Pure Storage Inc. is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2019 — a huge accomplishment given the transitory nature of many tech startups — and it has achieved over $1 billion in annual sales. So why has Pure Storage been successful, and where does the company see itself in the future?

“One of the things we’ve tried to do is … build a company that’s going to be in it for the long term,” said John Colgrove (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of Pure Storage. “If you build something great and you partner well with the environment around you, you can build something long-lasting.”

Colgrove spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure//Accelerate event in Austin, Texas. They discussed what it’s taken for Pure Storage to be successful in the past and predictions for storage in the future (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Flash, affordability, simplicity pillars of Pure Storage success

For Colgrove, Pure Storage began out of a desire to completely change the way storage industry operated. Colgrove watched as discs continued to get bigger and bigger and slower and slower, which was a problem. While this would be a really hard problem to solve, he got interested in it, and he also saw that flash storage was a catalyst that was going to change that.

“Think of what you demand from your personal tech — from your iPhone, or your laptop, or your tablet,” Colgrove said. “Customers should demand that kind of quality, serviceability, ease of use from their enterprise IT.”

While Pure Storage wasn’t the first startup to tackle flash storage, or the only one, Colgrove believes that there were a few defining factors that separated Pure Storage from the crowd. The company went all into flash from the very beginning because it believed the future was flash. This has put Pure Storage in a stronger and stronger position as flash has become more and more popular. However, it wasn’t just its focus on flash, but its decision to be accessible.

“We were the first to focus on affordable flash,” Colgrove said. “If you’re gonna change the world, you have to make something for everyone, not for an elite few.”

But it wasn’t just flash that set them apart — it was also the commitment to simplicity in its business, according to Colgrove. Flash was the catalyst to help the company figure out how to offer simpler firmware that only has to solve that one problem, which enabled it to get a better performance out of the flash, longer life, and less flash failure.

Pure Storage is also focusing on the future with cloud and making sure that a company can have their data seamlessly move between cloud and on-premises.

“As easily as you move from one of your cell phones to the next model, move from one cloud to another cloud, move from that cloud back on-prem, to deliver value to your organization should not be rocket science. And our job at Pure is to make that accessible so everybody can deliver that kind of quality experience to their organization,” Colgrove concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Pure//Accelerate event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Pure//Accelerate event. Neither Pure Storage Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE