Pure Storage, Inc.

Mr. Sanjot Khurana. Mr. Khurana, please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to the Pure Storage fourth quarter fiscal 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Sanjot Khurana, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer at Pure Storage. Joining me today are our CEO, Charlie Giancarlo, our CFO, Kevin Chrysler, and our CTO, Rob Lee. Before we begin, I would like to remind you management will make forward-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 our 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 relating to our business is contained in our filings with the SEC, and we refer you to these public filings. during this call we will discuss non-gap measures in talking about the company's performance and reconciliations the most directly compatible gap measures are provided in our earnings press release and slides additionally when we refer to sales in our prepared remarks we mean total bookings excluding cancelable orders 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.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our call. I hope you are healthy and faring well given the many challenges of the current environment. I'm very pleased to report that Pure delivered a fantastic Q4, capping off a great fiscal year. our quarterly revenue grew 41% over last year's strong Q4. This past quarter, we again enjoyed strong growth, especially in the Americas, our largest theater. And we grew across enterprise, commercial, and public sectors. I'm especially pleased with our growth in both net new logos and subscription annual recurring revenue, indicating great progress against our long-term strategy. Full-year revenue growth was 29%. and the annual growth of our subscription revenue was 37%. Revenue growth and operational leverage drove strong profit and cash flow growth in fiscal 22. As we stated in our Financial Analyst Day presentation in September, our total addressable market of more than $60 billion across both storage and storage as a service continues to provide expansion opportunities for Pure. We believe that our strong performance is clear evidence of Pure's increasing strength. Three things are necessary for sustainable growth, which we have steadily developed within Pure. First, sustainable growth requires highly differentiated technology with sustainable competitive advantage. First, TUR's focus on developing purity software and our direct flash technology to maximize the many advantages of solid-state storage is unique in our industry and has taken many years to develop. Second, sustainable growth requires a broad portfolio that addresses a full range of customer needs, a portfolio that we have steadily developed over the last several years. Sustainable growth requires the ability to support customers in all major market segments, commercial, enterprise, public sector, and cloud. Pure now has all three of these elements to drive our growth for many years to come. Pure's highly differentiated technology enjoys a strong sustainable competitive advantage. Many of Pure's advantages stem from core software architecture decisions that are practically impossible to retrofit into pre-existing software. Among our advantages are the simplicity in the design and use of our products, the ability to realize the best price performance from raw flash, and the ability to perform non-disruptive upgrades for both hardware and software, which deliver a cloud-like experience. While some competitors make claims of non-disruptive upgrades in their marketing, they consistently fail to deliver. Furthermore, Pure's proprietary hardware provides higher performance, reliability, and longer lifetime while requiring less space, power, and cooling than competitors' commodity-based systems. Competitors would need entirely new designs and years of new software development to replicate Pure's advantages. Pure's growing portfolio of industry-leading storage and data management products has propelled the growth of our enterprise business to greater heights. Customers appreciate the simplicity of our portfolio, which supports the majority of their traditional workloads with just two hardware architectures sharing a common software architecture, and their cloud-native workloads with Portworx all integrated through Pure One and all available as a service. They appreciate our ability to provide common interfaces and ATIs between on-prem and the cloud. They have embraced our ability to support their development of cloud-native applications with Portworx. They're excited by our vision to provide automated data management with PureFusion and Portworx Data Services. and they are overjoyed as we consistently deliver non-disruptive upgrades year after year and soon decade after decade with our evergreen design a model that has been claimed competitively but never replicated the effect of our portfolio is evident not only in our continuing penetration into large enterprise but also in our recently announced collaboration with meta Meta chose Pure when it needed a storage partner to deliver powerful and scalable storage capabilities for their AI research supercluster. With FlashArray and FlashBlade, their AI supercomputer has unparalleled performance and benefits from a broad range of our technology's advantages, underpinned by Pure's foundation of simplicity, reliability, and sustainability. We announced a record number of new products and services this past fiscal year, including purity upgrades for ransomware and disaster recovery, additions to our FlashArray C series, FlashDeck as a service, PureFusion, Portworx data services, and major enhancements to our PureOne digital experience. This past December, we announced FlashArray XL, which delivers 5.5 petabytes of capacity in up to 80% less space and power than competitive all-Flash solutions, and it's off to a great start. Our product pipeline for FY23 is no less ambitious, and I am incredibly excited about the year ahead. Our vision and technology to deliver a cloud operating model to our customers' multi-cloud data environment spanning their private cloud and public cloud providers, continues to resonate and grow. This vision is based on the concepts of first, providing common frameworks and APIs to both on-prem and hyperscaler environments. Second, enabling fully automated data management to IT organizations through policy. And third, the abstraction of these IT-created data classes for developers' access through API. We are seeing strong interest in this transformational model built on Pure Fusion, Portworx, and delivered by Pure One. We have enjoyed great success with our strategy of delivering a simple set of evergreen data platforms that enables customers to focus more on leveraging their data than on managing their storage environment. Customers have rewarded us with market share gains and recognized us with the highest third-party certified net promoter score in almost all industries of 85.2 for the calendar year 2021. From our primary focus on the commercial market just five years ago, we have expanded our skills and infrastructure to support all major markets. Today, our enterprise business model is fully capable of supporting the largest global organizations, both public and private, with a portfolio of products, subscription services, support, and professional services. We do this with the help of a growing set of capable partners. We're now adding an ability to serve large hyperscalers and MSPs. We are proud to partner with the world's largest global system integrators and managed service providers to make Pure a preferred part of their solutions. We recently announced a global partnership with Kindrel, combining the power of Pure's offerings and Kindrel's expertise to deliver industry-leading solutions to customers' most complex challenges. Our joint customers are already benefiting from this partnership. One of the world's leading shipping and logistics companies chose Pure as a service to build a secure data infrastructure for its new logistics offering for its clients. Being part of a major digital transformation to improve shipping and logistics worldwide has special poignancy as we face supply chain challenges that continue to affect all companies. I feel confident that we have one of the most robust supply chains in the business. Pure has invested in strong relationships with our supply partners and flexible multi-source global operations over many years, and we benefit from the architectural advantages of our integrated hardware designs. While there have been numerous supply chain challenges over the last year, and we are certainly not invulnerable to disruption in the future, We have navigated and managed them well and continue to meet our customers' demands. Earlier, I had mentioned that Pure Solutions are able to provide customers higher performance and reliability with significantly less space, power, and cooling than competitive all-Flash products, in many cases utilizing up to 80% less power and space. Lower energy use by our products will significantly reduce the environmental footprint of our customers' data centers. Third-party reviewed competitive comparisons will be one part of our full Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG, report, which we will publish later this month.

In our operations and downstream use of our products.

as well as our current state and future plans on talent recruitment and retention, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. And finally, our governance and business practices. I would like to comment on three additional topics of broad current interest. First, the so-called Great Resignation, then inflation, and then our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As is widely reported, employee attrition is elevated across all industries, and especially in technology. However, the flip side of this coin is that there has never been a time in my memory when so much great talent was available all at one time, and we saw strong traction in hiring during Q4. Our continuing success, large market opportunity, and high employee satisfaction scores have made Pure a talent magnet. Inflation is also real, and there is no countervailing benefit. I believe this will be with us for some time, and we have assessed impacts to employee compensation and other operating expenses which we have considered in our guidance. We are carefully monitoring the situation in Ukraine, and I am dismayed by the wanton disregard for both national sovereignty and human life currently on display. Our hearts go out to the people of Ukraine and all those affected by the conflict. We have ceased all shipments and support services in Russia and Belarus, which represents a small amount of business for the foreseeable future. We are providing support as appropriate to our employees and their families. In closing, I would like to thank our customers, partners, and especially our employees for their trust and support of Pure this past year. Through all of the challenges over the last several years, Pure has thrived. We have innovated. We've grown. We've battled competitors large and small, and we've taken market share. Most importantly, we have delighted ever more customers by delivering solutions beyond their expectations. This simple formula will continue to fuel our growth for years to come.

Over to you, Kevin. Thank you, Charlie, and good afternoon. We saw outstanding execution and performance across our entire company, achieving record revenue, operating income, and cash flows. Demand continued to be very strong across our portfolio of solutions, services, and geographies, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Although supply chain challenges continue to persist, we executed for our customers, delivering our solutions and minimizing delays. Growth of our subscription business is robust as we continue to create value-based outcomes for our customers. Subscription annual recurring revenue, or ARR, grew 31% to nearly $850 million. Also, our subscription net dollar retention, or NDR, at the end of the year exceeded 120%, compared to our long-term target of 115% as a result of expansion growth from existing customers. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which includes our committed and non-cancelable future revenue, was over $1.4 billion, growing at 29%. We acquired 470 new customers, reflecting increasing strength. New customer acquisitions were balanced across geographies, market segments, and our solutions portfolio. Our total customer count now exceeds 10,000 customers, which also includes over 50% of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies. Now turning to financial results for the quarter. Total revenue for the quarter grew 41% to approximately $709 million. Revenue in the United States grew 51%, and international revenue grew 20% year over year. Subscription services revenue grew approximately 42%. For the full fiscal year, total revenue grew 29% to nearly $2.2 billion. Our fiscal year includes 53 weeks, contributing both additional revenue and costs. Excluding the revenue contribution arising from the additional week, total revenue for the quarter grew approximately 37% and 28% for the year. Total non-GAAP gross margins were nearly 69% this quarter. Non-GAAP product gross margins of 67% were slightly impacted by higher supply chain related costs. We were very pleased with how we actively managed our supply chain challenges in partnership with our suppliers. Our integrated software and hardware designs continue to be very valuable as we manage these challenges. As we continue to sell the value of our solutions, we expect product gross margins to be in the high 60s, consistent with our long-range expectations. Non-GAAP subscription services gross margins were solid at 73% this quarter. We achieved record non-GAAP operating profits of nearly $119 million and non-GAAP operating margins of 16.8% this quarter, while also continuing to make investments to drive growth. increased operating costs included higher compensation due to our strong performance increased hiring and an additional week of operating expenses of approximately 17 million non-gap operating profits for the year also achieved a record high of 235 million and 10.8 percent non-gap operating margins as we have highlighted in previous quarters the covet environment was a tailwind to our operating profits contributing approximately two to three points of benefit to our fiscal 2022 operating margin. Slower than planned hiring, significantly reduced travel, and the reduction of physical marketing events were the largest drivers. Now let's turn over to the balance sheet and cash funds of $138 million this quarter. Capital expenditures were approximately $21 million. For the year, we more than doubled our cash flow from operations to more than 400 million and generated more than 300 million of free cash flows. With our strong balance sheet and cash flow generation, we paid off our outstanding credit revolver balance of 250 million after the close of our fourth quarter. We continue to return cash purchases We repurchased approximately 2.4 million shares during the quarter and approximately 8.5 million shares during the fiscal year. Our 200 million share repurchase program has been completed, and we have also announced a new share repurchase program of 250 million. Now turning to guidance, which is based on a 52-week fiscal year. Our performance in fiscal 2022 set new records for revenue, operating profit, and cash flows. Our strong revenue growth this year benefited from a substantial sale of Flasher AC to Meta, includes an extra week in the fiscal year, and reflects an easier compare to fiscal 2021, which was impacted by COVID-related headwinds. We see broad-based demand strength continuing this year for our solutions and subscription offerings, and expect our pure as a service offering to grow at a much faster rate than our overall company growth rate. As we consider these factors, we expect revenue in Fisco 2023 will be approximately $2.6 billion, growing 19% to 20%. Revenue in Q1 will be approximately $520 million, growing 26%. Operating profits substantially expanded this year as a result of strong operating discipline and operating leverage. As we have previously highlighted, operating profits also benefited from slower than anticipated hiring, less travel, and fewer physical marketing events due to the COVID environment. While we do not expect the majority of these COVID-related benefits to recur next year as business operations become more normalized, we anticipate operating margins to expand modestly through continued operating discipline and leverage. Contemplating higher inflation next year. with these considerations operating margins of approximately 11.5 percent and non-gap operating profits of 300 million for the year non-gap operating profit in q1 is expected to be 16 million in closing i am very pleased with our execution and performance Our consistent commitment to innovation and creating best-in-class experiences for our customers are really the driving forces of our successes we have seen. I want to thank our entire peer team and our channel partners for their outstanding execution this year. With that, I will turn it over to the operator so we can get to your questions.

thank you ladies and gentlemen if you have a question please press star 1 on your touchstone 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 for just a moment to compile the q a roster And our first question comes from the line of Amit Daryanani from Evercore. Your line is now open.

Thank you, and congratulations on a great set of numbers here. My question really is, you officially announced Meta as a customer and You know, they had this white paper that sort of outlined their storage needs around the super AI cluster that they have. Can you talk about sort of the breadth of this engagement? And, you know, I think we all know the revenue contribution from back in October. But maybe to talk broadly, you know, what led them to choose pure storage versus building their own? And then what does it mean from a revenue perspective if this cluster gets to one exabyte that they've talked about in their white paper?

Hi, Amit. Charlie Giancarlo here. Thank you for opening up the questioning. So Meta, I think, is a great example of the power of our portfolio because we had started working with Meta, formerly Facebook, actually some years ago using the FlashBlade platform on some of their AI initiatives. But as they looked to scale out that AI initiative, what they really needed behind it was a data lake Something that could hold data at the right performance, although not necessarily to directly feed the GPUs. But that would provide high performance, but frankly at a price that would compete with disk. And in addition, they had other constraints in their environment, space, power, and cooling being an important element. Frankly, not only did they look at their own technology internally, but they looked at outside vendors as well. And at the end of the day, our Flasher AC product, which forms that data lake behind the AI cluster, was the only product that could satisfy all of the requirements on it. But it really shows the power of portfolio that is, I think, driving our growth across enterprise and around the world. And we do believe that it's what's going to allow us to continue to expand our overall footprint. Let me turn it over a little bit to Rob Lee here to perhaps give you a little bit more behind the super cluster and then Kevin on the revenue.

Yeah, Ahmed, just to add on to what Charlie said, again, I just highlight this is a great example of use case benefiting from the entire portfolio. As Charlie mentioned, we started working with Meta, formerly Facebook, over five years ago, first supporting, I would say, their AI research environment, directly supporting data scientists, doing ad hoc kind of AI model training, against the FlashBlade. And as that environment grew and continues to grow, they built around it a larger production AI supercluster environment, which Meta has come out and described. And now in that environment, what they look to Pure to provide with FlashRace C is Really what we would describe as more of a general data storage, bulk data storage capability, something that provides a huge capacity, certainly high performance, and then meeting the balance of needs that Charlie called out in terms of very efficient power cooling and footprint associated with it. And so, you know, I think a couple things of note here. One is, well, A, great validation of, you know, our technology and advantages. But B, I think it's a great sign that, look, you know, the transition from disk to flash is absolutely happening. We see it in the enterprise. We're now starting to see it in the hyperscale environments. You know, and we believe to a degree this is not only happening, but it's inevitable.

And I'll just close a minute with some – share some thoughts in terms of the revenue contributions, but without getting into specifics, obviously. Certainly from a revenue outlook, we've built some revenue in for Meta, and I would say it's in line with our overall company growth rates for next year.

Perfect. That's really helpful. And if I could just follow up quickly on your commodity, I think it's been a big discussion, especially what's happening in nanopricing. I'd love to understand sort of what are you seeing from a nanopricing perspective, and then what are you embedding really in the fiscal year guide when it comes to commodity pricing?

Yeah, we're expecting that the constraints, let's say, in NAMM production over the next couple of quarters is going to put upward pressure on NAMM pricing. We do expect that to flow through and eventually come back down in pricing later in the year. We're not expecting huge swings to be direct, so slight upward pressure in the early part of the year and then downward pressure later in the year. That's our expectation. Of course, events have a way of changing expectations pretty quickly these days, but that's what we're currently going with.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Mita Marshall from Oregon Stanley. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks. I wanted to see, you know, clearly you guys stated you were seeing traction across a lot of different customer types, but just any details, you know, kind of downtick there, just where all of the upside noted that you were saying maybe that all of the COVID savings or COVID tailwinds don't come back. or on the OPEC side, but just what you're expecting in terms of how much of that 200, 300 basis points would come back in the fiscal 2020?

Mita, first of all, welcome to Pure. Thank you, Future. On your question, you know, as mentioned, we really saw, from a product line perspective, broad-based strength, and particular strength in the U.S. I'd have to call out – I have to say both commercial and enterprise were strong. Commercial We've been commenting on these two markets consistently quarter by quarter. Commercial has been slower to come back during this latter COVID period, but we really are starting to see some real strength in commercial building, especially over this last quarter. But our ability to be penetrating deeper and deeper into enterprise, both new customers, but in particular penetrating more deeply in existing customers, has been very strong. and it was really broad-based in the Americas. Good strength, you know, internationally as well, but I'd say, you know, this past quarter, the Americas really, you know, has really shown the power of the IT environment in the U.S. has been very strong.

Yeah, I'd agree with that, Charlie. I think the U.S. just had an outstanding quarter for us. You know, in addition to what Charlie was saying, I think what we're seeing in the U.S.

is really leveraging

our expanded product portfolio and technology and solutions. You know, with FlashBlade, we're really seeing some good traction on that front. So, you know, it's a shout out to our sellers and channel in terms of the performance there. I think your next question was in terms of contribution with the COVID tailwinds. You know, I think it's probably fair to say around two points, Mita, in terms of how we're thinking about that.

Perfect. Thanks, and congrats on the quarter.

Thanks.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Jason Ader from William Blair. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Hey, guys, I guess I thought it was a typo when I saw the number for the quarter, the revenue. I mean, that helped us just understand from Meta and how much came from other sources?

Jason, no confidence. A typo, really? I think it really has to do with, you know, the company starting to hit on all cylinders as we identified. You know, strong portfolio now. The brand, you know, very strong now across the board in terms of major markets.

Now, you know, simple fact that we can cover more of the use cases.

without a doubt, industry-leading products. And I think we're just hitting on more and more cylinders. You know, in terms of – Kevin, do you want to cover the guide?

Well, yeah, and I'll just, you know, tack a little bit more onto that, right? So it's really interesting for us, right, because the linearity we saw was actually really strong all the way throughout the quarter end-to-end, which was really impressive for us. Again, you know, the U.S.

and Canada, frankly, out-delivered for us.

And it was across the board, as Charlie said, enterprise strong, commercial strong, public sector strong. You know, the other thing that was interesting is we did stress test a lot in terms of, hey, were we seeing a lot of, we didn't see anything abnormal to that front. So, yeah, really strong for us.

Was Meta a 10% customer for the year?

No, I believe they were not. They were not.

Okay. Certainly not. And then one quick follow-up on the, and I may have missed this if you talk about this, so I apologize, but constraints on low-level components, not on NAM, but on low-level components in their array of shipments and overall in their guidance. I think they talked about it happening in kind of mid-December. And I'm just curious as to whether you guys were impacted by that.

Absolutely. That's a big challenge across the industry. You know, we've obviously had a lot of manufacturers, and those low-level parts, you know, have been a consistent problem throughout the industry. So, you know, almost every day, you know, there's a new challenge that challenges the supply chain team. So, yeah, no, it's a, you know, just to give you, you know, sort of a broader view of the supply chain.

You know, we had indicated last quarter Q4, and it probably had

along the bottom, I'd say. And you never know another day when there's a new challenge that comes up. I think we've managed it well, but we're still waiting to see signs that we're on the upswing.

It's almost becoming a new normal for us, because obviously this was the same, very similar challenges we were working through last quarter that were very successful in partnership with our suppliers, and it's the value of our integrated hardware and software solutions that we over and over again keep talking about, and it just keeps getting validated as we're working through these challenges that Charlie outlined.

Thank you. Your next question comes From the line of fraud hall from Goldman Sachs, your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks, guys. I want to ask the first question with regards to OpEx. OpEx, their sales and marketing to sales costs about 8%, and you guys are about 30%. And that's fair because you distribute to a bunch of enterprises, and hyperscale is pretty new to you.

But that's the sort of sales and marketing ratio that a company that distributes

you know, more to hyperscale is capable of. And I just wonder, do you think over time if hyperscale mix increases, you know, the marginal op-ex related to that, since these are such a small number of customers, Charlie could, you know, could start to approach that lower number? I'm just wondering how you think about that hyperscale mixing into that sales and marketing cost. And then I've got to follow up.

Right, absolutely. No, that is the right example, right? I mean, if you look at Arista's numbers, they operate on somewhat lower gross margin and a higher operating margin due to lower sales and marketing. And that's the business model for selling into hyperscalers. You know, as... As we go down that path, the model for us will be mixed. That is to say that there will be an enterprise business model that will have a higher gross margin but higher sales and marketing expense, and a cloud business model likely to have lower gross margin but lower sales and marketing expense. Those are the tradeoffs that are made. My view and the subscription will come in at higher gross margin as well. Right. Right.

Right. Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks, Charlotte. That's helpful.

And then my follow-up was the... Oh, far down. I mean, we just... ...from our hyperscalers.

majority of that revenue we saw in Q3.

And we should remember that generally that is the way with large, whether hyperscalers or service providers, it can be quite lumpy for an individual player.

That makes sense. And when you guys think about that revenue, then you talked about the growth of it being kind of in line with the company growth. I didn't know what you meant by that. Are you saying sort of pro-rate the revenue you got in the second half, like multiply it by two and grow that at the company rate? Or are you saying look at the absolute total of revenue in the year? Yeah, keeping it pretty simple, right?

So when you take the outlook for next year and our growth rate, applying that on top of it is a general good framework to start out with. But the question is on top of what? What number?

What we did this year. What we did this year. Okay. Just the absolute number, not prorated or anything. That's exactly right.

Okay.

Great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Yep.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Diana Spangelin-Bora from J.P. Morgan. Your line is now open.

Great. Thank you for taking my question, and congrats on an absolutely great quarter. In the prepared remark, it sounded like Portworx will play a bigger role in the future. First, is that right? And then what are you seeing or hearing from customers with respect to the need for persistent storage in containers and kind of the maturity of container-based environments?

We absolutely expect Portworx and our continuing development of Portworx and Portworx data services to be foundational for us for the future in next generation, what they call cloud native developments based on Kubernetes and containers. It's a very different environment than traditional storage, traditional data environment, and therefore required a new way and a new set of new software to be able to support that. And we have the industry-leading product in Portworx. We're getting very extraordinarily good traction with Portworx across a wide range and growing range of customers. Now, that being said, I would not call containers or Kubernetes mature by any means. That is, the industry and customers are still very early. in their development of container-based applications. But when I say that, it's because most of their new developments are on containers using Kubernetes, but very few of them have gone into production. And it will take, obviously, over time, you know, years for those production workloads to reach full scale. But, you know, you always want to be on the leading edge of these very fundamental and foundational changes. Rob, do you want to add?

Yeah, absolutely. Just to add to that, you asked the question about the growth and realization around stateful versus stateless containers. I think it's a great example of the maturity curve that Charlie's talking about. I think as the technology around containers matures and The adoption increases the enterprise. We're seeing a couple things. One is a realization that state matters and being able to store data, get it back, and have all the enterprise resilience around it really does matter, as well as the enterprise data management workflows that go around it, whether that's a backup, disaster recovery, security, or migration needs. And that's where we really see customers across the board recognizing that Portworx is really the only solution out there that's able to solve the entire set of data challenges and needs around the container environment, whether that's the container storage infrastructure, the data management, providing the data service. Service and application tool capabilities with integrated and curated database deployments. So net-net, definitely earlier in the maturity curve, but we're seeing great adoption and great growth within Portworx, and we think that's going to be an increasingly important part of our strategy going forward.

Got it. Thank you. And Kevin, just to follow up on the RPO growth, it's a fantastic number, 29% at $1.4 billion scale. It's pretty impressive. Are you seeing any kind of an elongation of contract duration that might be positively impacting that growth rate? Or would you say it's more apples to apples in terms of contract duration year over year?

Well, hey, thanks for the question. And I think it's pretty consistent from a duration standpoint. And then, again, I do point the analyst base to our subscription ARR, because I really do think that's a really good measure of the health of our subscription businesses, and obviously NDR, which we published, is greater than 120 exiting the year.

Got it. Thank you. Yep.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers from Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks for taking the questions. And I'll ask, too, as well, since nobody stuck to the one. So I guess the first question I have is that, you know, in terms of the amount of that timeframe saying, hey, it's more than just meta, have you had engagements with other cloud hyperscale customers on their own AI projects?

Do you expect that customer base to expand as you look forward?

Well, we're putting work and effort into it, so I certainly expect it to expand as we move forward. The exact timing of these things, this is, as I'm sure you're familiar, I mean, these are like engineering designs. It's like engineering – it's like – selling into a new rack design for each hyperscalers, which itself takes several years for the hyperscalers. So, A, it's a little bit difficult to predict the exact timing, but we do have conversations ongoing. It's certainly my expectation, but I can't say that it's near term. It's, you know, but 12 months is a long time. I hope to have an update there. It's definitely of strategic importance to the company overall. Rob, do you want to add? I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I think you hit it, Charlie.

No, I think you hit it, Charlie.

And then as a follow-up, I know it's probably too early to kind of update, you know, analyst day kind of comments that you provided back in September. But, you know, just thinking about the growth, you know, that you had outlined, that mid-teens, you know, CAGR of revenue for fiscal 22 through 25. Maybe you can help us, like, did that assume that you were going to see some of these hyperscale cloud opportunities come to fruition? Or was that not necessarily baked into that expectation at that point?

I think it basically didn't assume like a huge, you know, some type of hockey stick growth from the hyperscale environment. It assumed a moderate, you know, at the time we obviously had already talked about a hyperscaler, which was meta, obviously. So we assumed we'd get some from that, but I can't say we assumed a lot of it.

Yeah, I think that's fair, Charlie. And in addition to that, we are assuming, obviously, acceleration with our subscription businesses overall as well, which is part of our long-range expectations and model.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Thank you very much for taking the question. I hate to sort of focus on negative with all the metrics you've beaten on, but I want to make sure I understand what occurred in your gross margin, specifically product gross margin, in your January quarter in that I was under the impression that October was depressed because of the customer myth. And I don't think you have the same customer mix with the meta shift down. So I want to maybe unpack this a little bit and then see if we can get an understanding of what effects, what elements are continuing in the April quarter as well as the fiscal 23 outlook on product gross margin. Thank you.

That's a great question, Simon, and I'll take it. This is Kevin. First of all, quite pleased with the product gross margins, but do understand the question, and we certainly did see some impact with higher costs at the component level that Charlie talked about, as well as indirect costs, including logistics that were impacting us. And we saw a little bit of the integrated hardware and software architecture that I've alluded to.

And expect our ASPs to really be.

be healthy especially you know as our competitors who really sell on a cost plus start increasing the pricing and we've seen we've seen that in the marketplace. And so in my prepared remarks I talked about the fact that we continue to expect product margins to be in the high 60s and that's again consistent with our long term expectations and understanding the challenges we're working through on the supply chain. But thanks for the question. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Wamsi Mohan from Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Yes, thank you. If I could just follow on product gross margins.

If we go back to two quarters ago, what we're talking about here in 30 basis points of margin compression,

And clearly the supply chain environment is quite challenged. So as you think about this high 60s gross margin going into next year, is the underlying assumption that we're not going to see supply chain improvement, or is there embedded in there a full year of hyperscale revenue that could play some depressing role? role in the gross margin mix, at least.

Yeah, Wamsi, I think it's a, you're asking a complex question. Let me give it a start. First of all, you know, we do think that we had some, or it was not the hyperscaler related, you know, when you have, you know, rapidly changing prices, as we saw, or costs, rather, you know as we saw in q4 you can't always adjust for them right away through asps but we see very strong asps because of the value of our product we expect that the the unless we have new challenges which we are uh you know of which we're unaware in in q1 and q2 we're expecting these temporary uh gross margin product gross margin costs to effectively pass through. And we've been guiding for high 60s in our gross margin for many years. And so that's not a change from the past.

Maybe I can add just a little bit more to that in terms of specific questions. So to be clear, we did not build in degrading product gross margins due to hyperscaler transactions. I want to be clear on that. We do expect supply chain challenges to continue. But to Charlie's point, we sell on value, always have the value of our software. both purity and pure one, the integrated architecture of the hardware and software. And that's what we've been doing even before, obviously, the supply chain challenges. And that's, you know, really the validation that our product gross margins will be in the 60s.

Okay, that's helpful. And if I could follow up, when we think about this hyperscaler revenue, I think, Charlie, you mentioned that you first engaged

a healthy revenue in this past fiscal year.

So why should, now that the proof of concept is sort of behind you, a lot of the behind you, why should we be in line with your aggregate base and Sort of it seems like a lot of the heavy lifting and proof of concept is sort of behind you. Why shouldn't we expect a much faster growth on that piece of the business?

Lips to God's ears. Of course, it's certainly see, but, you know, of course, every new sale depends.

engagement in a new data center or rack design with each customer, right? I will point, your chronology is correct.

We sold them Flash AI uses over the last five years.

But the reason why we got the really traditional and or, you know, hockey stick type of order with Flasher AC had more

Pure finally cracked level of disk of the way that it became compelling, which was a data lake type of use case.

That's only just beginning. That level of price performance is just beginning. So it's a new, if you will, concept for the hyperscalers, and they're just getting used to it now. designed to it and so forth so it's really a question of um uh of of to realize the opportunity for a new technology i will identify one additional thing uh which is that you know the are the benefit of uh of of our flasher ac or of qlc against the traditional use cases not limited to the price performance. We're able to deliver now just incredible performance of the storage involved, environmental in the case of power and cooling, environmental in terms of space, and environmental in terms of landfill footprint. if you will, waste footprint at the end of the day, much far less waste. So we think these are going to be of larger importance to both enterprise and hyperscalers going forward.

And, Wansi, this is Rob. If I could just add in, I think specific to your question, I'll just go back to remind you. you that, you know, just like each hyperscaler firm and environment is different, you know, each environment within and so each one of those, going back to necessitating, you know, an engineering driven

in almost design win process. Now, certainly being, you know, being a partner for Meta in one part of their environment and making them successful there helps us, you know, versus being in a new account. But, you know, just like, you know, we're having discussions with other hyperscaler firms, you know, in early days there, you know, this is a longer design process and so it's just going to take some time.

Thank you. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking my question. Congrats on a great quarter. My question is on the demand side.

Clearly, your peers talk about constraints impacting the growth, but you guys did a great job managing the supply chain and upsided your own expectations. Do you think some customers are adopting your solutions because they couldn't get the hard drive-based products? So the question is, what do you think the sustainability of these wins when supply constraints ease? And then kind of related to that, do you think your assay service offering is benefiting from these constraints? And even if you are,

Thanks, Sydney. So on average, I would say, you know, we don't see a significant amount of business. There are a few anecdotal cases, but there are few and far between. I think this is very fundamental demand, you know, based on the expansion of our portfolio and the number and the segments that we're able to go after.

after right now.

And so we do believe it's sustainable for the three reasons that I identified in my opening remarks, which is that we now have a much broader product line than we had just a few years ago. We sell into more segments. And our technology has sustainable differentiation, difficult for the competitors to be able to, easy to claim, but difficult to actually deliver. So I think for those reasons, we're on the early stages of sustainable demand growth.

Okay, 44%. I guess it benefits from some of the reduced expenses from COVID. How do you think about the Rule of 40 this year? Revenue growth is about 20, so I'm, I guess, indirectly asking about your free cash flow of margins.

It's a great question. And, yeah, we kind of outdid ourselves this year, didn't we, in terms of the Rule of 40. It was outstanding in any metric we look at. including the Rule of 40 framework. But, look, our FY22 performance in and of itself really doesn't change our long-term view that we've shared about sustainable improvement within the Rule of 40 framework. And, look, when we look at our FY23 outlook, it's tracking well with the long-term expectations that we set and discussed on Financial Analyst Day with you guys a couple months back.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Nihal Chokshi from Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Yeah, thank you. And stunning results, especially in the context that you accelerated a 41% no-help from meta. So spectacular. So the question actually is, is that you're guiding the 20% year-over-year growth in the April quarter, and you talked about that the driver here is – a renaissance of IT spending within the Americas. Why shouldn't this continue into the April quarter and beyond?

Yeah, I'll start it, and I'll let Charlie kind of hit it from a macro standpoint. But we've chatted about this a fair amount, right?

We're seeing strong demand.

across our portfolio, which obviously has been expanded. But we're seeing good success across our entire portfolio, including our subscription businesses. Key markets, key geographies, repeat business.

No matter what we're looking at, we're seeing strength.

So that's a plus for us in terms of the demand signal that we're seeing. But I also think, you know, when you think about our FY23 outlook for revenue growth, just a few reminders for you, right?

in terms of the FY20 compare.

Obviously, we had the large opportunity with Meta that was helping us out in FY22. We have an extra week of revenue in FY22. And again, without taking anything away from our outstanding performance in FY22, our growth rate was simply an easier compare because obviously, Cisco 21 had some COVID-related headwinds that we were working through. so you know and then when i compliment and layer on the uh pure as a service growth with cloud block store that we you know we expect that growth to significantly outpace our company uh revenue uh growth rate for next year and as a reminder with pure as a service you know revenue is recognized over time so so obviously there's there's an impact there but hopefully that's helpful for you thank you your next question comes from the line of team long from barclays your line is now open

Thank you. Just one follow-up and a question. The follow-up just will kill the hyperscale one more time here. I think from one of the answers, just curious if when you think about some of the other large customers, since you were in Facebook for a while, you had at least somewhat of an advantage. Was one of the answers... implying that for the other large hyper skills, you don't have that same level of relationship coming in. Therefore, it's a little more challenging. And then the second question is, if you could just talk a little bit about kind of deal size and particularly cross selling across, you know, more broadly across the products, I think you you talked about FleshRay EX doing really well and obviously Seize done well. So can you just give us some color around cross-sell and how that's impacting repeat sales and deal sizes? Thank you.

You bet. Thanks, Tim. So, you know, regarding the hyperscaler, we're not necessarily strangers to other hyperscalers, but if we are in them, we tend to be in their IT organizations and less in their production organizations. And it's a different, as you may know, those are different relationships. We do get, remember, it is an engineering design win that has to go in more like a chip sale, if you will, than like Like a traditional enterprise system sale. So they take a while, highly integrated with their teams, and we are at earlier stages, no doubt. We were already engaged in a production environment in Facebook. So that's certainly part of it. You know, in terms of the broader portfolio convinces customers to take us into more of their environment and greater amounts of their wallet spend and the portfolio sale that does take place. But even without a portfolio sale, it's opening up new opportunities for us.

A significant portion now of Our deals are portfolio sales.

That is more than one product going in at the same time in the transaction that takes place. So that's growing nicely as well. But it's really convinced customers that we're a vendor that, frankly, any time that they're looking to put in a new storage capability or replace an existing storage capability, that they have to consider us.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Your last question comes from the line of Krish Sankar from Cowen and Company. Your line is now open.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. And Charlie and Kevin, thank you very much. Congrats on the great results. I have two quick questions. One is on the profitability. You know, what gives you the confidence in the profitability for the whole year? I understand you spoke about op-eds going up because of inflation and COVID costs reverting. But, like, inventory is also the all-time low. I'm just kind of trying to figure out what is the level of confidence on profitability. And then I had, like, a big-picture question for Charlie. Thank you.

Hey, welcome, Krish. I know you're new to the community as well and Pure, so welcome to you. And, yeah, let's spend a little bit of time on. on profitability. And I think we spent a fair amount of time walking through our thoughts on the gross margin side for product. We haven't spent much time on the subscription gross margin, which, as you saw, was was quite solid for us both for the quarter and for the year. And we think that trajectory will continue. And look, I just when you look at the operating leverage and discipline that we achieved this year, you know, in addition to the covid tailwinds and primarily Within go to market sales and marketing although you know all areas really benefited this year. But we're just going to continue that momentum simply. Right. So we're going to continue to invest in growth which is an absolute priority for us. But with that discipline and growing our global workforce we think we can continue on our journey of increased profitability and feel quite comfortable with our modest operating margin expansion.

Great. Thank you for that, and thanks very much for the kind words. And then just as a quick follow-up for Charlie, you spoke about IT spending. I'm just kind of curious, like, you know, there are some views that IT spending growth was strong last year and might grow this year, but maybe the second derivative turns negative. So I'm kind of curious from your viewpoint, was there any budget flush in Q4 and things normalized this year, or is there – how do you think about – I see spending as a whole relative to Q4 and into FY2022.

yeah you know we had a very strong linearity throughout the quarter so there was no specific budget flush either you know either through uh you know december which would typically be when you know most companies have their fiscal year um or to the end of our fiscal year which was you know end of january beginning of february so no i can't say bub budget flush was uh it was much of a of a consideration at all uh it was really i'll go back and say that it was really based on as we look at both industry and economic watchers, as well as other companies in the IT space. We seem to see a theme of believing that the first half, or at least more confidence in the first half than the second half. So I think that's probably more of what goes into the thinking.

Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. At this time, I will turn the call over back to Charlie Giancarlo for closing remarks.

I want to thank you all for joining us today, and especially Amita and Chris, who are with us for the first time. Certainly here at Pure, we're looking forward to not only this quarter, but to our sales kickoff, which starts next week. And I'm going to welcome all of our sellers. It's going to be virtual, hopefully for the last time this time around. But, you know, we are broadcasting to you for the first time legally maskless. from our Mountain View headquarters, and we're hoping that's a sign of things to come. Thank you all very much again for joining us, and look forward to talking to you next quarter.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.