Recently I received a verbal offer for MTS-3 SWE at Pure Storage (Mountain View). The team is under Portworx (a Kubernetes storage startup, acquired by Pure Storage in 2020), working on some core distributed storage systems. Although there is no absolute safe place in the current market, I still hope to get some input to evaluate the job security at Pure Storage/Portworx. Pure Storage’s stock performed well this year (YTD -10%). Financials kept beating expectations. Revenue, ARR growth and cash flow seem good. But it’s still not steadily profitable yet (very close though). For Pure Storage: is there pressure to cut cost? How much will it be affected by customers cutting cost? How’s the risk of layoff in general? For Portworx: what’s the position/status of Portworx in Pure Storage? Is it gaining or losing priority? Is it growing fast? Is it a good BU to work for? 3 YOE Current TC: 175K Location: Bay Area #purestorage #portworx #layoff #tech #jobsecurity
Amazon is stuck in 2010. Storage is not as much of a commodity as it used to be. There are enough differentiating factors today that have open up competition again. Power consumption, rack real estate, and of course performance to name a few.
There's always pressure to cut cost. :) Having said that, I'll start off by saying that I felt Charlie/CEO and company have always been mindful about making hires and have a good understanding on impact to risks. I truly believe the company tries to protect the employees and so I personally feel the risk of layoffs will be lower than most other companies. Here is the issue I have observed with Portworx as a former SE for Pure Storage, which is impacted by the general situation of the company as a whole. Pure Storage basically has 3 business segments - Enterprise, Commercial and Small/Mid Business (SMB). When Pure Storage first came to market, due to the high cost of flash systems, the natural market segment to go after was Enterprise because Enterprise companies had the bigger budget. However, flash systems have become a bit of a commodity more recently and the natural market segment shifted to the Commercial segment. 80%+ of revenue is achieved mostly through the sale of the Flash Array systems and 60-80% of that revenue comes from the Commercial segment. In most situations, Pure Storage will have difficulty becoming a strategic partner for most large Enterprise companies due to the lack of depth in their product portfolio (vs Dell or Netapp that offers servers, storage, more in depth cloud solutions, backup solutions, etc). Annual revenue for Pure Storage is ~$3B per year. I think they were trying to get Portworx revenue to $100M per year from $30M, which they were still pretty far from achieving. Enterprise companies won't entertain Portworx because it's more of a strategic decision and most commercial companies are still not running containers in their environment. There are other challenges within the company that impacts Portworx, which I won't go into further detail for this conversation. Obviously, Pure Storage wants to address any deficiencies and there is desire to grow the Portworx business and revenue (at least from what I have observed). Lastly, I just want to reiterate that I think Pure Storage as a whole is a great company to work for and wouldn't hesitate recommending the company.
Thank you so much for the informative response! It’s the most thorough analysis of Pure Storage I’ve ever seen on Blind. Since you’ve mentioned that Portworx acquisition didn’t generate much synergy (low containerization penetration rate among Pure’s commercial customers), I’m curious about what strategy does Pure take on operating Portworx. Do they see it as great potential of growth in the future or just take use of it to better serve Pure’s major products? Portworx seems to have small revenue contribution now. But how does its growth rate compare to Pure as a whole? Do you see risk of Portworx being abandoned by the upper management? And also, what’s Pure’s strategy to the rise of public cloud providers?
Honestly, I don't think I can provide the direction of Portworx based on the few historical data points or evidence. There were 3 acquisitions that were made that I'm aware of: - Object Engine (forgot the name of the original company) - product was dropped before being integrated into the Flash Blade systems - Compuverde - their IP is being incorporated into the Flash Array for file protocol support - Portworx - mostly a standalone product separate from the Flash Array and Flash Blade. Has it's own separate sales team that provides overlay support for the "core" sales team. Also, Pure Storage really only has 3 distinct directly revenue contributing products in my opinion: - Flash Array - yes, you have the X series, the C series, and Cloud Block Store but in my opinion, they are just a variation or models of the same product - Flash Blade - Portworx I do think Portworx (along with the development of Cloud Block Store) was a strategic acquisition by Pure Storage. Cloud Block Store was developed to stay relevant in conversations with existing Pure Storage customers that were looking to migrate to cloud providers. I don't believe Cloud Block Store resonated with non-Pure Storage customers. I also believe Portworx was acquired to stay relevant for non-Pure Storage customers as the product is platform independent (can be used with backend storage systems from Dell/EMC, Netapp, AWS, Google, Azure, etc) and can be positioned to go after new Pure Storage customers. In regards to the strategy that Pure Storage is using to compete in the market space against competitors (both traditional and cloud solutions): - Pure Storage has a very unique business model with the Flash Array (not so much with the Flash Blade) that is enabled by the Flash Array architecture. For example, non-disruptive data in-place upgrades for controllers and storage media. Upgrade to next gen systems without any planned downtime. - Pure Storage tries to remove any configuration decision from customers and tries to make using their product so simple (think Apple) that it almost runs itself. - All their products have API support (along with GUI and CLI) for configuration, operation and management. Allows for IAC deployments just like cloud services. Hope the above provides some additional insight to help make your decision.
Hi. I know a thing or two about portworx. Former CNBU employee. Post acquisition. Portworx is an absolute nightmare of an organization. Box company not knowing how to operate a true software organization. I was involved within Product Management + GTM Strategy, for a significant portion of North America. The entire senior leadership org needs a reset button. Box 📦 people need to completely vanquished from the CNBU. Full stop. Massive attrition in sales, presales, Product management, and overlay AE’s are treated as tools. Expect 18+ hour work days and horrendous WLB. Have fun. If you accepted your offer, start looking for a new job.
What do you mean by Box?
Literal storage boxes vs. true cloud-native / Container Native Storage / DevOps philosophy. Traditional IT Infra org trying to become software.
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Hey, congo on the offers Can I DM you about Walmart offer ?
Sure
Can you pls respond to my DM?