Beware of Vampire Squids ...
... bearing Gifts.
Pure Storage has appointed Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Barclays Plc to ready it for an initial public offering (IPO), says Reuters. Citing people familiar with the financial footling as its source, the newswire says the company thinks the markets will toss over US$3bn in its direction some time later this year. Pure …
If Pure Storage actually does IPO, the game is up. If you look at what Pure is actually selling, it's not really ready for the enterprise, and anyone worth their salt knows it--including their employees. A lot of folks went to Pure on the promise of making a ton of money by getting in early and going public. Once that happens, the A-player sales and engineering folks will look for their next opportunity. Sales will plateau and current customers, as well as prospects, will be left to determine what they're really getting if they invest in Pure's systems. Then again, if they don't IPO, those same folks will eventually get frustrated and leave anyway to look for a better opportunity.
Plus they also have a massive architectural challenge. Not only are their current arrays lacking enterprise features but it will also need completely redesigning to move away from serial SSDs - the current range is pretty much a dead end. This will be a huge upheaval and is probably why the Netapp chap joined recently.
I don't like salt , won't buy it,use it , or sell it , and..it is not healthy. . So I have no worth in salt. Is salt still in commodity Where is the obvious evidence that the pure products not ready for enterprise?
The other comment about IPOs , "A" players ,etc can be applied to all startups. There usually are vesting periods for stock and for "a" players some other terms that keep most of the greedy "A"s , that may have slipped thru Scott's exec team's review, on board. Having been in many startups, up to around 800 emp are all "a" players maybe even 100% stayed years after IPO.
The 'obvious evidence' that they are not enterprise ready is readily available on their public website. Take a very quick scan down their product datasheet and you will see that most of the standard enterprise functionality that customers require is not available. Customers currently running tried and tested disk arrays will not be able to migrate onto this platform until Pure complete their data management suite of products and this will severely limit Pure's progress.
Once Pure goes public and Wall Street sees their cash burn-rate, they won't look so attractive. Pure has been gobbling VC cash, chewing it up and pooping it out in the form of rediculously expensive marketing. Add the large R&D cost of re-designing their storage platform to use DIMM-type flash and not SSDs, their over-aggressive hiring of sales staff for an all-channel sales model, and expensive talent like Beepy. It doesn't look good.
Once they're public, they'll have to get their rediculous spending under control which negatively affects everything.