What’s the next market for Pure Storage Inc.? Why is it choosing to remain an independent storage offering in the age of hyper-converged information technology environments?

Looking to answer these questions and others, SiliconANGLE is at the flash storage provider’s annual conference Pure//Accelerate 2017, taking place in San Francisco, California, with exclusive commentary and interviews from our roving news desk, theCUBE. (* Disclosure below.)

Pure Storage’s claim to fame was its early bet on flash storage, a technology that many legacy IT providers were in denial about. The company is a leader in Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, and while it’s not number one in revenue, Pure’s services are competitive with Dell EMC’s offerings.

Pure reported better-than-expected first fiscal-quarter profit and revenue of $182.6 million, up 31 percent from a year ago. The company expects full fiscal-year revenue of $975 million to $1.02 billion, which is approximately the billion-dollar level it’s predicted for several quarters. Despite the booming flash market, it is a bubble with an annual market cap of only $2.7 billion, which means Pure is quickly running out of room to grow in its current market.

Ongoing market impact of flash storage

Pure announced its FlashArray//X system earlier this year that uses NVMe to provide twice as much bandwidth and reduces latency by up to half compared to its previous generation hardware.

But Pure Storage is facing competition from the likes of IBM Corp., which announced all-flash storage arrays for cloud and machine learning jobs earlier this year, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which updated its flash storage product range last month.

Investors also continue to remain interested in the flash storage market with both Tegile Systems Inc. and Kaminario Inc. completing large funding rounds this year.

What will Pure Storage do when the bubble bursts?

“Strategically, they’re preparing for that day to be an OEM supplier for SaaS and storage to the cloud. Their emphasis on blade storage is interesting because they can participate with that more effectively in the uni-group future. They know the bubble will burst at some stage. Overall, the SaaS market is declining, but flash is growing,” said David Floyer, lead analyst and chief technology officer at Wikibon Research (Wikibon is owned by the same parent company as SiliconANGLE).

Keynote speakers at Pure//Accelerate 2017 include Jeffrey Ma, group product manager at Twitter Inc.; Arthur Riel, director, middleware engineering and rapid app development at The World Bank Group; Kelli Zielinski, manager of storage and compute at Domino’s Pizza Inc.; and Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager of computing systems product group at Cisco Systems Inc.

Other keynote speakers include Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager of VMware Inc.; Scott Dietzen, chief executive officer of Pure Storage; and Julie Clugage, co-founder and executive director of Team4Tech.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

There are various ways to watch all of theCUBE interviews that will be taking place at Pure//Accelerate, including SiliconANGLE TV and YouTube. You can also get all the coverage from the event on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE’s coverage starts today at 10:30 a.m. till 5:30 p.m. PDT.

SiliconANGLE TV

You can watch all of theCUBE’s exclusive interviews and commentary from Pure//Accelerate on the dedicated SiliconANGLE TV page.

Watch on the SiliconANGLE YouTube channel

All of theCUBE interviews from Pure//Accelerate, which runs until June 14, will also be loaded onto SiliconANGLE’s dedicated YouTube channel.

Cubecasts

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on both SoundCloud and iTunes, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE includes Pure//Accelerate keynote speaker Scott Dietzen; as well as other Pure Storage executives, including Vik Nagjee, vice president and chief technology officer of healthcare and life sciences; Axel Streichardt, worldwide lead for business applications; and Matt Kixmoeller, vice president of product solutions marketing.

Other guests include Sathya Sankaran, director of sales engineering and services at Catalogic Software Inc.; Kent Petzold, enterprise storage manager at Intermountain Healthcare Inc.; Brian McDaniel, infrastructure architect at Baylor College of Medicine; Patrick Soisson, ‎lead system engineer at Baylor College of Medicine; and Ray Smith, assistant executive director for technology for the Mississippi Community College Board.

Today’s lineup also includes Todd Graham, vice president of information technology infrastructure at ScanSource Inc.; Siva Sivakumar, senior director, data center solutions at Cisco; and Andy Vandeveld, vice president of global strategic alliances at Veeam Software Inc.

(* Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Pure Storage