Amazon Web Services Inc. and Pure Storage Inc. are collaborating in a new way by working together in the datacenter for the first time with AWS Outposts. Outposts and Pure Storage will unlock workloads in verticals to help both companies address issues like data residency, local data processing, latency and datacenter modernization.

Michael Sotnick (pictured, left), vice president of global alliances at Pure Storage, and Rob Czarnecki (pictured, right), principal product manager for AWS Outposts at AWS, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the new collaboration AWS Outposts and how the datacenter is evolving during ongoing digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Talk about your relationship with AWS.

Sotnick: The partnership with AWS is a very high-profile and strategic partnership for Pure Storage. But one of the big things that we’re most proud of is the recent establishment of Pure being Service Ready and Outposts Ready and the first and only on-prem storage solution. And we’re shoulder to shoulder with AWS as AWS takes Outposts into the datacenter. They’re going after key workloads that we’re well known for, and we’re very excited to partner with AWS in that regard.

Rob, Give us the update. What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing success with Outposts now that that’s part of the portfolio. How is it all working out?

Czarnecki: One of the really bright spots over the past year has just been how many different industries and market segments have shown interest in Outposts. You can have customers, for example, with data residency needs. Those that have to do local data processing, maybe have latency needs on a specific workload that needs to run near their end users. Or just folks trying to modernize their data center. And that’s a journey; that transformation takes time.

One of the things that’s really become clear to us is to enable the success that we think Outposts can have, we need to meet customers where they are. And one of the fantastic things about the Outposts Ready program is many of those customers are using Pure and they have Pure hardware.

It’s exciting because the edge is a big thing here. What’s the customer need? What causes them to look at Outpost as part of their hybrid? 

Czarnecki: So there are a couple of different needs. One is we have regions and local zones across the globe, but we’re not everywhere. And there are data residency regulations that are becoming increasingly common and popular. So customers might come to us and say, “Look, I really need to run … a financial services workload that needs to be in Thailand.” And we don’t have a regional or local zone in Thailand, but we can get an Outpost to places where they need to be.

The other piece is there’s a tremendous amount of interest in that top-down executive sponsorship across enterprise customers to transform their operations to modernize their digital approach. But … when they actually look at their estate, they do see an awful lot of hardware, and that’s a hard challenge to plan the migration. When you can bring an Outpost right into that data center, it really makes it much easier because AWS is right there.

Michael, what causes the customer to get the Pure option on Outposts?

Sotnick: What I would tell you is, one of the things that a lot of people miss is the complicity and the consistency that are characteristically very much in the AWS experience and equally within the Pure experience. And that’s really powerful. So as we were successful in putting Pure into workloads … for all the reasons that Rob talked about. Our predictability, our simplicity, our consistency really matched what the customer was getting with other workloads that they had in AWS.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE