The storage industry is entering a period of expected growth despite challenging economic conditions, with research from Fortune Business Insights predicting that the market will surge from a 2023 valuation of $247.3 billion to $777.9 billion by 2030.
This growth rate highlights the insatiable appetite among businesses globally, driven by both a rapid growth of data volumes and heightened demand for artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and cloud-based services, the study suggests.
It's against this optimistic backdrop that Pure Storage heads into its Pure Accelerate annual conference, a 1,000 attendee-strong celebration of data storage and management being held in Las Vegas next week. Sustainability is also likely to get plenty of airtime, as well as cloud-native development, data management, and data protection.
Artificial intelligence in the spotlight
As one might expect, AI is set to feature heavily at Pure Accelerate 2023, with a range of sessions catered specifically for data engineers, IT leaders, and data scientists tasked with “building and innovating around data pipelines”.
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The company has positioned itself as a key vendor in the emerging AI space in recent years, serving organizations spanning the media and entertainment, financial services, and pharmaceutical industries.
In May this year, the company announced a partnership with South Korean-based voice recognition provider, MediaZen, to provide the FlashBlade storage platform for use in its R&D operations.
This will enable MediaZen to markedly improve time-to-market for its AI services and modernize its legacy storage architecture, the companies said at the time.
The generative AI boom of the last nine months, prompted by the emergence of systems such as ChatGPT, has heralded the rapid adoption of automated systems among businesses globally.
But this shift means business considerations such as reliability, scalability, and cost are now more pressing than ever, leading organizations to assess how their IT architecture can accommodate for adoption.
Ahead of the conference, Charlie Giancarlo, CEO at Pure Storage told ITPro that the company views recent generative AI developments as a prime opportunity to capitalize on this burgeoning market space – and it’s an area Pure Storage has an established foothold in.
“It’s clear that our continued innovation strongly resonates with our customers, whether it’s for artificial intelligence and machine learning, rapid recovery from ransomware, high performance databases, electronic design automation and video editing, traditional or cloud-native applications, and now also for secondary storage environments such as content and media stores, enterprise imaging, and even traditional backup and archive,” he said.
Sustainability and green supply chain innovation
Pure Storage customers and partners will be well aware of the growing necessity of supply chain sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.
Sessions at the conference will explore the unique sustainability-related challenges that both customers and partners currently face.
This will include how to develop a ‘greener’ data storage estate and how sustainability and energy efficiency have emerged as key considerations for IT decision makers today.
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Last year, Pure Storage announced a comprehensive shift toward advancing its sustainability efforts and enabling customers to curtail their environmental footprint.
This included the launch of the new Pure1 Sustainability Assessment, which gives customers broader visibility of their environmental impact and provides recommended steps to optimize energy efficiency.
The company has also sharpened its focus on improving the sustainability of its core products, including the FlashBlade//S suite of tools. These now provide more than double the power efficiency as previous versions, the company said.
Bucking industry challenges
Pure Accelerate 2023 comes amid a challenging period for the data storage industry, with acute macroeconomic factors placing strain on both providers and customers alike.
Despite this, Giancarlo said that the company has performed well during difficult operating conditions, adding that there are emerging opportunities for growth in the coming months.
While its most recent earnings call showed a 5% decrease in year-on-year revenue to $589 million, the company still exceeded analyst expectations.
“We were pleased with our recent Q1 performance in what continues, overall, to be a challenging IT environment,” Giancarlo told ITPro. “While we saw continuing caution by enterprise and cloud customers in Q1 similar to what we saw in Q4, we also experienced enhanced demand for our most cost efficient solutions, especially Evergreen//One.”
Giancarlo said the company expects to continue increasing its market share and “pick up even greater momentum” amid a flurry of new products and services rolling out in the year ahead.
ITPro will be covering Pure Accelerate 2023 live from Resorts World Las Vegas between 12 June and 16 June. To stay up-to-date with the latest news and announcements from the conference, follow our live blogs and subscribe to our newsletter.
