The Internet of Things. Edge computing. Artificial intelligence. Invoking all those trends during a keynote presentation today, Pure Storage Inc. sounded more like a cloud provider than a storage company.

It’s no coincidence, thinks Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.

“That legacy change to new distributed architectures has been a tailwind for Pure,” Miniman told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured, right), his co-host during theCUBE coverage at Pure//Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco, California.

Pure’s software-defined storage has played well to customer’s increasing desire for on-demand, cloud-like infrastructure as a service. The question, according to Miniman, is: “When will cloud be something that will push against their growth?”

A similar contradiction in Pure’s business model — indeed in its existence — is reflected in its fiscal reports, Vellante noted.

“The concept of a large, independent storage company — that concept is going away — it’s like, extinct except for one company,” Vellante said referring to NetApp Inc., the only $1-billion storage company left.

That said, Pure is on track to meet the $1 billion mark itself, thanks to 30 percent year-over-year growth. “At one point last year, they had like 69.6 percent gross margin, which is unheard of” for a storage company, Vellante said.

“Is that sustainable?” he asked Miniman.

Pure puts public cloud in a corner

Pure might hit $1 billion by 2018, Miniman answered, but how long until it makes $3 billion or $5 billion?

“The reason I throw out that number is, that’s probably how much storage Amazon’s doing today,” Miniman said. “And nobody in the storage industry talks about that, because [cloud] just ties to my application — so I want to follow the applications, follow the data.”

Hearing Pure Chief Executive Officer Scott Dietzen claim only 20 percent of use cases fit in public cloud caused Miminan to “bristle a little,” he said.

“You don’t put the public cloud in a corner and just say, ‘Oh, 20 percent of the market’s there,’ because that’s today, and it is still growing, 50, 75, 100 percent, depending on which public cloud you’re talking about,” Miniman added.

As public cloud continues to eat storage, companies like Pure could easily see revenue plateau, Miniman said.

There is hope for Pure to sustain some, if not all, of its current growth by continuing to sell to Software as a Service providers and the growing private cloud market, Vellante and Miniman agreed.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Pure//Accelerate 2017.

Photo: SiliconANGLE