Storage technology startup Pure Storage Inc. today said it’s kicking Chief Executive Scott Dietzen upstairs to chairman and appointing veteran tech executive Charles Giancarlo its new CEO.

The company, which makes large flash-memory storage systems, made the announcement as it also reported better-than-expected second-fiscal quarter results and current-quarter outlook. Shares jumped as much as 6 percent in after-hours trading before settling back to about a 4 percent rise. Shares declined about 0.8 percent in regular trading, to $12.56 a share. Update: On Friday morning, shares were shooting up 15 percent.

Second-quarter revenue rose 38 percent, to $224.5 million, about 3 percent ahead of the midpoint of the company’s guidance and well above the $219 million analysts on average had projected. The company reported a net loss of 29 cents a share, or 11 cents excluding costs such as stock compensation. That was lower than the consensus loss of 14 cents.

For the current quarter, the company forecast revenue of $267 million to $275 million, surrounding analysts’ consensus of $270 million. For the full year, the company predicted revenue between $985 million and $1.025 billion, again around the analyst consensus of $998 million.

“We continue to march toward profitability,” Chief Financial Officer Tim Riitters said on the earnings conference call. “The leverage in the growth model is working.” He added that the company expects to log its first quarterly profit in the third quarter.

Still, given Giancarlo’s long experience and his apparent stepping back from operating roles in recent years — plus his tenure at Silver Lake, which has been involved in many deals — analysts on the call asked if Pure might step up acquisitions. Executives declined to shed any light on that potential.

Investors also may wonder about the flipside, that is, whether Giancarlo joined partly to spruce up Pure’s bottom line for an eventual sale. The company, not surprisingly, also made no mention of that, and the number of buyers that can afford the $3 billion-plus may be limited in any case, said Dave Vellante, co-founder and chief analyst at Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE.

Few companies make big changes in their executive staff when everything is clicking, but beyond continuing losses, it wasn’t apparent what new issues Pure might have that would spur the executive shift.

Dietzen, who has been at the helm for the past seven years, said that a few months ago the board started a search for a new CEO. “I felt we needed a different class of experience to operate at scale,” Dietzen said. “I think he’s exactly the right leader at the right time.”

“Dietzen has proven to be an extremely effective startup leader, but he’s never really run a large company,” Vellante said. “So it probably makes sense for someone who has run large orgs to take over.”

For his part, Giancarlo (pictured) said Pure is in a “great position to continue gaining market share across its three growth segments: its data platform for cloud, accelerating data-driven applications like artificial intelligence and Internet of Things, as well as helping enterprises that are seeking to derive more value from their data.”

Giancarlo, 59, was a managing director at private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners from 2007 to 2015. From 2008 to 2009, he served as interim president and CEO of Avaya. He may be best-known for serving in a number of roles, such as chief technology officer and chief development officer, at Cisco Systems Inc. from 1993 to 2007.

For now, Pure is positioning the executive move as a way to catapult Pure into a multibillion-dollar company. “In Pure, I see a business that is poised to follow in the footsteps of companies like and Arista and ServiceNow,” Giancarlo said on the earnings call.

President David Hatfield added that newer products are seeing good acceptance. “Platform selling motion is working,” he said on the call, referring the the company’s strategy of getting customers to buy more Pure products over time. Pure said it added 350 new customers in the second quarter, for a total of more than 3,700 worldwide. New customers include Airbus, NASA Kennedy Space Center and ServiceNow Inc.

Photo: Ikhlaq Sidhu