Cathy Southwick, Pure Storage | Pure Accelerate 2019
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2019-09-18

Cathy Southwick, CIO, Pure Storage, sits with Lisa Martin & Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019 in Austin, TX.

#PureAccelerate #theCUBE 

https://siliconangle.com/2019/09/26/qa-pure-storage-growth-attributed-understanding-enterprise-wants-pureaccelerate/

Q&A: Pure Storage growth attributed to understanding what enterprise wants

Technology is democratizing business, looking to bring seemingly separate industries together under the common umbrella of digital innovation. Take telecom giant AT&T Inc. and storage company Pure Storage Inc. On the surface, the two have little in common. But both are seeking the same goal: Maintaining a competitive edge through technology.

One person in a unique position to understand both companies is Pure’s chief information officer, who has over two decades of experience working in information technology, cloud, and engineering at AT&T.

“I think the role I’ve played coming in is bringing a perspective from a larger enterprise,” said Cathy Southwick (pictured), chief information officer of Pure Storage Inc. “It’s not just ‘You’re helping me with storage’ [but] you’re actually helping me to solve a business problem.’”

Southwick spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure//Accelerate event in Austin, Texas. They discussed Southwick’s experiences moving from Pure customer to the company’s CIO and how her perspective is helping Pure bring in new enterprise customers (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Martin: You were a Pure customer when you were with AT&T. What was it about Pure and its technology that differentiated it from the competition?

Southwick: When you’re a big enterprise, you don’t have time to look at technology for weeks and months on end and then have to test it. We brought Pure in, they tested out their products in two weeks, and we saw more than what we were expecting. All of a sudden, we saw all these other capabilities we hadn’t planned for.

One of the most unique things that I share with customers is when you are in technology and you’re in a large enterprise, you tend to have a challenge with introducing new technology because you don’t want more technical debt. Typically, your operation teams are doing a little bit of pushback [saying], “We don’t need something new.” [But at AT&T] the folks that were in operations, they were literally coming and saying, “We want more Pure.”

And we had the same experience with our application team saying, “Hey, I just got lower latency.” And that didn’t happen before. Those were things where they were like, “Operations and applications are going to work as a team together?” So a very different experience.

Vellante: What is your technology strategy at Pure, and how are you enabling business outcomes for the company?

Southwick: As I’ve come onto the organization, our opportunity and our challenge is that we now have different responsibilities. We’re taking on things like how do we want to think about data across the enterprise, not just within each individual domain.

So, our opportunity now is to take a step back, be able to look across and rethink how we want to think about the customer experience from the time product is developed all the way through its lifecycle, through the delivery and then support.

Our focus is how do we help our business to become even faster? How do we get more focused on the customer from a whole ecosystem? And to think about the customer from the whole ecosystem instead of each individual area.

Martin: Pure is one of the few storage companies showing growth. It recently announced a 50% increase in multi-million-dollar deals, with over 450 customers added in Q2.  Do you think your experience with AT&T has helped Pure understand how to be able to go after those large enterprise multi-million-dollar deals?

Southwick: Well, certainly from a personal understanding of the product and what Pure can do at scale, I have that perspective to share with our customers and bring in that confidence and credibility. [Large enterprise customers] have a lot of questions about how exactly AT&T [implemented Pure Storage products].

They run hundreds and hundreds of arrays and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes, so it’s not like it’s a proof of concept or a pilot. And it’s been years of doing upgrades non-disruptively over the years with all the Pure upgrades that have come into play. So I can certainly bring that to the table.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Pure//Accelerate event. Neither Pure Storage Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)