The purchase of data services platform Portworx Inc. by Pure Storage Inc. for $370 million on Wednesday represents an important move into the developer operations space for Pure.

On the surface, the combination of the two firms can be viewed as a blending of Pure Storage’s expertise in data storage services with Portworx’s Kubernetes Data Services Platform. By expanding into the world of containers and Kubernetes, Pure is also broadening its appeal to software developers who work extensively in that space.

“About 40% of the buyers of Portworx are customers that we do talk to regularly in the [information technology] groups, and about 60% are in the DevOps environment,” said Charles Giancarlo (pictured, left), Pure Storage’s chairman and chief executive officer. “We have a good head start with the people we are selling to today, but it also opens up a whole new buying area for us with DevOps and it’s one we plan on investing in as we go forward.”

Giancarlo spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio. He was joined by Murli Thirumale (right), co-founder and CEO of Portworx, and they discussed Portworx’s fit with Pure’s business model and the startup’s appeal to developers.

Scalable storage environment

Portworx brings an existing customer base that includes Comcast Corp., T-Mobile, General Electric Co. and Lufthansa. The firm’s software provides storage for container workloads that can scale across clusters. This portability fits with Pure’s existing model for enterprise data flexibility.

“When you build an app on containers, it becomes portable, and you can operate on the cloud, you can operate on hardware inside your own data center,” Giancarlo said. “Pure is known for making data portable as well, between private data centers and hyperscalers, such as AWS and Azure. We create a very flexible, portable environment.”

Portworx will enhance Pure’s model by making it easier to provision storage resources needed by containers.

“For someone who is deploying apps, they are doing that with the help of Kubernetes, and their hands never leave the Kubernetes wheel,” Thirumale explained. “Now all of a sudden they are deploying data and storage and doing all of that without an intimate knowledge of the storage infrastructure.”

Founded six years ago, Portworx announced record sales results and total revenue last month, along with the release of new features and updates for its Kubernetes platform. However, the company’s co-founder says he recently told his team that the acquisition by Pure is just a small part of the company plan.

“The journey of business success is like a thousand steps, and the part of a startup is only the first 250 steps,” Thirumale said. “We’ve run up those first 250 steps pretty fast, but we’re going to sprint through the next 750 steps in the company of Pure.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE