Everpure (PSTG) Bernstein Insights: What's next in tech? - 4th Annual Tech, Media, Telecom Forum summary

Strategic updates and business transformation

• Announced a name change from Pure Storage to Everpure, reflecting a broader focus on data management and enabling conversations with new decision-makers beyond storage admins.

• Acquired 1touch to enhance data management capabilities, enabling contextualization of stored data for analytics and AI.

• Achieved a milestone with the first billion-dollar quarter, reporting $1.06 billion in Q4 revenue and 16% year-over-year growth, with guidance for 19% growth in the coming year.

• Core business is accelerating market share gains, outperforming competitors with low single-digit growth.

Market dynamics and supply chain

• Facing unprecedented volatility in NAND flash pricing and supply, with some prices more than doubling in four months; both flash and hard disk drives are sold out through 2027.

• Not currently constrained by NAND supply, but pricing proposals have been shortened to 60 days due to rapid cost changes.

• Gross margins may fluctuate during periods of cost instability but are expected to normalize once pricing stabilizes.

• Competing on system value rather than raw commodity prices, as all vendors face similar input cost challenges.

Technology and competitive positioning

• DirectFlash technology offers 30–40% better price/performance than SSDs, with significant reductions in power, space, and cooling requirements.

• Certified as the first storage vendor for NVIDIA's DGX SuperPOD, positioning as a day-one choice for AI infrastructure.

• FlashBlade//EXA platform delivers top performance for AI workloads, supporting all storage protocols with a unified architecture.

• AI-specific storage is expected to remain a niche, about 10% of the overall storage market, with most enterprise AI workloads running in GPU clouds.