Pure's punchy first fiscal 2017 quarter opens door to billion-dollar year

Re: TL:DR 3 years in and still making a loss.

Yes, but is Amazon an example of a good business strategy or just another example of survivorship bias?

See https://www.xkcd.com/1827/

Re: TL:DR 3 years in and still making a loss.

"A good analogy here is Amazon. They invested for growth for a LONG time, over 20 years without profits."

Amazon still doesn't, really, have profits. They are being bolstered by AWS, as their core business is at best break even, but now that Google has shown up in the cloud market... that will probably be difficult as well as Google is going to put tons of margin pressure on them in IaaS. GCP is already considerably less costly than AWS. AWS is trying build out their own proprietary software, Aurora for instance, to insulate themselves from competition... we'll see if that works.

Pure is in a commodity market... fast storage (all Flash NVMe storage if you want to be specific). All manner of providers can create these all Flash arrays. It is unlikely that Pure ever gets to the level where they are dominating the market and just don't need to worry about competitors which would generate high profits. Unless Pure can convince people to take on some very proprietary version of software so they are locked in (the traditional model to high profits), it is unlikely that they ever become a break out.

Re: The next Amazon....really?

-Disclosure NetApp Employee-

Oddly enough NetApp hasn't focussed exclusively on NAS for quite some time, and has grown it's SAN marketshare nicely on the back of an all flash growth rate which is double that of Pure's off a higher base. It also and provides object storage at a cost / GB which is about half that of S3 (Glacier is a different proposition, but thats more of a tape competitor than a NAS competitor)

Having said that you're right that cloud is gobbling up a lot of the traditional EMC and HDS and HP and Dell and NetApp "7-mode" business which is why the "SAN/NAS disk array" parts of those businesses are flat or shrinking, Offsetting that (at least for NetApp) are fast growth bits of the on-premesis market which are growing nicely, (Object, All Flash, Infrastructure analytics, HCI etc),

Personally I'm skeptical that Pure will hit escape velocity and make it as an independent company, and the list of potential buyers is pretty small these days .. Lenovo, SanDisk, and maybe Cisco (whiptail 2.0) I heard that HP had a good look at them but were turned off by the future evergreen commitments and decided to buy Nimble instead. I doubt that they'll be the next Violin, but I strongly suspect the age of building major new on-premesis infrastructure provider is gone, especially when your competition isn't just the incumbents like EMC and NetApp, but also Samsung, Intel, Micron, and AWS and Azure and Google, and every "Built from the ground up NVMe Startup" who are going to try copying Pure's business model and start poaching their best engineers and sales folks .. building a better mousetrap can only take you so far in an business environment.

Time will tell.