Ant,

Thanks for the follow up here.I see your prediction, in the original post here from a year ago, is coming true now.

Over the last year the price performance of All Flash Arrays has overtaken traditional disk storage. Because of this, I expect that the entire market should move in favour of Flash storage, with Pure Storage as one of the leaders of the Flash storage market. Also, because Pure has now completed development of a full product suite, providing a CAC benefit and a volume/value potential, I am expecting acceleration in revenue growth.

A little bit more from Bert’s article on Seeking Alpha.
Burt Hochfeld-
“…, Pure’s (Q1) subscription bookings are recognized ratably. Thus in a quarter like this, where subscription bookings were quite strong, reported revenues do not completely encompass that strength which is seen in the strong growth in the backlog metric, RPO balances.”

“… it would be hard to dispute that Pure’s share gains have been consistent, and have lately accelerated.”

I believe that the amount increase in the beat, for Pure’s +5% Revenue growth last quarter, is going to show acceleration, in Q2. I look to add more shares here, hopefully with a confirmation from increasing share price. Or, I’ll add if revenue growth reaches the 20%, as expected by Bert, in his 3 year compounded annualized growth rate estimate, from linked article above.

Like I said in my portfolio summary, this month, I often get in too far ahead of customer adoption rate. So I’m including this here to either rap up this thread or provoke additional interest?

Best,

Jason

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A couple days ago, I increased my allocation in Pure to 13% of my portfolio because the stock has held up better than most in the recent melting. Along with my seeing this as the market confirming the value in my initial allocation, I reread the last Confernce Call and pulled out this nugget…

on AI applications tech, Q1CC QnA

What kind of systems do you usually replace a competing old flash solution or a hybrid story system?

Charlie Giancarlo

Yes, I’ll take that. Well, AI systems are typically they’re greenfield. So we’re not generally replacing. What we are competing with are solely all-flash systems. Hard systems just can’t provide the kind of performance necessary for a sophisticated AI environment. .

Of course, you still have hard disk systems in there for some analytics environments, where the performance is not generally as required. But for anything that’s machine learning or real-time AI-oriented, it’s only all-flash systems, and we compete on the basis largely of our FlashBlade product, which has been in place for 5 years now and now augmented by the latest generation FlashBlade.

Rob Lee

…broader brownfield opportunity we see is, hey, so what are the large corpuses of data that enterprises have been collecting for sometimes decades. They’ve been throwing in the corner on hard disk-based systems that have generally been very, very cold and haven’t had a need to access that data.

Well, now with AI technology, there’s now a demand to apply AI or AI applications to those large data sets. Well, now all of a sudden, there’s large pools of data need to be accessible. They need to be to a degree of performance. And I think that’s where we see a tremendous opportunity for us with especially in our FlashArray//C line.

Elon Musk said Tesla alone would buy every H100 Nvidia made this next year, if TSM could make enough of them (They can’t so Tesla has gone in house on yet more vertical integration, producing their own specialized chips.).

Then on 8/15/23 Beth Kindig,

Per the @FT, multiple sources close to Nvidia $NVDA and Taiwan Semiconductor $TSM estimate the chipmaker will ship around 550,000 H100 chips in 2023.

At a price of about $40,000, the H100 could contribute $22 billion in revenue this year for Nvidia.

And then from a PR Newswire report:

Customer Impact: (from Pure Storage)

Chungbuk Technopark (Korea) built its AI environment around the NVIDIA DGX A100 system. After comparing flash storage solutions, it selected Pure Storage FlashBlade for a seamless integration with its DGX systems, maximizing the efficiency and management of data used to develop and train AI technologies. Benefits that Pure Storage delivers to Chungbuk Technopark include:

  • Advanced AI development infrastructure: Chungbuk Technopark increased data processing performance twofold, improved the GPU server’s data read speed, and expanded GPU usage from 30% to 80%—an increase of about 2.6x. It also enhanced performance, scalability, and data availability for the AI development environment, while also achieving a tenfold increase in reliability.

Me: So in a situation where growth in the foreseeable future is unlimited, what’s the value to the purchasers of $40B of H100’s if 100% of this is supplemented by Pure Storage Flashblade memory…IMO at least $20B fewer H100s. With the cost of an H100 of $40,000, what’s the cost of adding 100% Flashblade to that….there’s not only the revenue now we’re also including the profit for Pure Storage.

Let me know if this sounds crazy to you,

Best,

Jason

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Not Pure Storage results but NetApp released results yesterday and they didn’t look very pretty to me.

Top line revenues down 10% to $1.4bn (Q1’24)
Billings down 17% to $1.3bn
Hybrid segment revenues down but public cloud revenues were up YoY
Gross Margins were slightly up in hybrid and down in public
All Flash Array annualised run rate down 7% to $2.8bn
They highlighted Ontap and Ontap One Fedramp and uptake

Guidance is in line and basically more of the same - low to mid single digits decline for the year.

Pure Storage has always beaten the competition by ~10 percentage points in revenue growth terms allowing them to win market share. Even still, I’d like to think that the read across here is that Pure is really hurting NetApp in the market. If not then the revenue growth rate at Pure may well be looking like low single digits (even if their subscription and recurring growth could be higher).

Here’s the results:-

Here’s the results presentation…

(BTW nb this is another competitor that uses ARR as annualised run rate rather than anualised recurring revenues).

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Hi Ant,

Thanks for the breakdown. Yes, I am disappointed in NetApp Rev growth for their flash array segment. I’m not going to try and separate the offering they sell from what Pure sells. I don’t have the technical ability, even if I wanted to do try and explain why Pure might do much better.

Realizing this does take some wind from my sails. I sold some Pure on the news, for sure.

I still like Pure at 10% of my portfolio. Since I’ve been detailing what I’m doing more in real time than once a month, I’ll include here that my time horizon is 1-3 yrs and my risk tolerance is very high (I’m still working and have enough I literally can’t touch for retirement).

Best

Jason

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Looks like Netapp is copying a page from the PSTG playbook. Netapp identifies themselves now as a cloud-led first party storage service in Google Cloud.

My wife has worked at both companies so we hold stock in both companies for years. PSTG has always been a step ahead of NTAP technically. PSTG growth has always exceeded NTAP but subject to the same macro conditions. With the coming AI build out, data storage will be in high demand for the next couple years. And now cost per byte for flash is equivalent to spinners. NAND Flash storage has always been PSTGs bread and butter and they do it well. I do not see PSTG as an exciting, high growth stock, rather a stable, well managed medium growth stock. Netapp is a mature company with very good support for Microsoft SMB and NFS storage services. I am surprised to see PSTG is on Sal’s board, but I believe it to be a good long term investment.

-zane

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Interesting zane. I guess this is the kind of initiative that you see NetApp aping from Pure Storage…

As per Snowflake and Global-e Online, I’m hoping that this private preview release makes it to General Availability as fast as possible. Pure results out this week, (Wednesday after school).

Ant

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Ok earnings out last night.

  • Q2 Non-GAAP EPS of $0.34 beats by $0.06.
  • GAAP EPS of -$0.02 misses by $0.03.
  • Revenue of $688.7M (+6.5% Y/Y) beats by $8.76M.
  • GAAP gross margin 70.7%; non-GAAP gross margin 72.8%
  • GAAP operating loss $(6.2) million; non-GAAP operating income $111.8 million
  • GAAP operating margin (0.9)%; non-GAAP operating margin 16.2%
  • Operating cash flow $101.6 million; free cash flow $46.5 million
  • Total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities $1.2 billion
  • Revenue $688.7 million, an increase of 6.5% year-over-year
  • Subscription services revenue $288.9 million, up 24% year-over-year
  • Subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) $1.2 billion, up 27% year-over-year
  • Remaining performance obligations (RPO) $1.9 billion, up 26% year-over-year
  • Returned approximately $22.0 million in Q2 to stockholders through share repurchases of 0.6 million shares

My take was this was probably what we could have realistically hoped for. Pure still creamed the competition and stole more market share with their 6.5% revenue growth. They beat on top and bottom line for the quarter, guided towards a return to double digit revenue growth in Q3 (~12%) and ~20% growth in Op Inc and re-affirmed their double digit second half and high single digit guidance for the whole year. (YoY comparisons, which were 50% in Q1 FY’23 and 30% in Q2 FY’23 also get easier from Q3 where compares are versus 20% growth in Q3 FY’23 and 14% in Q4 FY’23).

Additionally Pure kept up their fast growth progress (27% YoY in Q2 or 28% when counting contracted but not initiated recurring subscriptions), in turning their operating model into a subscription based recurring business. This quarter’s revenue number was 42% subscription recurring based which was second highest on record after Q1 and up from 35% in Q2 last year. RPO (26% growth headline but 30% on a like for like basis), was in line with the subscription ARR growth rate.

Customer adds were ~325 which is slightly down from the ~350 adds in the year ago quarter but up from the Q1 adds of 276 making 12,000+ enterprise customers in total. This takes the Fortune 500 penetration to 59% so still plenty of land potential to go as well as expand.

Lastly their Gross Margins across the board were at all time highs and whilst they did make a higher capex investment this quarter free cash flow and operating margin were strong.

What was even more interesting was the earnings call where both prepared remarks and the Q&A provided a lot of additional context and encouragement for future growth.

Takeaways:-

  1. Flashblade E is the fastest launch uptake product in the company’s history (in terms of revenues booked and pipeline established and the whole Flashblade family had a stand out quarter).

  2. Flashblade S and E sales seem to be wrapped in with Evergreen/One which maybe why they don’t show up so much in the in quarter 2 revenues but subscription revenues, ARR and RPO seems to be growing strongly.

  3. AI is driving considerable interest in Pure demand, they booked a low 8 figure deal booked in the quarter from an AI deployment - the largest of its kind incorporating Flashblade S /One. Portworx also captured AI deployment wins and is more related to AI opportunities than had been appreciated by analysts. AI on prem exists for development and moves to cloud for full release. Flashblade S relates to AI training model development and Flashblade E for full release.

  4. AI driven storage demand is sequential behind compute capacity build up. AI demand for storage will arrive once clients have taken possession of physical compute installations which are still coming through (supply chain and order fulfilment lags at play here). Expects this to move from a compute priority to a storage priority from Q4 and into next year.

  5. Product release roadmap hasn’t finished with Flashblade E, as Pure will be releasing Flash Array E later in the year which should provide another growth boost. Additionally they are “shipping 48 terabyte DFMs currently and will introduce 75 terabyte DFM later this year. Today, Pure’s DFM’s are 2 to 4 times denser than the largest hard disk and SSDs in competitive use and the advantage and density is accelerating. Roadmap calls for a 150 terabyte DFM next year and a 300 terabyte DFM by 2026.”

  6. Competitive position is unparalleled. Pure continues to distinguish its QLC advanced flash versus HDD and even other commodity flash products of the competitors and remains the only native software driven flash storage with its Purity software operating system. Flashblade E is unparalleled vs competing flash E products from NTAP etc.

  7. Evergreen//One, Pure’s storage as a service offering saw sales double again year-over-year. They estimated headwind impact of the subscription ARR growth is 1-2% off headline revenue growth numbers. Eventually this will feed into the YoY revenue numbers but in the meantime it is growing the long term revenues under contract on a multi year subscription basis.

  8. Competitor pricing saw some deep discounting which pressured their margins although you wouldn’t know it looking at the GM lines.

  9. Pure have not seen any “spin down” cannibalisation of revenues from high performance storage to lower cost storage in the current climate.

  10. Pure consider the announced Microsoft Azure + VMWare relationship with their Cloud Block Store business as highly significant. They had been working on this for over a year. Customers have been pushing for this and it effectively provides a simpler methodology for customers to move their existing workloads into the cloud and reduces cost.

Results announcement and presentation:-
https://investor.purestorage.com/financial-information/quarterly-results/default.aspx

Transcript:-

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If anyone is still in Pure Storage they had a webcast at the Goldman Sachs conference yesterday. Shares reached an all time high and broke $40 with a substantial 4% bump on the day.

The Webcast covers:

  1. Backstory of Pure and their core focus; (software driven, evergreen model and user experience)

  2. Highlights of Q2; (Flashblade sales, out performance of Evergreen Storage as a Service and Gross Margins)

  3. Fundamental importance of their Direct to Flash native software advantage of Purity (speed performance, density advantage etc) and how this is distinguished versus SSDs (this was a question on this board). They explain how SSDs were originated as a work around from not having native direct flash operating software that Purity provides.

  4. Platform of solutions from Purity Flash software, operating software and management software across their Storage as a Service offerings

  5. The spinning disk cannibalisation education imperative as well as refresh and renewal cycle messaging

  6. Gen AI opportunities across training large language models - analytics and AI is a strong segment representing opportunities in i) training models ii) enterprise data set deployments. References Meta RC, additional 8 figure win this Q. Infrastructure deployment is seen as a larger opportunity than training model opportunities.

  7. Flashblade E opportunity for Pure which is only the first step in the roadmap to attack spinning disks - which is still the largest $ spend part of the market. Density roadmap will augment this. Flash Array E will complete the E build out. E also completes Pure’s portfolio for all enterprise data storage footprint now.

  8. Purity Software gets efficiency out of flash than competition, allows denser modules and structural hardware savings

  9. Importance of Evergreen One - storage as a service gives a performance and capacity benefit with a service offering which simplicity, speed, utilisation, reliability, flexibility & dependability for customers to grow with 1 platform and reduces outlay of capital and improves lifetime value and supports migration from on prem to cloud of workloads.

  10. Fusion & Portworx - 3 years since Portworx acquisition seeing build of demand for cloud native applications. Has been constrained by macro but coming back strong with connection to AI demand - most complete offering available. Fusion - earlier in the journey, providing a management platform for private cloud like experience.

  11. Macro demand environment - has remained consistent since Q4, hasn’t worsened or improved but has allowed positives in prioritised customer investments. Customer decisions has seen some sweating of assets that will come back and already being seen in the Evergreen One performance. Guide Q3 = double digit growth with no macro changes assumed.

  12. Evolution of Go To Market - increased focus on product portfolio and enterprise GTM. Pure still a minority part of wallet but can now fight for more wallet share; focused on direct touch sellers, enabling channel partners to be more independent and accessing customers via C suite where differentiated outcomes resonate (power savings, data center space, non-media parts, labour and capex savings).

  13. How will Hyperscalers see Pure - opportunity or threat? They see the same roadmap, they have to switch to flash from disks but SSDs isn’t the answer and they need to decide on build or buy or partner. Pure has laid the ground work to incorporate all vendors into their solutions which could benefit their hyperscaler opportunity which is available now and ready to go and allow hyperscalers/cloud titans to control their supply chain.

  14. Under appreciated part of the Pure story? Purity software vs SSDs and Evergreen One Storage as a Service flexible business models.

https://investor.purestorage.com/news-and-events/events-and-presentations/default.aspx

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Hey @anthonyms I still own a bit. This caught my eye. Did they say that Meta ordered from them - i.e. your comment above means they had an additional order from Meta RSC? Or is this the same 8-figure Gen AI deal that they spoke about in the call?

