Everpure (PSTG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. I think we're about to get started. I think it's the last event of the conference, I believe. So anyway, thanks for joining, everyone. Just a reminder, I'm Mark Newman, Bernstein's U.S. IT hardware analyst, and great pleasure to welcome Charles Giancarlo, CEO of Pure Storage.

Charlie, please, my friend.

Charlie, Charlie. Charlie. So before we get started, I have to read -- I'm told I have to read the safe harbor. So statements made in these discussions, which are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements based upon current expectations. Actual results could differ materially from those projected due to a number of factors, including those referenced in Pure Storage's most recent SEC filings on Forms 10-Q, 10-K and 8-K. So now we've got past that. I'd like to perhaps, Charlie, if you could start off, you just reported earnings and you also I believe you just changed your name to Everpure. Maybe if you wouldn't mind just summarize why the name change and maybe just briefly summarize your earnings before we jump into the questions, if that's okay.

Yes, absolutely. Monday morning of this week, we announced our name change as well as an acquisition, which I'll spend a minute on. And then just yesterday, of course, we announced our latest quarterly is our fourth quarter, so last quarter and last year's full earnings release. So Monday was an interesting day. We changed our name. We've been Pure Storage for about 16 years. And so the question might be why change the name? Well, we've really very much redefined the enterprise storage industry in many different ways. We've reached a point to where while we started out with a niche products fitting into an important but small percentage of a corporation storage needs. Today, we can really fulfill any storage need that -- and every storage need that our customers have. So it really makes us a full supplier across their needs. And being the -- not just being the newest, but being the company that invests the most in R&D in this area, we do it with a single operating environment with a very consistent hardware architecture. And we do it with the world's highest Net Promoter Score and highest customer satisfaction, the highest reliability. So that's a fundamental change in where we sit today. As of today, not only do we spend the most from the standpoint of percentage of revenue and R&D, we actually invest more R&D in data storage and management than any one of our competitors in the business, including the largest companies. So it's a big change in terms of our position. Secondly, we have, over the last several years, been investing more and more in data management. That is making the data more manageable and more useful to companies, especially as they look to analytics and AI. On Monday, we also acquired a company called 1touch that accelerates our activity in this level to where we can add context to the data we store so that data becomes more meaningful from an information standpoint for input into analytics and AI. So that's really, again, accelerating our movement into this data management space. So why the name change? Well, we were Pure Storage and the personas that make decisions around data management, around data security tend to be different people than the people -- than the storage admins who make decisions around storage. And storage in our name was actually holding us back from having conversations with those other people because those other personas would say, well, I don't manage storage. I don't need to speak to these people. we have other companies that we speak with. So it was a very simple name change. We're still pure. We're just more pure than ever. Therefore, Everpure, and it's going to open up the aperture for some of the conversations. Now a year from now, is it going to matter? No, we're not a consumer company, but this was about opening up the opportunity to speak to more personas and making that easier for our sellers. So yesterday, we announced earnings. Just to give you a snapshot, it was our first $1 billion quarter. So we were roughly $1.60 billion. Last quarter, we announced that was roughly 16% year-over-year growth for the full year. It was actually 20% growth quarter on -- that is Q4 this year versus Q4 last year. And we also announced that -- or we guided Q1 to be a 28% growth quarter year-over-year and for the year as a whole, a 19% year-over-year. And that's compared to last year, where we guided 11%, we delivered roughly 16%. And next year, we're guiding 19%. And one more comparison point, we had a couple of our competitors announced today. They're in the low single digits in terms of growth rate. So our continuation of our core business to gain share is, in our view, accelerating at this point.

Would you like to briefly comment on the acquisition before we jump into?

So yes, the acquisition of 1touch. 1touch is a company that builds a product that is able to search for data repositories within customers, and then it is able to identify the data within those repositories. It's able to classify it, understand the context of the data, look for data, understand the security posture of that data, determine what's at risk, whether there's, for example, PII, personally identifiable information in that, able to mask it and provide a variety of other services that we plan on adding to our -- adding that context to our data within our storage environments so that, again, that data now is not just raw data, it's data that's been contextualized that has really effectively gone through an ETL chain in operation, in its operational form to be able to provide a richer data set to analytics and AI.

Great. Appreciate that. So if I just kicking off some questions, and then we can see if any questions from the audience. I'd like to talk a bit about NAND flash given what's going on in the market with high pricing and shortages. So how do you view Everpure -- I have to get used to saying your name. How do you view Everpure's positioning within the NAND supply chain given the supply constraints and dynamics at the moment?

Yes. Well, we're on a path because we -- as of last year, for the first time, are selling not just to enterprise customers, but to hyperscalers as well. So our responsibility for NAND flash this year will be multiple times what it was the year before, okay? So we do have long-term contracts in place. But the spot market for NAND has gone -- like memory, like CPUs has gone crazy. The rate of change of pricing in the spot market, the world has not really seen anything like this ever. Now unfortunately, given the events of 2021, 2022, the whole tariff craziness last year and now this, unfortunately, we're using unprecedented too many times in the same decade. But really, this is remarkable. Some prices on some products have more than doubled in less than 4 months. That's to give you a sense of the rate of change of these things. So it is -- and the other thing is there are a lot of shortages now that are popping up in the market because there's just more demand than there is supply. So it's going to be a topsy-turvy supply market for probably the remainder of this year. We've weathered this very well in the '21, '22 time frame. We think we'll weather this as well as anyone, if not better, this time around, but there is a bit of unpredictability to all of this.

Are you NAND, are you constrained -- are you constrained by your supply of NAND flash at the moment?

Not at the moment. No.

Not at the moment. And with regards to the NAND pricing, does your pricing framework allow you to immediately requote existing backlog? How does that impact your margins? Is there a timing difference between your cost rate change?

Rate of change makes a difference because when we provide pricing to customers, well, generally, your teams, as you might imagine, they're talking to customers quite a bit before a proposal goes out. So expectations are set. Then a proposal goes out pricing. That proposal usually has a time frame on it. Typically, in the past, it was 90 days. It's now been shortened to 60 days, and it may shorten even further. Many of our competitors now are not only issuing pricing that's only valid for a week, but some of them have said, actually, we reserve the right to change pricing until the day we ship. So that's sort of the span of what you're seeing in the market. So when costs change faster, then you can change pricing in the market, that's when gross margins get a little wonky.

So there's going to be a bit of a transitory period. Price, as costs go up, it takes time to reflect it?

That's correct. Once you reach some cost and price stability, then we don't expect any change in gross margin.

Once the NAND price stabilizes, then you believe those costs will pass through. So your margins will be...

Absolutely. It's a competitive. Just to be clear, we're not competing against our price last year. We're not competing against raw commodity prices. We're competing against other system vendors who have the same challenges on input costs that we do.

So next topic, I'd like to talk about NAND flash versus hard disk drives. Everpure recently published a white paper suggesting that by 2028, virtually no new all HDD enterprise data center systems will be sold. But data suggests at the moment that hard disk drives still represent around 80% of gigabytes in data centers.

In hyperscalers, not in enterprise.

Right, right. Not in enterprise. So maybe you could just help us, help reconcile that view.

Well, the current supply-demand market, which basically has exhausted supply of any type of data storage. In fact, hard disks are sold out through '27. Flash is effectively sold out through '27. So customers are just buying whatever they can that satisfies their needs. So that transition has slowed down a bit. But these cost curves of both semiconductor, believe it or not, you can tell I'm not that young. When I was in business school, we studied the cost decline of magnetic hard disk. That was quite a long time ago.

Innovators' dilemma.

Yes, Innovators' -- well, it was pre-innovator's dilemma, I hate to say, but yes. And the fact of the matter is the hard disk, if you extract any particular year and just look at it on a long-term basis, has followed that cost curve for 50 years, okay? Except for any individual year supply-demand imbalances, the cost decline of flash has followed its -- you could call it Moore's Law, it hasn't been around as long, but for many decades. So the current price or supply-demand imbalance is a temporary phenomenon, hopefully temporary. We will get back to those curves. There's always a reversion to the mean. I may be off a year or 2, but I'm not off on a long-term basis.

So I guess my question is, you're talking about all hard disk drive becoming less. Basically, you're calling for flash to take more share longer term in storage in the data center. However, if you talk to some of the hard disk drive makers and the NAND makers directly, they're saying that they're not really changing market share. They're kind of going after separate markets. I mean how do you -- I mean how do you think about that? I mean how do you think about -- do you think that 80/20 is going to change? Do you think that 80-20...

I have literally no doubt whatsoever. First of all, let's -- why is it that we are able to sell into the hyperscaler market and none of our competitors sell into the hyperscale market. We have a very unique technology, right? Hyperscalers today use 1 of 2 different commodities for their storage. They use either hard disk or they use SSD. We don't provide hard disk, we don't provide SSD. We provide something we call direct flash. And most people say, well, wait a minute, SSD is flash. Not quite. SSD is flash masquerading as a hard drive. Literally, it is. That's why it worked in your computer automatically and why you can switch one to the other. But flash is a semiconductor, a magnetic hard drive is a mechanical device. They work very differently. So to take a semiconductor, which is a very powerful technology and make it look like a mechanical device, there's a whole bunch of translation and other logic. There's a little computer inside an SSD that is translating what flash looks like, makes it look like a mechanical hard drive. We don't do that. We use raw flash. Our software allows that raw flash to be used the way that flash wants to be used, and we connect that to the application. We're literally the only company in the world that does this. Okay, so you might say, great, what's the benefit? The benefit is we get a 30% to 40% price performance improvement by doing that versus SSDs. SSDs waste price performance. Now so why do people use them? Because disk is managed out of the operating system. Nobody likes to change operating system environments. And so SSDs were a brilliant way of getting flash into a computer very rapidly. All of our competitors were based on hard disk. They could go to flash very quickly by substituting SSD. Guess what? Hyperscalers started out on hard disk to be able to accelerate performance, they could throw in SSDs, easy-peasy. Now that storage is 25% or more of their space power and cooling and cost, getting an extra 30%, 40% out of that. We are 1/10 the power space and cooling of hard disk. We are probably twice the power or 1/2 of the power space and cooling of SSD, and we're more performant. So there are a lot of reasons why hyperscalers will use our technology. And that goes even beyond this, I won't get too techy on you, but that will benefit here. And to answer part of your question, what is the benefit over hard disk, Well, 1/10 space power and cooling, when 25% of your space power and cooling is storage is a big deal, and we are same total cost of ownership. So...

So total cost -- basically TCO is lower even though the dollar per...

Even if price higher, TCO is lower.

Right. Actually, there was a lot of discussion last year around -- I think it was September, maybe August, September about NAND. It was actually SSDs. So maybe that's a little bit outside of what you exactly do, but SSDs taking share from hard disk drives due to the shortage of hard disk. Did you hear -- are you aware of that? Is that...

I'm not only aware of it but I can confirm that, that is, in fact, taking place. As I said, there's a shortage of everything. There's not enough of everything to go around. And so there's more than one reason why even SSDs in hyperscaler, which if they're not using us -- well, even if they are using us, they're also using SSDs. But if they're not using us, there are only other choices SSDs. And there are several reasons, one of which being not enough hard disk another of which is hard disks don't have the performance that these enhanced data centers need and therefore, they're going to more SSDs.

But given that now -- I mean, back then, NAND wasn't as short and pricing wasn't really going up that much. This is August, September. Now that NAND is also probably even more short than hard disk drives and pricing is going up dramatically, is that going to shift back to hard disk drives?

No. I mean hard disk drives are also short. So there's -- at this point, they're just desperate for anything they can put in place.

Okay. So you've argued before that for AI hyperscalers, the real bottlenecks are data center shell and power costs, not drive costs. So there's 2 interesting dynamics playing out right now; power is increasing, increasing becoming a limiting factor, which clearly favors NAND, but offsetting. But then on the other hand, you have this rapidly increasing NAND prices versus hard disk drive prices per terabyte. So how do you think about that?

Hard disk drive prices are going up now rapidly as well.

What kind of -- how much are you seeing?

Over 50%.

Per terabyte?

Yes.

Okay. Well, the recent numbers from the hard disk drive makers is implying up like 2% year-on-year terabyte so far reported. So that blended average, though. So if there's some specific contracts that are up 50%, that's...

Spot pricing is going up as much as 50%.

I see. Well, still NAND pricing has, in some case, spot prices up like $5.

Double.

It depends on which contract. Anyway, depending on which contract you look at, NAND price is clearly up much, much more than hard disk drive. So there's 2 competing dynamics there. Just maybe you could just help us reconcile that and talk about TCO and how that plays into this.

I will. But I think we're spending too much time on -- I mean, on really basic hardware and not enough on software and services and especially with respect to our business is being driven by the enterprise business, to be very clear, okay? And we're spending a little too much time, I think, in my opinion, relative to our revenue and growth on this particular topic. But that being said...

I'll change the topic next question.

Okay. So I'm sorry, I forgot the question.

No, I was saying the 2 competing dynamics of power is becoming more of a bottleneck. NAND is better for power, but on the other hand, NAND price going up more.

Look, we're in a topsyturvy world in terms of lack of supply, so shortages plus pricing. Right now, the hyperscalers seem to be -- demand seems to be price insensitive. And what I mean by that is they want to build out their data centers. They are desperate for delivering the data centers on time at the capacity that they need. They seem to be price insensitive. That's not true in the enterprise, but it is very true in this current race that we have. And so it's really less about almost everything else pricing than it is about just getting the bits. And I'd say that's what's driving most of what's going on right now.

Okay. Yes, changing topics a little bit. So -- your company is, I think, the first storage vendor certified for NVIDIA's DGX SuperPOD, making it like a true Day 1 choice for organizations building industrial scale AI factories. So direct flash, your product remains a key differentiator for your company. So I just wanted to ask you to assess your competitive positioning in light of the new Vera Rubin platform and what Jensen Huang talked about at CES, given how much more important storage is going to be and then how it's becoming rearchitected in the Vera Rubin platform?

Yes. Well, it's interesting. This is -- so another new segment of the storage business because it is a new segment. It's not the -- at best, it will become 10% of the overall storage market. So I want to put it in perspective. Is the AI segment, specialized storage for AI, of which we have a product that -- now one of the things that is -- we use the direct flash, but another thing that makes our system unique is we use the same software and the same hardware architecture for all storage needs, block file an object, large-scale, small scale, high performance, low cost, all the different protocols, including the very, very high-performance AI environment, right, which is what we use for SuperPOD, for interfacing with non-hyperscale GPU-type environments. Hyperscalers, we use our hyperscale architecture. But in the case of GPU clouds or any of the tech titans that are building out large-scale environments, we use what we call our FlashBlade//EXA platform. That platform provides the world's highest performance. And in the case of some of the newest elements associated with this type of system, such as KV cache, which is a key value cache. We are able to deploy literally the best benchmarks in the world in this area. So it's a relatively new market, but as I mentioned, it really is very specialized. It goes to the GPU clouds generally in the tech titans. That's not the problem that exists in the enterprise environment. In the enterprise environment, most of whom will not be actually building their own GPU environments. They'll be using, in many cases, the GPU clouds. The enterprise challenge is that their data is not yet ready to be used by AI. I think for those of you that have been in the data management market, you know that in order for data to be prepared to be used for analytics or AI, it has to go what's commonly known as an ETL chain, extract, transform, load. This ETL chain is held together with many different bits of software that come from generally different companies and a lot of people, a lot of human middleware, a lot of data scientists that put this together, usually weeks, if not months of work to transform data that's very raw coming out of operational systems like databases. And add all the context and meaning and semantics to it, so it becomes, I'll call it, information to sort of distinguish it from data, becomes information that can be used for AI, okay? That information is stored in yet other systems, usually other storage systems, many of which we provide and other compute environments. So we think of this as being very wasteful in many ways. One is it's wasteful of human labor. Two is wasteful of time. You're not using real-time data. You're using data that's been transformed over weeks or months. And AI, you'll see this often, your AI isn't giving you timely information, certainly not in a business environment. It's giving information that's based on information that's weeks, if not months old. For business, they want to be able to operate on their real-time information. So where we're going, which is part of this acquisition that we announced, is being able to add the proper context, the proper information semantics to the data as it's being created in the first place so that it's more ready to be used by AI. When you talk about, for example, RAG, retrieval augmented generation, that's a term that was created by NVIDIA, what they're doing is they're saying, okay, well, we're training on old data, and we're coming up with an old response, but then we'll go out and check with the real-time data to see if it makes sense. We're trying to bypass that entire gap between real-time data and data that's already been transformed or data that takes weeks to transform. So that's really where we're focused.

Got it. Got it. Fantastic. That's very helpful. I believe you've surpassed your FY '26 shipment target of 1 to 2 exabytes.

Correct. This is to the hyperscalers again.

But you've also described FY '27 as mixed and nuanced revenue model, I believe. I think we're talking about hyperscaler versus enterprise. So I just wanted to understand, given the current engagement you have with one big hyperscaler. What does that means essentially for your margins and revenue going forward?

That's a huge question. Okay. Let me see if I can hit it piece by piece. So we had announced last year that our expectation for this year was double-digit exabytes into the hyperscale part of our business. that we are standing by that. In fact, we now believe it will be larger than what we had previously identified. But we didn't give a specific number on it. We've become very cautious. We've become very careful now with our public statements as to the exact nature of what we're shipping and to whom because we do have a primary hyperscaler, and they have told us they don't want their proprietary information being shared. So we have to be more thoughtful in how we describe these things. But in any case, this year that is -- let me go by calendar years. This 2026 calendar, we will ship a lot more than we shipped in 2025, and we believe we will ship a lot more in '27 than we shipped in '26. And so that's that. We've refined and now standardized our -- the economic model by which I mean what does the gross margin picture look like in the operating margin picture of the products that we will ship to the hyperscale customer base. And last year, it looked more like it was going to be nearly all software. This year and the standard that we've created for a wide variety of reasons, which if we really want to get into, we could do that. But suffice it to say that as we look at it this year, we're going to have gross margin in that business between about 75% and 85%, and that's our standard model as we go forward.

Okay. So before it was more -- it was mostly software for hyperscalers. But now going forward, it's going to be blend of software and?

It's a blend of some amount of hardware. The answer to that is our direct flash modules, which are not SSDs. But remember, when they buy an SSD, they buy one thing, it's one price. They don't have to worry about how it's built, where it's built. and so forth. The previous model required that they would build the DFMs. The DFMs have lots of different -- have mostly flash, but they have other components on there. It put the burden on them. They don't want that burden. We're taking that burden. So while they are still -- we are not procuring the NAND, that will be procured separately, but we are procuring all the other components. So that requires a slightly lower gross margin. It's not providing us any less margin overall. It's just that now that those components will flow through our P&L rather than someone else.

And given your exposure to enterprise, are you seeing much of adoption of AI data centers, AI servers in enterprise versus in the cloud?

Very little. It's going primarily into the same enterprise customers that were previously buying what's called HPC or high-performance computing environments. So no, it's largely going into the GPU clouds, obviously. It's going into pharma. It's going into automotive. It's going into quant funds, but they were buying GPUs and "supercomputers" already. So it's going -- all national labs, obviously. And what is different is that sovereign clouds are more and more buying GPUs, and they were not a factor before.

I see. And are you seeing like significant attach for storage when they implement any kind of local on-prem AI service?

Yes. But I want to put it within reason. Again, I'll say that the storage that's going to be associated directly with AI is still going to be about 10% of the storage market. There's a lot more hype around it in the store, which is very different than networking and obviously compute, very different. In, let's say, a traditional data center, storage is about 25% of the overall capital purchase, if you will. In the AI data center, it's less than 10%. It's just there's -- compared to the cost of GPUs and the cost of 400 gigabyte -- gigabit rather, 800 gigabit network switches and so forth, it's just a smaller component.

Did you have any exposure to neoclouds?

A lot, yes.

And so one of the things I found quite interesting from one of the other guest speakers we got here, I think it was one of the hard disk drive makers was that neoclouds, they actually -- they're building their own GPU servers, AI servers, but they are actually using storage at the hyperscalers. So they don't have as much storage locally. Do you see that?

So there's a lot of that. And let me describe why. There's multiple tiers of storage. It's only the very hot tier of storage that is the very, very fast tier of storage that they really need to have directly connected to their GPU clouds. All of the other storage is effectively data in waiting and the performance requirements on that can be quite a bit less. And so for some of them, if some of them want to outsource it to the major cloud providers, there's no reason not to. I think part of the reason why they do that is because they're all cash strapped. And so the less that they need to spend on CapEx, the more that they can spend in an OpEx way. If you're a start-up growing with capital needs, the less you need to spend on CapEx, the better.

I see. But you're still seeing a need for flash storage, direct flash storage locally for the neoclouds.

On that high-performance tier.

I see. Got it. To what extent is...

By the way, we see it both on the high-performance tier and the lower performance tiers. Not all of them are going to the cloud for the lower performance tiers.

I see. I see. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about your Nutanix partnership? Is that acting as a pull-through for FlashArray sales in the enterprise? Can you just talk a little bit about how that relationship works and what's the impact?

Yes. No, I'd like to expand that. So we're seeing a really big demand now for alternatives to VMware, to be very direct. After the Broadcom acquisition, in many cases, the price for VMware has been increased by a factor of 5 or more. And many customers, even if they've signed on to a new license, are looking to get off of VMware in the next few years. There are a few alternatives for them. Nutanix is one, and that's been a very good partnership with Nutanix. Another one is Kubernetes virtualization. So moving to what's colloquially called KubeVirt for Kubernetes virtualization, generally running on either SUSE or Red Hat. And our product, which is called Portworx, which operates both for -- it provides for staple storage for both container-based workloads as well as Kubernetes virtualization workloads. It's almost the only solution. It's practically required for any scaled Kubernetes virtualization project. We're seeing huge growth in that area. Customers are desperate to move away from VMware in many cases. Their time frames are limited by their current contract. They want to get -- they want to move their environment by the end of that contract, and it's driving a lot of demand for both of our solutions.

Okay. I would like to see -- open up to the audience to see if there's any questions from the audience. Any questions? We've got a microphone here. That's all super clear. Do you see? There's one question here.

I just want to share a little bit more practically how it actually works. So I work for Fidelity. We need storage.

Thank you. You're a wonderful shareholder, a very long-term shareholder.

But how would you approach a customer like that? Just how does it work? How do we purchase things from you? Or do we use -- how do we make decisions on where to store our stuff?

Yes. So we didn't really spend a lot of time on our core business, which is growing at unbelievable rates and where we're picking up market share like crazy. We boast the world's highest user Promoter Score, right, Net Promoter Score at 84. That was our latest for last year was 84. Our competitors are in the 30s. Now why is that? Why is our Net Promoter Score so high? Our product literally delivers -- and this is not an exaggeration. In fact, it's an underestimation. Our product delivers more than 10x greater reliability. It requires 10x fewer people to manage, right? Generally half the space power and cooling. So we have a lot of bona fides to our name. We basically give all of the storage admins out there, their weekends back because they don't have to worry about us failing, which is a major problem in data centers is storage failures, right? So we provide a remarkable -- and we're the only vendor that provides nondisruptive upgrades forever. So we have a unique program called Evergreen. What is Evergreen? This is unique in all the industry. When our customers buy our product, and they take what we call our subscription. So this is -- don't think of this as a service contract. It's a subscription. What does that mean? What it means is we consistently upgrade and update the product every year, year after year on a consistent basis so that after -- now our earliest customers are about 12, 13 years old. If you were to visit that one purchase that they made and visit that installation, that product looks like a product we sold last year. In other words, the product is always new. It'd be like buying a car once and always having a new product without having to go through a disruptive upgrade, without having to turn your applications off, remove it, put it in a new one. No, no. This is upgraded on the fly without taking the applications down. It sounds like magic, and we can take you through it. We're the only ones in any industry that does this, nondisruptive upgrades, just like you expect from a SaaS platform, okay? When you subscribe to a SaaS service, you don't expect it to go down. You do expect them to upgrade it. You expect them to improve it every year, but you don't expect any downtime. That's what we deliver on-prem, all right? Now we also delivered it entirely as a service. You don't even have to buy it day 1. You just pay for what you consume, and we deliver that as a service. So that's another unique offering. So part of the reason why we're growing now well into the double digits, our competitors are flat. maybe growing single digits is because of this incredible service that we're able to provide. Now we're the only ones that deliver -- so storage is typically subservient to the application. Each array is managed on its own to that application, right? We, over the last year, have delivered a new upgrade to our software so that all of the customer's storage appears as a cloud. So they might have tens or hundreds of arrays across their worldwide environment. It just appears as a cloud service. And what they do then is set up policies for how data is handled. And the service, if you will, takes care -- the software takes care of where the data is placed, how it's managed, what policies are set against it. So they're managing their data rather than managing their individual storage. So our typical gross margin is in the 65% to 70% range. Our competitors' gross margin is in the 40s. What's the difference? The difference is software. The difference is we're managing the customers' data. We're not just providing them a storage system.

Great. Thanks very much. Any more questions from the audience? I don't see any hands. Maybe Charlie, to wrap up, I mean, what do you think people are missing here for your company, Everpure? I mean, is there something -- maybe just kind of just to wrap up, things you think Wall Street are missing, things that you want to add that you think people don't understand about your company would be?

Well, I think our long-term shareholders who we've had for 10 years now aren't missing anything at all. They know our company very well. We've had the same long-term shareholders honestly, they are fantastic supporters of the company. They understand our strategy. They understand where they're going. The hyperscale business of ours has, in my view, unfortunately attracted a lot of hedge funds that are betting, okay, this quarter, they will announce a new hyperscaler, run up the stock and then we don't announce a new hyperscaler and they run out of the stock. So we have a lot of volatility now, which I would much prefer not to have. But the hyperscale part of the business is something that we're betting on. It's going to be a good long-term investment. In the meantime, our I believe we've hit in a sense, escape velocity on our core business, which is after all, we're roughly -- we're almost $4 billion going over -- hopefully going over $4 billion this year in a $40 billion business. We have a lot of market share to make up there. And that's a very exciting part of our business, and I think we're hitting escape velocity. We have the ability now to overcome all of our competitors in that space. And I think that there's too much focus, if you will, on the -- not that it's not exciting, but when it's less than 10% of our revenues and it extracts 60% of the time on analyst calls, it's just too much focus on that part of the business rather than the core, which is growing really well.

Got it. Okay. Well, great. Charlie, thanks very much for joining us today. We appreciate it.

Yes. Thank you.

Thanks so much. All right. Cheers.