S-E Asian firms 'see value in data storage for innovation'
San Francisco
DATA storage firm Pure Storage, a New York-listed outfit that counts Singapore chipmaker Avago and property developer Ascendas-Singbridge as customers, says South-east Asian businesses contributed to some of its strongest growth in latest global revenues. It is a sign that the region is grasping that data storage is integral to innovation.
Michael Alp, Pure's vice-president for the Asia-Pacific (Apac) and Japan, told The Business Times: "All our Asean markets are growing at good rates. We are winning a lot of enterprise accounts, many in financial services and high-tech manufacturing. Governments are picking up too, including Singapore government agencies, which I cannot name."
For its first quarter ended April 30, Pure posted a 40 per cent rise in revenue to US$255.9 million, up from US$182.6 million last year.
Mr Alp, who was speaking to BT on the sidelines of the Pure Accelerate conference in San Francisco recently, did not disclose Pure's revenues by region, but identified South-east Asia as being among the firm's fastest-growing regions.
"Many industries here are starting to create data-science activities, such as in high-tech manufacturing, tertiary education and banking. There is a movement of skillset from reporting to discovery: companies have evolved from structured reporting to business intelligence to predictive analysis to artificial intelligence (AI)."
David Wirt, Pure's area vice-president for South-east Asia and Greater China, said AI initiatives are emerging from the region's businesses.
In Singapore, programmes such as Smart Nation and AI Singapore are boosting the country's AI capabilities to power innovations and its digital economy, he told BT.
"We need more data heroes, companies that have found innovative ways to use data. We look for them (partly) through customer references. It's based on the whole theme that data has become the new oil."
Pure, founded in 2009, was one of the US' most-watched enterprise startups before its listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2015. It has since hit US$1 billion in revenue.
Its share price has been on a steady rise in the past year, last trading at US$24.48 on Friday; its 52-week-high price is US$24.93.
Among its key competitors is EMC, which Dell acquired in 2015 for about US$67 billion.
Tim Dillon, founder of tech analyst firm Tech Research Asia, told BT that Pure has continued to show progress in growing its international business alongside the evolution of its product solutions.
"Even in relatively tough mature Apac markets such as Australia, Japan and Korea, Pure has solidified its presence, growing both customers and staffing numbers," he said.
Last month, Pure declared it is going "all-in" on Shared Accelerated Storage, a new technology expected to shape the future of data storage.
In a widely-watched move at the Pure Accelerate conference, Pure launched FlashArray//X - its new-generation and first family product line of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NMVe) flash arrays, purpose-built for Shared Accelerated Storage - at US$0 premium from its previous generation of all-flash products, FlashArray//M.
Matt Kixmoeller, Pure's vice-president of strategy who unveiled FlashArray//X, said that keeping it at the same price as its previous iteration encourages mainstream adoption and democratisation of Shared Accelerated Storage.
Shared accelerated storage enables diskless and stateless servers to connect to shared storage via fast, converged networks.
In an interview with BT, Mr Kixmoeller said: "This reminds us of the time we started with flash storage. We launched our first all-flash storage product at US$0 premium (from disk-based storage) to make it obvious for customers to switch from hard disk to flash storage in 2012. We see the same opportunity in NMVe."
Tech Research Asia's Mr Dillon said that while Pure's US$0-premium strategy is not a "game-changing move", it reflects the "ongoing evolution of the commercial pressure in the flash market, as price per gigabyte has continued to come down over the last several years".
He told BT: "What should prove interesting to businesses is the ability to incorporate NVMe into their storage needs via Pure's X range for no premium. To me, this reflects Pure's positioning that NVMe should be for all usage scenarios rather than the high-end, premium-price position taken by competitors in the market."
