A visit to the Pure Accelerate gathering in San Francisco this past week was a chance to walk amid the ghosts of history. Held at the century-old Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, the conference offered attendees an experience of listening to keynotes from the same stage where the Democratic National Convention was held in 1920, Martin Luther King delivered a speech and legendary rock artists such as the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan once played.

Mindful of where he stood, Charles Giancarlo (pictured), chief executive officer of Pure Storage Inc., used the keynote opportunity to recall his own days as a youth attending concerts in the heyday of rock and roll. “I always thought if I found myself on the stage, there would be a couple of security guys dragging me off,” Gaincarlo quipped.

These days, Pure’s CEO can stay onstage as long as he wants. The company is riding a wave of momentum for its all-flash storage solutions, with a quarterly year-over-year revenue increase of 40 percent and the addition of 300 new customers, including the U.S. Department of Energy. Whatever tune Giancarlo is playing on the enterprise technology stage, storage customers are clapping along.

“It’s a recognition that Pure is playing a very important role in the data processing and high-tech landscape,” Giancarlo said.

Giancarlo spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure Storage Accelerate event in San Francisco. Among the topics they discussed: the importance of hot storage for data access, recent announcements surrounding its data-centric solutions, investment in research and development and his belief that growth will likely keep the company independent. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features Charles Giancarlo as its Guest of the Week.

‘Always available’ storage

Pure’s solutions are playing to the growing need for businesses to provide access to customer data on an “always-available” basis. In the online banking world, for example, customers might need access to their checks from five years ago for a tax audit and they don’t want to wait weeks to get that information.

The all-flash data solutions provided by Pure Storage are directly engineered to facilitate “hot” access and availability so that information can be analyzed on the spot. “Right now, only 1 percent of the data that companies have can really be analyzed because it’s being kept in cold storage,” Giancarlo said. “At Pure, we believe in no cold storage. It’s all got to be hot; it’s all got to be available.”

One important use case for always-accessible data can be found in Paige.AI, a startup company seeking to transform manual processes for cancer diagnosis. Equipped with more than 25 million pathology slides and images, Paige.AI is using the Pure Storage FlashBlade to speed up pathology evaluation for cancer patients.

“Pure is the one company that actually believes there is real innovation to be had in storage,” Giancarlo said. “You want your cancer pathology to be analyzed really quickly. That’s what this engine can do.”

Pure used the Accelerate gathering to announce its “Data-Centric Architecture,” a set of technologies designed to let customers derive more value from data. The announcements included a new FlashArray//X product line built for shared accelerated storage; the AIRI Mini, which expanded Pure’s AI-ready infrastructure offerings; and the Evergreen Storage Service, which provides a cloud-like model for on-premises storage needs.

Pure’s software is designed to enable storage flexibility for any flash environment, creating one tier that meets many needs at the same time. “We’re able to take low-quality flash and make it look like high-quality flash because our software adapts to whatever the specific characteristics of the flash are,” Giancarlo said. “We believe this is an architecture that really sets our customers’ data free.”

High R&D investment

Part of Pure’s innovation strategy involves bringing nonvolatile memory connected commodity flash into widespread adoption. That takes considerable investment in research and development.

“We’re investing in technology at a rate that our competitors are not going to be able to keep up with,” Giancarlo said. “We invest close to 20 percent of our revenue every year in R&D. Our competitors are in single digits.”

A critical component of Pure’s go-to-market strategy involves its channel partner relationships. Prior to becoming CEO at Pure, Giancarlo served for more than a decade in a number of senior executive roles at Cisco Systems Inc. where he helped guide that company from direct sales to the channel partner structure it has today.

Pure, which depends completely on channel partners for its product distribution, overhauled its partner program this month by moving to a two-tiered structure. Partners will now be rewarded for building around Pure’s technology more than simply meeting revenue categories.

“My history and belief in utilizing a channel to go-to-market is very well known,” said Giancarlo, who also noted that Pure continues to actively pursue a number of technology partnerships with companies such as Cisco and Nvidia Corp. “We need to do more with other companies to make the solutions that we jointly provide easier for our customers to be able to use.”

Going it alone

Pure’s interest in technology partnerships raises a question that has been swirling around the all-flash storage vendor for some time: Will it get acquired? The company’s current market capitalization of approximately $5 billion could make for a pricey purchase, and Giancarlo took pains to emphasize that Pure’s continued growth will likely turn away suitors.

“Growth is important for us to stay independent,” said Giancarlo, who evaluated the likelihood of an acquisition before taking the top job last year. “I didn’t see a likely acquirer for Pure, so that was going to give us the breathing room to be able to grow to a scale where we could continue to be independent.”

A number of attendees at Accelerate in San Francisco got the opportunity to wear T-shirts representing famous rock artists who had played in the historic venue. It led to lively conversations and camaraderie during the week. After less than a year on the job, Giancarlo has taken note of the company’s culture. “People become dedicated not to an entity, but they become dedicated to a cause,” Giancarlo said.

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the conference. Neither Pure Storage, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE