Everpure, Inc. (P) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

In the early part of this century, I was talking about in the 2005 to 2007 time frame, there was a lot of talk about so-called green IT. And at that time, there was some organizational friction, like, for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And then the '07-'08 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on IT spending and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, it kind of became a benchmark for IT simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity is needed. And the third was by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride and then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive forms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really, these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progress through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of ESG, environmental, social and governance, shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power, cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence, and you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello, and welcome to the path to sustainable IT made possible by Pure Storage in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague, Lisa Martin. Today, we're going to hear from 3 leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the Head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around 1,000 sustainability leaders worldwide and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to Ajay Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had him on theCUBE before. And not only will we share some useful stats in the market, he will also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is AI, which is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballerio of Elmec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoy the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started. [Presentation]

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the special event Pure Storage, the path to sustainable IT. I am your host, Lisa Martin, very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the Head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure storage. Nicole, welcome to theCUBE.

Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. And I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What nuggets are in this report?

Well, actually, quite a few really interesting nuggets at least for us, and I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about 1,000 sustainability leaders across the globe to understand what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world, we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so there was some thought that perhaps that might play into EMEA being a larger -- having sustainability goals that were more significant, but we actually did not find that. We found sustainability to be really important, no matter where the respondents were located. So very interesting. At Pure, sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set-out to make storage really simple. But it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their own carbon footprints. And so we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space, power and cooling costs and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80%, while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions.

Right. Those 2 teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being a high priority for organizations. You have a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with IT. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked. What are some of the things that you're seeing despite so many people saying sustainability, a huge priority.

Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top road block. So I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, we know that IT has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting company's sustainability goals. So we really want to ensure that these 2 teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see the 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And of the 65% IT is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program or process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint.

It definitely has to be cross-functional. So strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera. These correlations, were they a surprise?

Not entirely. When we look at some of the statistics that come from the places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. And that's now almost 3 years ago. Digital data only accelerates. And by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that, that communication and that correlation is going to be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for IT to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? Like we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward.

And that's really tipped the hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do. But for those 2 for sustainability and IT to come together as part of new of the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I want to dig in a little bit to Pure's ESG goals. What can you share with us about that?

Absolutely. So as I mentioned, Pure is kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the sustainability front for a long time. It's funny as we're doing a lot of this work and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in them, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline Scope 1, 2 and 3 analysis and discovered interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers were running our products in their data centers. So we know that we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, those. They only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious schools set out in the Paris agreement.

That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us is Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations there. Lofty goals at Pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to accomplish those goals in record time.

I hope so.

Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides IT sustainability team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful.

Yes. So I think understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture, we have to solve new challenges. And we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help us to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over-time. So I think that that's something that we need to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently, and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of energy and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we need to get out of the mindset the data centers are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision-making.

So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention. The report shows and the successes that Pure had demonstrate that, that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even a cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can Pure help with customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management plan and they understand the value in it for them.

Yes. So I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right, and help the management to understand, first of all, the impact, right, on climate change. So I think that's the kind of heart's piece. On the mind piece, I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of the equipment. And so especially if you're in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is going to be. Often, maybe the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those 2 teams aren't talking and there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just look at it from a more high-level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is.

That's a great point, great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We still appreciate your insights and your thoughts.

Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you.

Ajay Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. Ajay, it's great to have you back on the program.

Great to be back on, Lisa. Good morning.

Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're going to really unpack what Pure is doing. We're going to get your viewpoint on what you're saying, and you're going to leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on our ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from Pure, about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated.

Absolutely, Lisa. You can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and there's a good reason for it. Data is the new currency, some people call it the new oil and the opportunity to go process this data, gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's going to make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus being kind of someone that quite miss the boat. So data is super critical. And obviously, as part of that, we see all the big benefits but it has to be stored. And that means it's going to consume a lot of resources and therefore, data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated. A recent study pointed to roughly by 2025, 175 zettabytes where each zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And they also say is that pretty slow today, in fact, in the developed world. Every person is having the interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or your e-mail, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes 1% to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and all those aspects, if you can kind of really tamp down the data center energy consumption. Sorry, you were saying?

I was just going to say, it's an incredibly important topic, and the stats on data that you provided. And also, I like how you talked about every 18 seconds, we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long-term implications, the fact that data is growing massively as you shared with the stats that you mentioned, if we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And the consumers expect it. We expect that you are going to deliver these relevant personalized experiences, whether we're doing a transaction in our personalized or in business, but what requirements do technology companies have to really start going down their carbon footprint?

No, absolutely. I kind of think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, Sorry, we can't have any more data center here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and all the hyperscalers scratching their head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some organizations and jurisdictions are seeing pretty much no data center allowed, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that IT has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to drive a sustainable environment. And at Pure, we believe that today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency. So to really be energy efficient means you are going to be successful long term with data. But because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, we've got disk infrastructure, hybrid infrastructure, flash infrastructures, low-end systems, medium-end systems, high-end systems. So a lot of silos, a lot of the inefficiency across the silos because the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, today, a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there.

So Ajay, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its Chief Product Officer would love to get your thoughts. What steps is it implementing to help Pure's customers become more sustainable?

Absolutely. So essentially, we're all inherently motivated, like Pure and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right, innovation, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is how do you make technology and the data we feed into it, faster, smarter, scalable, obviously, but more importantly, sustainable. But you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us, not only to do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today, 80% of the companies, so companies are realizing this, 80% today are, in fact, report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of our leadership with companies, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you name it, right? So mitigating the carbon impact can, in fact, today, be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going. And everybody wanting to skate towards the park, and it's good. It's a good business to be sustainable and meet these customer requirements. In fact, the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kick-starting their sustainability initiatives and many things are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's really part of the big release. So our view is that IT infrastructure can really make a big push towards greener IT and not just going to green-wash it, but actually make things more greener and really take the lead in ESG. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead for the organization, the sustainability aspects.

I'm curious, Ajay, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus IT coming together? And how does Pure help facilitate that, to your point, IT needs to be able to deliver this, but it's a board-level objective these days.

Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that's unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for a lot of companies, and we definitely see customers starting to do that. So in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company to make IT sustainable. And obviously, customers are doing all the things we talked about, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per watt with unmatched storage density so you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And how efficient is that. Compared to other all-flash systems, we tend to be one-fifth. We tend to take one-fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning disk. So you can imagine cutting your -- if data center consumption is, say, 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage because of all the spinning disk. So you had about 0.8% of global consumption. And if you can cut that by 4-fifth, you can already start to make an impact. So we feel we can do that. And also, we are quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one-fifth the power, one-tenth density, but then we take it a step further because, okay, you've got the storage system in the data center. But what about the end-of-life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation. So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We're using our AI technology in Pure 1, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail. And just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customers' data is not impacted and then we recycle that. So you get a full end-to-end life cycle from all the way from the time you deploy, much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back-end, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things.

That's a great point that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own. The customer doesn't have to be involved in that?

That's right. And we do that. It's part of our evergreen service that we offer. A lot of customers sign-up for their service. And in fact, they don't even -- we tell them, hey, that part is about to go, we're going to come in, we're going to swap it out and then we actually recycle that part.

With the power of AI, love that. What are some of the things that companies can do if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a daily topic on the news.

Absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, there are 4 items that I'm going to highlight. First one is they can just start by doing a materiality assessment kind of materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect what the stakeholders want. You have different groups from sales, customers, partners, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product, we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards making an impact from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. Thing number 2, companies are also think about taking an as-a-service approach. The beauty of the as-a-service approach is that you are buying -- your customers are buying outcomes with SLAs. And when you're starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. So that way, you don't have systems sitting idle, waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as-a-service approach. And so for example, for us, we have something called Evergreen One, which is our as-a-service offer where essentially, customers are able to only use and have systems turned on to as much as they're consuming. So that reduces the waste associated with under-utilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chain, end-to-end, right, basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste and that thing, so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that's following sort of good practices across the globe. And such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you also the business benefit that you can also handle surges in demand. For example, for us, during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, whereas most of our competitors lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from 3 to 6 weeks because we had the sustainable supply chain. And so all of these things, the treating are important, but the fourth thing I say is more cultural. And the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of our ethos as a company across all the departments. And we've at Pure, definitely, it's big for us, around sustainability starting with the product design, but all other areas as well. If you follow those 4 items, they'll do a great place to start.

That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity. We can have a whole conversation on that. Also glad Ajay that you brought up culture, that's huge for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business and has to become to your point, part of their ethos. Cultural change management is challenging, although we think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's more on the top line of it. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as an organization lives and breathes that. And the last question for you is, so you outlined the 4 steps organizations can take a look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy.

Absolutely. So obviously, the advice is going to come from a company like Pure, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so our advices for companies that have products, usually, they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your customers, especially if there's got hardware components in it. The biggest generator of e-waste and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that you can handle at the very back-end, you design it upfront in the product. And so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed upfront so that one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system, that non-disruptive approach. It has to be designed into the hardware, software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they are about to fail and then putting them through a waste recovery process. So that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy. Again, it comes down to if that is seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do that type of work. So I mean, it's an important thing. Look, this year, with the spike in energy prices, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable not just at the initial install point, but from an end-to-end full life cycle standpoint.

Absolutely. And I love that you brought intention, that is everything that Pure is doing is with such thought and intention and really for organizations in any industry to become more sustainable to develop an ESG strategy, to your point, it all needs to start with intention and of course, that cultural adoption. Ajay, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what Pure is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable IT. We appreciate your insights and your time.

Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board. [Presentation]

We're back talking about the path to sustainable IT, and now we're going to get the perspective from Mattia Ballerio, who is with Elmec Informatica, an IT services firm in the beautiful Lombardia region of Italy, north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you.

All right. Before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elmec Informatica. What's your focus? Talk about your unique value add to customers.

Yes. So basically, Elmec Informatica is a network company from the north part of Italy and is a managed service provider in the IT area, okay? So the main focus area of Elmec is rich digital transformation and innovation to our clients with a focus on infrastructure services, workplace services and also cybersecurity services, okay? And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and innovation through technology and sustainability.

They are obviously, very hot topics right now, sustainability, environmental impact. They're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries, particularly acute right now in Europe with the energy challenges. You've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term speak to? And what can others learn from it?

Yes. At Elmec, our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and values and also in customer territory, but also employee-centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessment to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to build such a responsibility strategy. Specifically, during the past year, we have been particularly focused on defined sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals.

Okay. So you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment. You can set a baseline and then you have other data by which you can compare that and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business, the strategy? How has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Because this hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today? And is it a competitive advantage for you?

Yes. For all intent and purpose, sustainability is a competitive advantage for Elmec. I mean it's so because at the time of profound transformation in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work-life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, Elmec's attempt is to meet high standards of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach. At the same time, is the reconditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come back from rental. I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to Elmec sustainability are increasingly frequent at in depth, which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14001, okay.

Got it. So in a previous life, I actually did some work with power companies. And there were 2 big factors in IT that affected the power consumption. Obviously, virtualization was a big one. If you can consolidate servers, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage. And we used to actually go in with the engineers and the power company, put an alligator clip to measure of an all-flash array versus the spinning disk. And it was a big impact. So I want to talk about your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about your experience there? Why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow, what's your experience been?

Yes. It was basically an easy answer to our business needs, okay. Because you said before that in Elmec, we managed a lot of data, okay? And in the past, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the space of storing the data. And when Pure came to us and share their products, their vision to the data management journey for Elmec Informatica, it was very easy to choose Pure. Why? With values and numbers, we create a business case and we see that our power consumption usage was much less more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past, okay? And so of course, you have to manage a gradual deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the Pure technology brings to our IT systems. And of course, the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first good part of our trip with Pure. And after that, we approached also sustainability in long term of choosing Pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure. And of course, this was again challenge for us because it allows us to extend the lifecycle management of our data centers, but also it allowed us to improve the facilities of using technology from our technical side, okay? So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choice of Pure Storage technologies, okay? Of course, this easy usage mode, let me say, it allow us to bring this value to all our clients that put their data in our data centers.

So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I haven't put you on the spot because I was on Pure's website, and I saw in their ESG report comparison with a generic competitor. Presuming that competitor was not a 2010 spinning disc system, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and Ajay earlier in the program. Do you think -- again, I'm going to put you in this spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen.

Yes, of course, it's more competitive because basically, it allows to service provider to do a much more efficient value proposition and offer services that brings more value to the customers, okay? So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the value that Pure as inside, by design in the technology is for us, very, very important and very, very strategic because with like a glass, we can ourselves transfer, try to transfer the values of Pure Technologies to our service provider clients.

Okay. Mattia, let's wrap and talk about sort of near-term 2023 and then longer term, it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay, unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates, that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated now. It's a topic that everybody is measuring. What's next for Elmec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have for sustainability leaders that want to make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line.

Okay. So sustainability is fortunately a wider spread concept. And our role in this grid game is to define a strategy aligned with the common fundamental goals for the future of planet and capable of exposing our inclination and particularities. Elmec sustainability goals in the near future, I can say that will be basically free. One define sustainability plan, okay, its fundamental to the finance plan. Then it's very important to monitor its emissions, and we will calculate our carbon footprint, okay? And last but not least, produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demand of customers, suppliers and also partners, okay? So I can say that these 3 target will be our direction in the future, okay?

Yes. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan, you got to monitor and measure you can't improve what you can't measure. So you set a baseline, you're going to report on that. You're going to analyze the data and you're going to make continuous improvement.

Yes.

Mattia, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your perspectives from the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it.

Yes. Thank you for having me aboard. Thank you very much.

It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm going to be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus, rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability. And you should. Many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of the century were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor R&D is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation and machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results, thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net, so check them out at your convenience. And don't forget to go to siliconangle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out purestorage.com. There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, Pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that Pure Storage. I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction, it's kind of on brand, they are for Pure, well done. But to the top of today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around ESG, Pure's environmental, social and governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity. And of course, you'll see that Pure has some work to do there, but kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress and there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to sustainable IT, make possible by pure storage produced with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.