Everpure, Inc. Class A common stock

Standing by and welcome to the Pure Storage fourth quarter fiscal year 2021 earnings release conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your touchstone pad at any time. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference call, Ms. Nicole Knottes. Ms. Knottes, please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to Pure Storage fourth quarter fiscal 2021 earnings call. My name is Nicole Nutsius, Investor Relations at Pure Storage. Joining me today are CEO Charlie Giancarlo, our CFO Kevin Kreisler, and our VP of Strategy Matt Kixmuller. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during this call, management will make four looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and related disruptions, our growth and sales prospects, competitive industry and technology trends, our strategy and its advantages, our current and future product offerings, and business and operations. Any forward-looking statements that we make are based on facts and assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Our actual results may differ materially from the results forecasted, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Discussion of some of the risks and uncertainties related to our business is contained in our filings for the SEC. We refer you to these public filings. During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures and talking about the company's performance. and reconciliations to the most directly comparable gap measures are provided in our earnings release and slides. This call is being broadcast live on the Peer Storage Best Relations website and is being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be available on the IR website and is property of Peer Storage. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Charlie Giancarlo.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our Q4 earnings call today. I hope that each of you, your loved ones and colleagues, are all safe and healthy. Pure ended fiscal 2021 with great strength and growth, setting revenue and sales records for the quarter and for the full fiscal year. Our portfolio has never been stronger, with record sales in our Pure-as-a-Service offering, FlashBlade, Flasher AC, and Portworx. The completeness of our product suite accelerated sales growth in our enterprise and cloud segments, in each and every theater, and in our major verticals. Our Q4 results are a confirmation of the strength of our long-term strategy and a leading indicator of our opportunity to accelerate growth. I am pleased to share with you today these Q4 successes. Our long-term strategy is to deliver a modern data experience to customers. It was gratifying that so many of our existing customers chose to significantly deepen the relationship with Pure as we've become an ever more critical component in their own plans for digital transformation. We also saw net new customer acquisition growth over last quarter and continued strength in enterprise. In Q4, we booked eight eight-figure deals with eight large enterprise customers, a new record. It was just two years ago that we began significant investments in our enterprise go-to-market team. Our strength in that segment this past year is proof point of the successful execution of that strategy. Our ongoing commitment to marrying technological innovation with our customer-centric business model is increasingly recognized by customers and the industry. With seven years ranked as a leader, Gartner's recognition this year of Pure's clear leadership across both ability to execute, and vision in their magic quadrant for primary storage arrays is a great validation of our strategy. And we also improved our already leading excellence in customer experience as measured through our net promoter score. For calendar 2020, Pure's third-party certified NPS was 83.5, our sixth year in a leadership position and the highest score among vendors measured by Medallia. One of the most important components of our growth strategy is, of course, Pure's leadership team. This quarter, we welcomed Ajay Singh, our new chief product officer. As CPO, Ajay will be responsible for our five business units and our technology alliances. and will be a key contributor to our strategy to deliver modern data services. He brings to Pure extensive expertise in software and services to accelerate our growth into our as a service model and cloud native support. Our growth in Q4 is proof that our ability to deliver a modern data experience is resonating with our customers. They see the benefits of advanced technology from a trusted storage leader that supports a wide range of structured and unstructured data at scale and across any workload. But the Pure value proposition goes well beyond this. The Pure vision is to deliver real-time access to resilient hybrid cloud managed storage services via code to developers and operations managers. Customers desire managed data services that are dynamic and provide a cloud experience with flexible on-demand consumption. Needless to say, we continue to dramatically outpace our industry in both innovation and customer delight. And I'm excited to share four reasons why customers continue to lead with Pure. First, Pure delivers the simplest storage platform to operate, period. We continue to innovate with what customers appreciate, namely seamless upgrades, cloud management, pay-as-you-go consumption models, and both traditional and cloud native data services. This strategy is resonating with customers as validated in a Wikibon analyst report for cloud spending and adoption. Their survey showed that Pure leads both hyperscalers and on-premise legacy vendors in customer spending intent. with an off-the-charts net score of 63%. Second, we continue to see strong customer adoption of our subscription services, which include our Evergreen and Pure-as-a-Service offerings. Only Pure delivers a true enterprise-class utility with flexible storage consumption, a cloud experience on-premise, an easy path to move data to the cloud at any time, and aligns spend with actual consumption. This year, we've continued to advance