Pure Storage, Inc.

good day ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by and welcome to the pure storage third quarter fiscal year 2021 earnings conference release conference call at this time all participants are in a listen-only mode at the conclusion of our prepared remarks and there will be a question and answer session If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press the star zero on your touch tone 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 Benicio. Ms. Benicio, please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to the Pure Storage third quarter fiscal 2021 earnings call. My name is Nicole Nutsius, investor relations at Pure Storage. Joining me today are our 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 all subject to various risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and related disruptions, our growth and sales prospects, including our Q4 outlook, competitive industry and technology trends, our strategy and its advantages, our current and future product offerings, including Portworx, 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. A discussion of some of the risks and uncertainties related to the business is contained in our filings with SEC, and 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 GAAP measures are provided in our earnings press release and slides. This call is being broadcast live on the Pure Storage Investor Relations website and is being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be available on the IR website and is the property of Pure Storage. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Charlie Giancarlo.

Good afternoon and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's earnings call. As we look to the end of 2020 with relief and look forward with high hopes for a brighter 2021, my thoughts are with all of you on this call. I hope that you, your families, colleagues, and friends are all staying healthy and faring well. The challenges and the changes we've experienced this year have been extraordinary and seem never-ending. and they have certainly reset all of our expectations and assumptions. COVID has been the change agent of this decade, and we have all learned many lessons in stamina and resilience. Like you, I am excited about the many reports on the fantastic progress with vaccines and therapies created by the world's scientists, doctors, and engineers. However, we all know that there will continue to be challenges due to the virus and its economic impact for months to come for all of our communities and stakeholders. Through all of the challenges that COVID created this past year, Pure has been there for our customers, delivering capacity, performance, and services that enabled our customers to cope and thrive during the crisis. I feel confident that regardless of the rate of progress in the battle against COVID, Pure and most of our customers have turned the corner on their plans and ability to operate in this new normal. I am pleased with this quarter's performance and the progress Pure has made. Growth in our global enterprise business continues to provide me with confidence that we will exit this downturn with an accelerated opportunity. our strategy and our vision to deliver the modern data experience strongly resonates with our customers in our first 10 years pure completely changed customers expectations of what they should see from storage arrays and storage vendors in our second decade we are changing the expectations for hybrid cloud data and storage management We are growing from a two-product company to offering a full multi-cloud data services platform, increasing our relevance to both those who build infrastructure, that is IT, and those that build applications, namely developers and DevOps. I am very pleased to welcome the Portworx team, now part of the Pure family. Portworx brings to Pure a Kubernetes data services platform for cloud-native applications running across container-based hybrid cloud environments. With Portworx and our existing Pure Service Orchestrator or PSO, we have expanded our industry-leading data services capabilities to both traditional and cloud-native applications and containers. We've made good progress with the integration, and the Portworx team continues to perform well, easily beating their pre-acquisition sales plan. Our strategy with Portworx is to continue their software-defined storage, container, and Kubernetes control roadmap, and layer in Pure's capabilities with VMs and bare metal workloads, all managed through our unique SaaS-based Pure One management system. Customers are looking for more complete solutions to their digital transformation. They are not specifically looking to migrate to subscriptions. They are not specifically moving to SaaS and hyperscalers because it's the cloud. Customers are moving to services and suppliers that provide the outcomes they desire rather than just the means for customers to create those outcomes themselves. Purity solutions continue to evolve to enable customers to automate their data storage and management and to deliver data management as code to their developers. And importantly, like our Purity software, Portworx is just as comfortably deployed in cloud as on-premises, supporting a new set of customers who are born in the cloud and may never consider on-prem infrastructure. This quarter, We saw strong momentum in both existing and new Portworx customers, including Eurobank, Expedient, and Datascan. And I'm pleased to share that we were just named a leader by GigaOM for Kubernetes data protection. Leading customers are choosing containers, Portworx, and PSO to build and run their most strategic new initiatives. They are also choosing to use object storage for these same advanced systems, and we are benefiting from this demand in the continued strong momentum for FlashBlade. FlashBlade continues to be chosen by customers to consolidate and modernize their unstructured data across a number of uses, including technical computing, analytics, and rapid recovery. Momentum with customers like First National Bankers Bank, the Louisiana Office of Technology Services, and Sinai Health System demonstrates that FlashBlade continues to be the leading choice to enable rapid recovery to defeat ransomware. We are also seeing strong interest and initial customer adoption for our recently released FlashRecover solution to modernize the entire data protection stack. This quarter, Caden, A global leader in electronic design and computational software selected Pure's fast file and object service through our Pure as a Service offering to accelerate their transition to a modern IT environment and to automate their data services. FlashBlade's performance and ability to consolidate many workloads, combined with our consumption-based model and service-level guarantees, enables Cadence to increase developer productivity and accelerate their time to market. Customers like Cadence are looking to deliver outcomes to their developers. Pure's subscription services, which include our Evergreen and Pure as a Service offerings, had strong growth again this quarter. Selecting Pure as a Service in Q3, organizations such as ME Bank in Australia and the University of Texas Health Science Center recognize the flexibility and choice that these offerings provide. Our unified subscription in Pure as a Service, which includes Cloud Block Store, enables customers to subscribe to storage both in their data center and in the cloud, paying for only what they consume. making migration to the public cloud possible at any time without worrying about stranded assets. The operational benefits of subscribing to a service managed by Pure makes their lives substantially easier. Today marks another milestone and industry first for our Pure as a Service offering with the announcement of the Pure Service Catalog. The new service catalog provides cloud-like transparency by publishing pricing for on-premises and hybrid cloud storage delivered as a service. So customers can easily choose the right storage service level for each workload. Combined with Pure One's AI-driven workload planner, customers can place workloads on the right storage service tier based on intelligence derived from thousands of customer scenarios. Flasher AC, well into its second generation, continues to grow at an accelerated pace. This month, Flasher AC received the Best of Show award at the Flash Memory Summit for most innovative flash memory technology. The performance and financial efficiencies delivered by Flasher AC enable customers to both consolidate workloads and reduce costs below that of hybrid disk arrays. The full FlashArray portfolio enables customers to address a wide range of price performance levels for both block and file workloads, all delivered by our single purity code base. The services available under our unified subscription on-prem and in the cloud are powered by the same Purity software, providing customers flexibility and consistency in how and where they want to place their applications and consume their data services. As we scale our company from a single product just four years ago to a broad-based provider of data storage capabilities, we continue to scale our management team as well. Earlier this month, we announced Dominic Delfino as our new Chief Revenue Officer reporting directly to me. Dominic brings fresh perspective and incredible expertise selling subscription and consumption-based business models with software innovation at their core. He has a deep understanding for our customers' digital transformation strategies. and is well-versed in introducing new solutions into the market, working closely with customers to deliver solutions that improve their business outcomes. I am excited to welcome him as we position Pure for its next stage of growth. Navigating the ebb and flow of this COVID crisis has certainly been an exercise in flexibility and resilience for all organizations and actually all individuals worldwide. As we have stated in prior earnings calls, after a rush to solve for new, urgent, and immediate needs in Q1, companies reset in Q2 to replan their digital strategies given the new environment. This past Q3, we saw customers begin to reengage with clearer plans to drive digital transformation. As part of these new initiatives, customers have largely done away with business as usual, and are looking to simplify their operations, yet provide their developers with efficient and self-service infrastructure. Pure's offerings provide the efficiency, reliability, and automation these customers are craving. And with environmental impact concerns rising in importance, Pure makes it easy for organizations to improve their sustainability initiatives with the savings in power, cooling, and electronic waste we deliver across our portfolio. Pure has made fantastic progress over the last several years to position us well for the future. We have dramatically expanded our product portfolio. We have enabled our capabilities to be run and consumed as a service. We've created a true hybrid cloud environment for enterprise workloads. And now we deliver storage solutions for cloud-native application development and deployment. Even with the uncertainties which remain in the economy from the pandemic, we are confident in our vision, our strategy, and the ability of our team to grow and scale. With that, I'll turn it over to you, Kevin.

Thank you, Charlie, and good afternoon. We are pleased with our Q3 financial performance and execution as we continue to navigate headwinds caused by COVID-19. Our Q3 results demonstrate the value our product and subscription solutions provide to our customers. Strong sales and recurring revenue growth continues for both our evergreen and unified peer-as-a-service subscription offerings. Q3 total revenue was $410.6 million, down 4.2% year-over-year, slightly exceeding our expectations at the beginning of the quarter. Product revenue was $274.5 million, down 15.1% year-over-year, and subscription services revenue totaled $136.1 million, growing 29.5% year-over-year. Subscription services revenue during Q3 represents approximately 33% of total revenue. up from approximately 25% of total revenue during Q3 of the prior year. Subscription services revenue includes Evergreen subscriptions and our unified Pure-as-a-Service subscription, which includes Cloud Block Store. We were pleased with the strong sales growth and demand for our subscription services, FlashBlade, and FlashArray C offerings during the quarter. Our investments in innovation continue to drive results as both our FlashBlade platform and our second-generation Flasher AC offerings achieve their highest level of sales during the quarter. Customers, including large enterprise customers, continue to invest in our FlashBlade platform for their high-performance file and object needs, including data protection. Our remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which includes our committed and non-cancellable future revenue, grew approximately 25% year-over-year, slightly exceeding $1 billion at the end of the quarter. Total deferred revenue, which is included in RPO, was $763 million, growing 19% year-over-year. Bookings or sales during Q3, excluding cancelable orders, was generally flat, declining less than 1% year over year. Total revenue in the United States during Q3 was $302.1 million, declining 4% year over year. And total international revenue was $108.5 million, declining approximately 3% year over year. Across our full solution portfolio, we continue to acquire new customers despite the challenging environment created by COVID-19. We acquired over 316 new customers this quarter compared to 379 customers during Q3 of the prior year. Non-GAAP gross margins for product and subscription services during the quarter was 69.1% compared to 71.7% during the same quarter in the prior year. Non-GAAP product gross margin declined approximately three points year-over-year and one-half of a point sequentially. Non-GAAP product gross margins in the prior year benefited from both cost reductions caused by the unprecedented price reductions of NAND, as well as mixed shift, where we sold larger flash array systems. Non-GAAP subscription services gross margin increased approximately one-half of a point year-over-year and declined one point sequentially. Non-GAAP operating profit during the quarter was approximately $3.4 million compared to $29.1 million during Q3 of the prior year. Operating expenses during the quarter have remained relatively flat year-over-year as we continue to invest in innovation and scale. Non-GAAP net income during Q3 was $1.8 million and non-GAAP net income per share was one penny. Non-GAAP net income in Q3 of the prior year was $34.2 million and non-GAAP net income per share was 13 cents. Weighted average shares used for the non-GAAP net earnings per share calculation was 284.8 million shares in Q3. and 272.2 million shares in the prior year. We are pleased to have completed the close of our acquisition of Portworx during the quarter. Our purchase of Portworx was funded through a combination of our revolving line of credit and cash. Total cash and investments at the end of Q3 is approximately $1.2 billion. During Q3, we returned $21.4 million to shareholders through share repurchases of 1.36 million shares. Approximately 23.6 million of our share repurchase authorization remains. Total headcount at the end of the quarter was approximately 3,860 employees. Now moving to our Q4 outlook. We remain confident in our strategy and execution as we navigate the impacts caused by COVID-19. Visibility of business conditions has improved, but uncertainty of the near-term impacts the global resurgence of COVID may have on our business continues to exist. While we navigate the impacts of COVID, we will continue to share internal expectations of our business performance, but not provide formal guidance. We are pleased to see strong sequential broad-based growth of our total product pipeline opportunity. However, we have not achieved the same levels as Q4 of the prior year. Our current internal view is that total revenues for the full fiscal year will be $1.66 billion, representing approximately 1% of growth. And total revenues for Q4 will be approximately $480 million, a decline of 2% year over year. We expect operating expenses during Q4 to increase slightly year-over-year, including a full quarter of investment for Portworx. With our current view of revenue, we believe operating profit for the full year will be approximately $35 million and approximately $26 million in Q4. Overall, we are pleased with our Q3 financial performance and execution and resilience of our employees, partners, and customers. The performance, simplicity, and flexibility of our solutions are creating valuable outcomes for our customers, which is further accentuated during the COVID-19 environment. Our rich portfolio of solutions, including the addition of Portworx, positions us for strong revenue growth, including growth of our recurring revenues. With that, we will now open the call for questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your touch-tone telephone. In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. Once your questions have been answered, please jump back in the question and answer queue. We'll pause just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And your first question comes from the line of Jason Lear of William Blair.

Yes. Hi. I wanted to know from you guys if you have any sense of pent-up demand going into 2021 and then any update on NAN pricing and how that might be impacting the street pricing.

Yeah, thank you, Jason. Good to hear your voice. You know, we're very pleased with what we saw in terms of pickup momentum in Q3. The improvement in visibility and the fact that our customers' plans seem to solidify during the quarter, you know, all the way through the end of the quarter is a very good reason for optimism as we go forward. I don't know that I call it pent-up demand as much as I would call it their plans for digital transformation, if anything, are accelerated. And that's good news for the collection and storage of data, as well as managing that data and being able to take more out of it to improve their business. And I think that is going to be that is going to continue even after the COVID is is long forgotten. And so and with all of the optimism around vaccines, I think we believe that come spring or early summer, you know, we'll start to see, you know, new buy-in patterns and new acceleration emerge. You know, whether that's pent up demand or whether that's based on accelerated digital transformation trends, I'll leave that up to you.

Your next question comes from Alex Kurtz of KeyBank Capital Market.

Yeah, thanks. Can you guys hear me okay? Absolutely, Alex. Great. I hope everyone's safe and healthy, and we'll have a good Thanksgiving week here. Indeed. So, Charlie, you brought in a new head of sales, obviously from a very strong background in software and subscription. And it's clear that, you know, with peers of service doing well, um, there's a, there's a move towards a bigger focus on this type of, you know, selling motion and licensing to your customers. So I guess if you could just frame up how you would talk to your sales organization and to customers, big customers next fiscal year, like what's the message from pure about how you want to be selling the product. how you wanted to be licensed and ultimately for Kevin, like what does this mean for revenue growth? Because obviously deferred would start to pick up. So some big top level questions, you know, just do the best you can on those.

You bet. And, well, actually, I'm fully practiced because I addressed my entire sales force on this just a couple of weeks ago at our Global Leadership Summit. So the world is changing, and the world is changing from – if you ask why are they going to SaaS, why are they going to the cloud, it's not because it's in the cloud. It's because – They're choosing services and vendors that provide them with outcomes, better outcomes, rather than just the means for a customer to develop the outcome for themselves. You know, SaaS, if you will, if you go to a SaaS service, it actually provides a direct interface to their internal customers with a solution rather than just providing, for example, software solutions. for the customer to implement themselves. And so as we go forward, we are increasingly tailoring our solutions to provide those outcomes for customers. What our customers want is data management, not a device for them to be able to create data management out of. And you see that in our Pure as a Service offering that we announced today, which is our Pure Services catalog, where a customer now can go online, find all sorts of tools to measure and figure out what type of service categories and tiers they need for their workloads, and then completely subscribe to it online. And whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, Pure takes the responsibility for delivering that to the customer, you know, as a set of service-level guarantees. Right. So increasingly, you know, our approach is to provide customers what they need both on-prem and in the cloud, but to do so through a service offering. Now, that does generally mean migrating to more of a subscription style of sales, although the customers can get this even if they go with a CapEx purchase. But we've been signaling for quite a while that our expectations that subscriptions would be picking up. You know, as a percentage of our sales, that has largely come out to be true, as you can tell from our announcements this quarter about the improvement in overall subscription sales. And we expect that to continue to be true. But, you know, we will manage that. forecasting that we're providing to the street takes that into account. And so we feel comfortable with that. And of course, we think this is a better solution for our customers. And so increasingly, our sales team wants to go where the customers are going, and they feel good about the changes we're making.

I'll just add a little bit to that, Charlie. Look, a third of our revenue is really coming from subscription services to begin with. So we've got a great start to this transition. And given that our evergreen subscription model is running at scale, the idea that we're going to have ramp of our peer-as-a-service unified subscription will have less of an impact, in my mind, on total revenue, though there will be some impact. The other benefit that we'll see is obviously Portworx being part of our subscription revenue and that will be incremental to our growth curve as it relates to our subscription services. Thank you.

The next question comes from Erin Rankers of Wells Fargo.

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I want to kind of build on that last comment around subscription. I think one of the metrics that's always a little bit interesting is just the RPO balance expansion and that delta relative to deferred revenue. You know, I think it was up about 47.5% year over year. Can you just remind us how much of that is of the true subscription business? And was there any Portworx contribution in that number this quarter?

Great question, and this is Kevin. How are you doing, Aaron? You know, in terms of the differential, when you look at it sequentially and the growth we're seeing sequentially between deferred revenue and RPO, that is really our peer-to-service offering that's contributing to that build. And then Portworx would not have a significant contribution, though there would be some contribution to RPO for Portworx.

And just as a quick follow-up, maybe you've got one of your competitors also reporting tonight. I'm just curious, you know, PowerScore has been in the market for a quarter or better now. Just kind of update us on what you're seeing in the competitive landscape as you say the digital transformation is poised to kind of accelerate.

