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The legacy model for how enterprise storage vendors interact with their customers during product acquisition, ongoing management, and technology refresh is giving way to a much better model that is strongly preferred by end users. Pure Storage's Evergreen Storage was the catalyst for this positive change, and competitive vendors' response to the program not only validated its value but also improved overall customer experience (CX) across the industry. Competitors first tried to downplay Evergreen Storage as “just a program,” but in light of irrefutable customer affection for it, they have taken a new tack of trying to copy it. Some aspects of the program were easy to copy, but others were not. Program features, such as the Right-Size Guarantee, White-Glove Support, Capacity Consolidation, and Upgrade Flex, and the ability to comprehensively and nondisruptively upgrade installed, production systems to next-generation technology, without planned downtime or data migrations, continue to provide differentiating value to customers that is difficult for competitors to copy.
Pure Storage has continued to evolve the program since its introduction in 2015, and recent additions to Evergreen Storage have raised the bar even further. While the program applies to all Pure Storage all-flash arrays (AFAs) — FlashArray as well as FlashBlade — architectural differences between the two platform types did result in slight differences in program applicability. Investment protection during technology refresh has been a critical differentiator for the FlashArray platform, but the FlashBlade scale-out architecture does not have discrete controllers that can be upgraded independently. This is because the storage processors (or “controllers”) are embedded in the platform's storage devices themselves (the DirectFlash-based “blades”). A recent program modification now provides better investment protection for FlashBlade customers, allowing the customers an option to upgrade both storage processing power and media density through a FlashBlade-specific version of the program's Capacity Consolidation feature.
As the AFA market has matured and five-year compound annual revenue growth rates have subsided to under 10%, Pure Storage continues to grow revenue much faster than the overall market growth rate (while some of its competitors are struggling). This is driven by the vendor's high percentage of quarterly revenues that come from new customer logos (i.e., competitive takeaways or wins), which is higher than that of its established enterprise storage competitors. An industry-leading CX, fostered in large part by Pure Storage's Evergreen Storage program, drives these types of wins even as it also encourages a very high repurchase rate from existing customers.