our subscription services platform, reducing complexity by eliminating additional licenses and support costs, and introducing a service catalog with transparent pricing. This quarter, our subscription services grew over 30% from one year ago. New customers for our Pure as a Service offering included one customer over $10 million, as well as U.S. customer Cloud at Work, maca mining services in australia and german telecom provider bobcom and we saw customer adoption increase across every major area of the world given the significant customer benefits with our subscription services we have created enhancements to our field compensation for these offers going forward third Last quarter, we expanded our industry-leading data services capabilities for containerized cloud-native applications with the acquisition of Portworx. Cloud-native databases, analytics applications, and AI frameworks such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Postgres, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Spark, and TensorFlow are the tools upon which customers build their modern data pipelines. Pure has been successfully serving these applications at the highest performance levels with FlashBlade. And now Portworx helps us expand support for these applications on any infrastructure, on-prem or in cloud, at any scale. We saw significant growth of in-cloud deployments of Portworx this quarter, with particular growth through our IBM partnership, given our best-in-class support for Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Pak for Data. The integration of Portworx into Pure has been one of the best that I have ever experienced, and we are just beginning to leverage Pure's go-to-market engine to drive Portworx. And earlier this month, we expanded our market leadership with major software updates to our flagship Purity software on both FlashBlade and FlashArray to deliver enhanced performance, comprehensive ransomware protection and security, and we broadened file capabilities to serve more markets and use cases. Best of all, we enabled customers to adopt these new innovations without disruption, downtime, additional cost, or the requirement to rebuy new capacity. Sustainability is my fourth and final point. From our founding, Pure has focused on how our products can use less energy, require less cooling, need less maintenance, and take up less space in the data centers, and produce less waste. In the last eight years, we estimate that Pure's FlashArray offering alone has saved over 4 billion kilowatt hours in energy use. avoiding the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to over 7 billion miles of automobile travel. It's eliminated 96% of data center rack space when compared to legacy solutions, which is approximately 19,000 racks or over 10,000 tons of legacy gear not deployed. With evergreen upgrades, customers continuously upgrade rather than discard their older storage equipment. avoiding the rip and replace required by legacy vendors and reducing waste in landfills. Pure's industry-leading storage density allows customers to save on data center space and power when compared to other flash storage vendors. Now, with Flasher AC, customers can fit one petabyte of effective storage into roughly one rack unit the size of a pizza box. Paying for only what one consumes is the right model for customers' bottom line, and right-sizing energy use and physical infrastructure ensures that customers don't pay to cool and power excess equipment. I'm very pleased with both the internal investments we've made over the past fiscal year and our focus on operational discipline. We made a commitment early in the COVID-19 pandemic that we would continue to make strategic investments in global talent focusing on innovation, including our acquisition of Portworx, customer support, and scaling the company. We dramatically reduced travel, entertainment, and other operating expenses, while increasing our investments in talent and critical growth initiatives in anticipation of increasing growth this year, while continuing to deliver operating income and generating positive operating cash flows. Our employees and our charitable foundation, Pure Good, also stepped up investments focused on COVID-19 response, food and housing in our local communities, and in our workforce development initiative. Continuing our thoughtful approach to operating in this new normal, we recently announced to the company that we plan to use a hybrid approach when we return to the office, with most employees able to work from home part-time. We believe that the hybrid office model will deliver the best combination of individual and team productivity and allow us to continue to attract and retain the best employees in the industry. I have never felt more fortunate to be at Pure. Our dedicated Puritans, our loyal customers, and our partners and suppliers all displayed incredible perseverance, creativity, and positivity during the past 12 months despite the personal challenges they each faced. The effect of the COVID economy on Pure's business has largely played out as we predicted over this past year. First, a short acceleration of business as customers shifted to work at home and online business, then a sharp pullback as they took stock both of their business prospects and new plans for digital transformation, followed by a gradual stabilization based on the new normal. Now we look forward to a return to more significant economic growth as we expect the effects of COVID will begin to diminish during our fiscal Q2. I have increasing confidence that this year will be far better than last. On a macro front, I'm hopeful about the promise of increasingly plentiful and effective vaccines being distributed throughout the world. I believe that in this fiscal year, our customers will accelerate their investment in digital transformation with renewed confidence of economic recovery. they will be increasingly confident in their ability to deploy new vendors, new systems and software into new use cases, and Pure will be high on their list. Thank you. And now I will turn the meeting over to Kevin for details on our financials.