From my reading of the call these were two different things, and the timing of follow-on orders for Meta’s RSC was still uncertain:

“So the eight-figure deal was nice as I said low eight-figure deal, but in a production environment that has opportunity for expansion. So very excited and it was that, the largest Gen AI deal of its type”

And

“Separately, with respect to the Meta RSC which we’ve commented on the past, because when new shipments happened into that tends to have an effect on our overall P&L. Yeah, as I’ve stated in the past we have there’s really no change from prior quarters. It continues to be an environment that Meta is happy with, our relationship with them is very good. There are no change as far as we know of their plans to expand in the future. In other words, that’s still our expectation, but we don’t know the exact timing.”

So just wanted to check on this, as Meta ordering would have been big news.

-wsm

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I’m still in PSTG as well. Here is the announcement of the partnership with META from January of last year

I was also unclear as to whether the eight-figure deal was an expansion of that or something different. I’m inclined to think it’s a different company, since META is already announced and I would think they could have just said the deal expanded if that was the case.

It sounded like they landed another large deal and then the follow up was, “Well, what about META? You’ve landed them, are they expanding?” Followed by the response that they continue to expect expansion there but they won’t know when until it comes.

Quite a few of the companies followed by at least a few on this board are present at that conference. CrowdStrike and Samsara also had spots on the program yesterday and both MELI and NU (Nubank is my newest holding; I’m not in MELI, but they both play in similar spaces) had keynote spots. The conference continues for today and tomorrow. Here’s the agenda if you want to see how many of your companies are on it.

JR

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JabbokRiver42 - the 8 figure deal was separate to META and the details were announced in the Earnings Call.

WSM - again 8 figure deal is separate to META and was the same referenced in the earnings call. The reference to META was it started off as Facebook and then became META RC, they have supported them to date and they have no changes to future expectations to continue to support META as and when they had further needs. They weren’t announcing new deals but they were re-assuring that META is an ongoing live client with expectation of future opportunities to come through.

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I believe this announcement, from Pure, will likely move the less technical customers to understand that Flash isn’t ‘flash in the pan’.
New Disaster Recovery as-a-Service solution and scalable AI-powered management capabilities support secure, sustainable, and smart enterprise business operations

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ – Pure Storage® (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technology and services, today announced critical new data resilience offerings, including the introduction of Pure Protect™//DRaaS, a unique Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, new energy efficiency guarantees for its Evergreen® portfolio, and scalable AI-powered storage services via its Pure1® management platform to global enterprises.

f1886ea2c6b3457374163007b2c97319.jpg

www.purestorage.com (PRNewsFoto/Pure Storage)

www.purestorage.com (PRNewsFoto/Pure Storage)

Best

Jason

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I know many of the Pure Storage holders here exited at the last earnings release (Q3) but in his latest article Bert makes the case for the defence and I happen to completely agree with Bert on this.

I too recognise the near term net neutral tradeoff in the Q4 guidance of lower Revenues vs higher ARR/Subscriptions and the longer term net positive of the implications of the business operating model progression for the top and bottom line, however Bert as usual manages to identify even more richness in the story and uncovers in my view yet further upside…

By the way - I couldn’t find the Q3 report in this thread or any other PSTG thread and maybe it was covered in someone’s portfolio reviews as I do remember it being discussed, but here’s a link to the Q3 ER and guidance for Q4 that caused all of the hoopla.

For folks who want the full details of the announcement and earnings call presentation - here’s the source at the Pure Storage investor centre.

https://investor.purestorage.com/financial-information/quarterly-results/default.aspx

(I still hold a 4% stake).
Ant

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Hi Ant,

I think JabbockRiver’s portfolio review this last month made similar case for staying in Pure Storage despite/because of the revenue growth to ARR disparity.

I read the first bit of Bert’s article and assumed it was a re-hash of what he posted immediately after this last quarter. Thanks for the recommendation to revisit this last post of his, good stuff in there.

I don’t have anything else to add here, he did a great job!

I have ~9% position

Jason

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