Across the computing universe, technology that was tied to the vertical stack has become virtualized, freeing it to become agile and dynamic. But so far, storage has been left out of the trend.

The market is currently flat and generally viewed as staid and boring rather than an exciting opportunity for new technology. Bucking the established view is enterprise data flash storage company Pure Storage Inc.

“We really view storage as next frontier of great innovation,” said Charlie Giancarlo (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Pure Storage Inc. “We will invest 18% of revenue in research and development this year. Nearly all of our competitors are spending less than five percent. They’re viewing storage as an old antiquated market, not as a high-tech market.”

Giancarlo spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure//Accelerate event in Austin, Texas. They discussed how enterprise data flash storage company Pure Storage plans to revolutionize the storage market (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.) Answers have been condensed for clarity.

Martin: You are just about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Pure Storage. You’ve achieved a tremendous amount in the past decade. What’s to come in the next 10 years?

Giancarlo: We want this decade to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment.

[In the past decade], we brought a lot of things to storage and to the storage array. We made it much simpler. We made it upgradeable, non-disruptively, meaning that customers would have a continuously new product in their environment. And we started to bring it into the cloud.

For our second decade, we want to transform the entire storage experience. We don’t want it to be about boxes and arrays. We want it to be about a storage system for the entire enterprise. That is multi-protocol, multicloud, multitiering — or what we call storage classes — and entirely automated so that when an application calls for storage services, it’s delivered automatically without humans getting involved. That is completely as a service consumed as a service, delivered as a service entirely automated in the back end.

Vellante: Last decade you were really the only all-flash array company to reach escape velocity. You’re entering new territory now, up against Google and Cisco and Microsoft in the multicloud arena. Could you talk about your vision for the future in terms of total addressable market expansion?

Giancarlo: A lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data, managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data-center environment. We want to eliminate all that. We want to automate all of that.

Two decades ago, every application had its own individual communication stack. There were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company. One decade ago, every application had its own custom hardware stack and custom operating system stack. Well, today there’s one network. It’s called the internet. Today, everything, every application, every server is virtualized, allowing mobility. Yet storage is still static.

Vellante: How do you compare this opportunity to some other mega trends that you’ve been part of? 

Giancarlo: I think it’s an analogous trend, and it’s … this long-term trend of vertical, whether it’s vertical industries or vertical technologies going to becoming horizontal. So let’s just give a couple of examples. Networking was tightly tied to the application, and every application had its own network and its own set of protocols. That was vertically tied. Now networking is horizontal; it’s all Internet Protocol.

We’ll go back to applications. Applications had a vertical stack; the entire stack hardware and software was tied to specific application. Today that’s been made virtualized and, therefore, horizontal.

Storage is still vertical. It’s still tied very tightly to the rack. And there are a lot of good reasons for that. You needed a high-speed interface. High-speed networking didn’t exist. Disks were slow; they could only support one application at a time. With solid state that no longer exists.

So now we can make storage free. We can make it a horizontal layer rather than tightly tied to any individual application. And that’s what the next decade is going to be about.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Pure//Accelerate. (* 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