Yeah, I'm going to underwhelm you here, Aaron. We're just not seeing PowerStore. I mean, the little we're seeing of it is not being terribly successful. So, if anything, when it's introduced to a customer, it gives us an opportunity to go in because it's always a disruptive upgrade to the customer, regardless of which of the products that they're attempting to sell or upgrade against. So it's just not been a big factor. Our win rates generally with Dell have been very consistent. They're consistent quarter by quarter. I'd say not terribly different this quarter, if anything, a little bit better. So, you know, but PowerStore has been largely absent. I will say that most of the time, even if they go in with PowerStore, they quickly change their bid to PowerMax, and that's the more typical competition for us.

The next question comes from one of Penjalambora of JP Morgan.

Thank you. Hey, Charlie and Kevin. First question. Just on the pipeline, I think you said the pipeline is up but is not as much as last year. But help us understand the composition of the pipeline that you're seeing. Last quarter, I think you kind of indicated that the maturity curve is towards the early stage. Has that changed at all as we head into Q4?

Yeah, great, great question. And absolutely, when we're looking at the pipeline composition, you are right in terms of the year-over-year compare. What we are pleased with is the strength we're seeing sequentially in our build from Q3 to Q4, which gives us some confidence in terms of our internal view of our Q4 outlook. And then when we actually peel that back a little bit, we are confident to see some evolution in terms of the aging of those pipeline opportunities. As you mentioned, when we were going into Q3, we saw that we were getting some nice build, but those were earlier stage opportunities. And as we're looking at Q4, we see a much better balance between early stage opportunities as well as advanced stage. So nice evolution in terms of what we're seeing sequentially between our Q3 and Q4 pipeline.

Understood. Thank you for that. And Charlie, one for you. Talking to some of your partners, we have kind of gathered that there has been a few mid-eight-figure and even larger PAS contracts. Help us understand what's driving that. Is that transitory as companies try to preserve cash outlay right now in this environment, or do you think it's kind of a fundamental change in hardware buying behavior?

Well, I think it's the beginning of a fundamental change. And, again, I won't say it's hardware buying behavior. We're delivering this as a service. So I really want to call attention to the fact that, you know, and especially with PaaS 2.0, but actually also when we first introduced PaaS, it was a lot more than just a financial construct for customers to acquire hardware. We're delivering it as a service. They have no commitment to long-term holding hardware. of the hardware and it's a unified subscription with the same set of services in fact the same software in the cloud and increasingly every aspect of their use usage if you will of the service will be service oriented that is to say that you know it'll be fully managed it'll scale up and scale down without uh without disruption and without the customer getting involved in that at all we take full responsibility for it so i just want to identify that it's not about acquiring hardware it really is about subscribing to a service that just happens

to be on their premise as well as in the cloud and i do think that over time yeah we'll see more and more of this absolutely yeah just to jump in for a second i think charlie's really hitting on one of the key differentiators of paths from our competition where we're really pursuing this like a product opportunity you know if you look at our competitors their offerings tend to come from their financial services groups and they're just kind of dressed up leases in a different name We have a business unit that has engineers, has a GM who's running this program, and we're thinking about how we really change the entire customer experience around an as-a-service experience. And so hopefully what you've seen with the launch of the service catalog today is a good example where we're really rethinking what's the entire way a customer thinks about purchasing a service, looks at their existing workloads, and uses AI-driven modeling tools to understand the right service, and then just enjoys the same level of transparency that people have today in the public cloud around open service pricing, performance SLAs, and then driving the process for getting procurement going. So really it's the beginning of a whole new interaction with customers at Pure.

And your next question comes from the one from of Northland Capital.

Yeah, thanks. And that's one of the strong results and strong guidance as well, in my opinion. I want to go back to the discussion on RPO, especially the unbilled RPO portion. which it was up 16 million cube per cube, which is more than the 5 million a year ago period. So, clearly on a year-over-year basis, as Erin had alluded to, a nice acceleration. But it's still a step down from the 20-plus million in the past two quarters. So, is that a deceleration? the performance in the past two quarters, or is there some seasonality that you're seeing with the unified peer as a service offerings?

You know, Nehal, really, I think this may be more of the fact that we did a large peer as a service deal this quarter. And we're able to bill for the entire amount up front. So that entire portion is actually in deferred revenue. So when we look at our pure as a service trends quarter over quarter, actually they're very strong and we're quite pleased with those trends. What you're looking at between the unbilled portion versus deferred revenue, we do have some mix in there where we've got some PAS deals that are being reflected in deferred revenue because we were fortunate to bill for those up front.

I see. Okay, great. Fantastic. Congratulations. Thanks, Daniel.

Your next question comes from Carl Ackerman of .

Yes, good afternoon. Charlie, starting with you first, if I may, your internal outlook is healthy considering the headwinds across commercial. Are you seeing any rebound internationally, particularly in Europe, that is giving you greater confidence for the January quarter? Or are you actually seeing a sustained improvement in on-prem? in the U.S.? And I have a follow-up. Thanks.

Yep. So interesting, Carl. So I think international really shows the effect of COVID on business in general. So as you know, in Q2, we saw a real improvement in international overall as they came out of the crisis earlier than did the U.S., and we saw an uptick. In Q3, in contrast, We saw Europe in particular, but Asia, but international in general, start to go back into lockdown, you know, early, late September, early October. And already we started right around the same time with a little bit of latency. We saw the effect on our business. So COVID really does have an effect on the local economies, whichever country it happens to hit. And it's why we're a little bit cautious for Q4. But we do believe at the same time that businesses now have become, let's say, more accustomed to operating in the COVID environment. And therefore, they're more robust in terms of pursuing their IT and digital transformation plans. So we don't expect the kind of turndown that we saw in Q2. You know, even with our cautious optimism, we feel that, you know, we feel confident in how we're looking at Q4 right now. But, you know, clearly, I think once, you know, the same... The same effect that we saw in Europe when they came out of the crisis in the spring gives us confidence for this spring, especially, let's say, around the spring to summer of this year. And then with vaccines, we think that'll be a longer-term phenomenon. So we're very much looking forward to the future, but we do believe the next few months are reasons to be a bit more cautious.

Yep. Understood. I appreciate that. For Kevin... It's quite apparent that your recent acquisition and expansion of as-a-service offerings today underscore your desire to increasingly shift your portfolio toward a recurring revenue model. How does that impact OpEx growth in 2021 or the next couple of quarters? When we think about that, will 2021 be characterized by an investment year in sales and marketing? You know, I guess we've modified our, you know, sales approach. But, you know, how do we think about the ability to, you know, get leverage on the OPEC side? Because it's certainly, I think, a great initiative. But if we could think about that from an OPEC side, that would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Carl. You know, when I think about our operating margin leverage potential, even with the transition to increasing peers of service and our subscription offerings, both are very achievable. and we're planning on that as we look out to next year. I think we're making some great efforts across the board to leverage our investments, especially this year, as we kind of invested ahead of the growth curve, if you will, going into next year. So I'm looking to actually improve operating margin and profitability, even when considering growth in our subscription offerings.

Your next question comes from of SIG.

Yes, thanks for taking my question. I have two follow-ups. I want to go to your presentation slides, specifically slide number five and six. Obviously, the number of new customer addition has declined on a year-over-year basis. But what is interesting, the revenue mix is shifting and i just want to get some clarification is that just driven by the change in in the customer type more driven by app developers and his dad was driving a more better projects especially impacting the subscription services is that the right way of thinking about on a year-over-year basis

Well, I'll take that first, Charlie, and then feel free to add on. I mean, when we think about our new customers, our new customers will either purchase our peer-as-a-service offering, which would contribute to our subscription services, or they'll purchase our integrated appliance that comes with our Evergreen subscription. And so that will play into it as well. But we're also getting a significant amount of momentum with customers who are continuing to invest in their evergreen subscriptions from a renewal standpoint. And that momentum is really coming from our existing customers. And so that hopefully would answer that question specific to the mix occurring.

Well, let me also answer in terms of the mix of new customers overall. And as you point out, a decline in year-over-year. First of all, I have to say that given the COVID environment, we're pretty pleased with the number of new customers we've been able to gain because in the COVID environment, clearly incumbents tend to have a bit of an advantage as well. as customers are more cautious about considering changes to their existing environment. That being said, if you were to break down the new customers or the net new logos, what you'd find out is good growth as a percentage in enterprise and, of course, lower net new logos in commercial. And simply, again, because commercial is under pressure worldwide, much more so than enterprises, you know, in terms of numbers from the corona environment. So, again, our expectation is that when the corona pandemic abates, hopefully by spring, you know, we should see a good pickup in this.

Yeah. Thanks, Charlie. But the momentum when we think about our recurring revenues will be driven probably more from our existing customer base as well. Much more for the...

existing customer base.

Gotcha. And one quick follow-up, more of a housekeeping item. When I'm looking at the product revenue, as we look into next fiscal year and increased availability of the QLC NAND, is that going to have a positive impact on product margin, or would you prefer passing that along to customer to increase market share?

Yeah, let me take a try at that. I think it's a little bit early for us to be able to opine with great confidence on that. But I suppose my belief is that we're utilizing QLC first and primarily to penetrate into new markets in the disk space. And therefore, disk economics are the ones that we're competing with in that environment. And as such, I would expect margins to be consistent with our overall company margins rather than to be used strictly as an enhancement. I think over the long term, it may improve overall product margin. But in the short term, I expect that we'll be utilizing it to penetrate into that market.

And I'd also say that your question somewhat implied that our QLC product was being limited by availability of NAND, and that's not the case. We're in a second generation of that product being GA now. We've now shipped the largest QLC flash module in the industry, our 48-terabyte module. And so we're in a really great place from a supply point of view to supply that product, and we believe it's really differentiated in the market.

Our next question comes from Simon Leopold of Raymond James.

Simon Leopold Thanks for taking the question. First thing, I wanted to ask a little bit more about this announcement you've made today about publishing the service catalog. I guess I'm trying to think about the potential consequences. One scenario might suggest this could trigger price wars responses from your competitors. On the other hand, I could imagine maybe this leads to less discounting by you, given that you're putting prices out in print for your customers. Just wondering how you think about the various scenarios or outcomes from this action you've taken.

I'll take a first stab at that. Look, I guess the first thing here is we're doing this because it's something customers demand, and increasingly customers want to self-qualify, research solutions on their own, do so and understand relative pricing, and then contact a sales rep or a channel partner when they're much further along in the buying process. And so this is, from a pure point of view, it's all about really upping our digital go-to-market chops and being able to sell how customers want to buy much more in this cloud model. In the case of the service catalog, what we publish in there are MSRP prices, and so a customer can get a discount, obviously, by coming to Pure and working through our channel programs, and that's not published, so there's still some room for negotiation in there. But what the service catalog does do is it allows them to very openly see what the different services are, see what the performance levels are, so they can make a good choice around, okay, is it worth a 2x increase in spend to get a certain amount of increase in performance? And indeed, if you look at the new service tiers that we've introduced, we now offer a 10x range in pricing for a 20x range in performance. And so there's quite a range of services, and customers have the right service level for every workload in their environment.

That's very helpful. And just maybe as a follow-up, I think earlier in the Q&A, you talked about customers adjusting to this new normal. So even as we aren't fully backed and don't have a vaccine widely available yet, your customers are adjusting to how they do business. With that in mind, Do you think that your next quarter, basically as we turn into next year, you might defy normal seasonality, that we might have a more muted sequential decline as your customers are sort of catching up to business that they didn't do during the pandemic's worst period? Thank you.

Well, it's an interesting question. You know, look, we're not you know, we're not epidemiologists here. But I think it's fair to say that our expectation would be that that, you know, COVID will be with us through the early spring and then hopefully start to abate at that point in time. And I would expect to see then a return to growth economically across the world. That's what we're planning on right around that time. And then get back to – so that might suggest greater seasonality next year, simply because the beginning of the year might be a little bit more muted than the end of the year. But from that point going forward, I would expect to start to get back to our normal seasonality.

What I was pleased to see is a couple of things. I was pleased to see overperformance in Q3, followed by what we're seeing currently is sequential strength going from Q3 to Q4. And I think those are positive attributes. I think the COVID resurgence, back to your point, Simon, in terms of folks knowing how to sell in this new environment, customers being more comfortable purchasing, I think will help mitigate this resurgence we're seeing globally. And then we just need to see how Q4 performance evolves throughout the quarter. But look, we're really confident in our growth drivers, especially with what we saw in Q3 in terms of our subscription services, FlashBlade performance and FlashArray C. So it's coming together for us. COVID certainly creates uncertainty. And to Charlie's point, we do expect that to continue in Q1. But we're going in the right direction.

And your next question comes from Tim Long of Barclays.

Thank you. Yeah, just two if I could as well. Just wanted to follow up on FlashArray C. Just curious what you've kind of learned from Gen 1 to Gen 2 of that product. Maybe just win rates, deal sizes, new applications. What are you seeing as that product And then second, Charlie, if you could just give us, it sounded like enterprise was pretty strong. Could you just give us a little color around small, medium businesses and what you think it's going to take to see a better rebound from that customer group? Thank you.

Yeah. Well, let me give it a shot. You know, in terms of the – let me start with the second one first, which is that commercial, as we – I think as other companies have identified as well, the mid-market and small-medium have as a group – been harder hit by the COVID crisis than large enterprise, and perhaps because they were not quite as ready to operate entirely online as were many of the large enterprises that had already invested in it. So I think it's just a generally stronger economy overall will help that. As you can see, it's not completely disappeared. The new logos indicates by us, you know, indicates that there is still a healthy commercial market, but it's far muted from, you know, from pre-COVID days overall. I'm sorry, remind me of the first part of the question. Oh, Flasher AC. I'll pass it to Kix in a second. But I think the main thing is that with Flasher AC, with its primary target being the secondary tier market and disk economics, The additional pricing flexibility that it gave us to go after the disk market when we were able to introduce true QLC has made a big difference and allowed the very fast early momentum, allowed that to continue.

Yeah, and I guess telling you that is that it just hasn't been the type of product that's been very hard to sell in terms of going and finding very focused use cases. It turns out customers run disk-based arrays for a wide range of use cases. And so, really, the easiest way to go to market with it is just to go to a customer who's already bought in and understood the benefits of flash at the high end of their application space and ask them where they still run a disk array and, you know, work with them to say, look, if we can actually, you know, sell you an all-flash array that brings the simplicity and performance of flash and is actually 30% less expensive than a disk array, why do we need disk still?

Your next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi of Lake Street.

Yeah, I wanted to pick apart the pipeline a little bit by vertical I would assume the strength that you've seen, at least sequentially, has been from what have been more resilient verticals, financial services, healthcare, government. Any green shoots in some of the other more COVID-exposed verticals, you know, your transportation, hospitality, entertainment, that sort of thing?

You know, Eric, I would not call out any of the more affected verticals right now from our point of view showing green shoots. I would say that we were less exposed to those industries to begin with. But, no, I can't say that we've seen significant changes in how they're faring, at least from buying signals to us, over the last couple of quarters.

Yeah, I think what I would add on that is just, you know, the enterprise strength was across many of our verticals, and that was broad-based and it was global. Right. So that was kind of a new green shoot for us in terms of what we were looking at. We've had resilience across the board on enterprise, but the broad-based growth we saw on enterprise was actually pleasing for us.

Okay, and that was echoed in the pipeline as well?

Correct.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from of Morgan Stanley.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Kevin, what's the revenue contribution from Portworx that's embedded in your fourth quarter internal model? And then Charlie, can you provide a bit more color on Paul's decision to step down as COO? And are there any other changes or hires that you're planning to make on the back of his departure? Thanks.

I'll hit the poor works first, Katie. Super excited with this strategic acquisition. Revenue is actually pretty small in terms of contribution as we look out into Q4. We'll probably see that start to build in RPO and deferred revenue before that starts making its way in any significant or meaningful way to revenue.

Thank you, Katie. I want to thank Paul for his contributions to the company over the past year or so that he's been here. And he's really brought a lot of structure to our operations at the company and contributed a lot and also was part of recruiting. Dominic to the company. In conversations with Paul, as we were recruiting Dominic, Paul started to feel, and I had to agree, that Dominic was going to bring a lot of capabilities into the chief revenue officer role that Paul had been handling. Paul felt that, look, given Dominic coming on board and given the accession of Jason Rose as chief marketing officer and so forth, that we really had now a strong operating cadence. And that, you know, Paul's role as chief operating officer was not really as required at the company and that, you know, he had a number of opportunities that he could go pursue. And so maybe it was better to make that change. And so we agreed with that. Paul's going to continue with us through the end of the quarter to ensure a smooth acquisition with Dominic. and then move on. And I do want to thank Paul for what he's contributed. And while I have this moment, I want to thank KD as well for his leadership of the Salesforce over the last three years on a global basis. KD has gotten us, over his period of time leading the Salesforce, we've doubled almost every aspect of our company, the revenue, the size of the company, the size of the Salesforce, etc., And he's done a great job. You know, bringing Dom on board really signals the fact that we're changing as a company, having now moved from a single product to a two product to now a full portfolio both in the cloud and on-prem and increasingly moving to subscription. And Dominic brings the right type of background for this next step in our journey. And so we're very pleased with that overall.

Thank you for that, Culler.

And this concludes the question and answer session at this time. I'd like to turn the call over to Charlie and Jenny Carla for closing remarks.

Thank you. In closing, I'd like to thank all of our employees, our customers, our partners, and for all of you on the call for your hard work and dedication to our mission. It's been a wild year, and it's not over yet. I'm looking forward to working with all of you to build a much better 2021. Thank you for joining us today, and stay safe, and please have a very happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I know we all need the rest. Please take time with family, and I look forward to engaging with you in the future. Take care.