Pure Storage Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
May 28, 2025
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Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Pure Storage First Quarter Fiscal twenty twenty six Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Paul Dyatz, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Pure's first quarter fiscal year twenty twenty six earnings conference call. On the call, we have Charlie Giancarlo, Chief Executive Officer Kevin Chrysler, Chief Financial Officer and Rob Lee, Chief Technology Officer. Following Charlie's and Kevin's prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued after close of market and is posted on our website where this call is being simultaneously webcast.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

The slides that accompany this webcast can be downloaded at investor.purestorage.com. On this call today, we will make forward looking statements, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding our financial outlook and operations, our strategy, technology and its advantages, our current and new product offerings and competitive industry and economic trends. Any forward looking statements we make today are based on facts and assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Our actual results may differ materially from the results forecasted, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

A discussion of some of the risks and uncertainties related to our business is contained in our filings with the SEC, and we refer you to these public filings. During this call, all financial metrics and associated growth rates are non GAAP measures other than revenue, remaining performance obligations or RPO and cash and investments. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are provided in our earnings press release and slides. This call is being broadcast live on the Pure Storage Investor Relations website and is being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be available on the IR website and is the property of Pure Storage.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Our second quarter fiscal twenty twenty six quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, 07/18/2025. With that, I'll turn it over to Charlie.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Thank you, Paul, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 FY twenty twenty six earnings call. Thank you for joining us today. Pure delivered solid performance in Q1, delivering double digit growth within a dynamic macro environment. Our introduction of Fusion two point zero last quarter has received an outstanding reception. Already, almost a hundred customers are using or testing Fusion to manage their data infrastructure.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Customers are implementing their data management policies in software and applying their governance across their global data estate, ensuring consistent policy enforcement at scale and reducing human error. As I shared last quarter, our Fusion v two software eliminates data silos, transforming fragmented storage into a unified enterprise data cloud. At our annual Accelerate conference, we will unveil how our latest innovations enable our customers to create their own enterprise data cloud, allowing them to focus more on their business outcomes rather than their infrastructure. This past quarter, we launched our newest FlashBlade, FlashBlade Exa. FlashBlade Exa will be the industry's highest performing storage platform for AI and high performance computing when it is delivered later this quarter.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Traditional HPC storage was built for predictable workloads and demands ongoing tuning to deliver proper performance for different workloads. But modern AI environments require a wide variety of performance levels consistently delivered across tens of thousands of GPUs. FlashBlade Exa delivers ultrafast data access with unmatched read and write bandwidth using a new disaggregated architecture which scales effortlessly to support massive GPU clusters. And it provides the ease of installation, operation, management, and upgradability that Pure is known for. Q one was a strong quarter in our breadth of AI wins across customers and segments and across scale and use cases.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

First, we deliver industry leading high performance storage for public and private GPU farms, supporting small, medium, and large machine learning and training workloads. Second, as enterprises adopt inference engines and retrieval augmented generation or RAD to apply commercial large language models to proprietary data, they need storage infrastructure that scales non disruptively and adapts to evolving AI demands. Third, AI is accelerating the push to modernize IT by breaking down infrastructure and data silos, enabling faster, broader access to real time information. Unlike other vendors requiring different products for different use cases, Pure's unified platform handles the full range of AI workloads with simplicity and efficiency. Another topic on customers' minds is server virtualization.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Two weeks ago, we announced a major agreement with Nutanix. This solution will integrate the Nutanix cloud platform with the Pure Storage platform, solving a major challenge in the current virtualization market. This joint solution provides a modern, scalable, virtualized environment, which is purpose built for high demand data center scale workloads. Our partnership will deliver a high performance, virtualized environment, providing Nutanix cloud infrastructure with Pure's enterprise data cloud using Pure FlashArray storage. We expect the solution to be generally available later this year.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Pure is helping customers solve their transition to modern virtualization in multiple ways. First, we are able to help customers reduce their costs of existing virtualization solutions through efficient CPU utilization and reduction of compute cores made possible with efficient pure storage access. Second, Pure Portworx supports a number of modern virtualization solutions such as Red Hat OpenShift and other Kubernetes virtualization solutions popularly known as KubeVirt. Portworx allows Kubernetes to automate both VM and container data management in one integrated orchestration model. Finally, Pure has also worked with Microsoft to integrate Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware service AVS to enable customers to be able to easily lift and shift their VMware workloads and data to Azure under Microsoft's VMware license.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

We are expanding this cloud block store integration into a fully managed service available natively through AVS, which is in public beta now and expected to become generally available later this year. Our broad strategy is working. During the quarter, we signed multiple modern virtualization deals, two of which I'd like to highlight. First, a large modern virtualization win came from

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

virtualization Moving to a new modern virtualization solution was a strategic decision for them. They also needed to migrate from their legacy system without disrupting production or risking data loss, and they wanted a platform that would scale in the future as they advance their software defined manufacturing initiative. By using Pure's storage platform alongside Portworx to unify both container based and virtual machine based workloads. The customer reduced the complexity of managing diverse environments and attained the high availability needed to keep operations running without interruption. A second notable win was with a global health care company facing a significant increase in infrastructure costs.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

They needed an agile platform capable of supporting multiple applications. Using the Pure Storage platform and Portworx with KubeVirt, we unified their operations with a single workflow across the company's application landscape and reduced their total costs. Both wins reflect a broader enterprise trend. Customers are moving away from legacy systems in favor of modern flexible infrastructure. Pure is at the forefront of this shift, helping enterprises redefine their data storage and management architectures.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

This strategic engagement drives deeper customer relationships and sets the stage for continued expansion across the business. Our hyperscale collaboration with Meta continues to advance. Production validation testing is on schedule with strong progress in certifying our solutions across multiple performance tiers. We remain on track to deliver our anticipated one to two exabytes of this solution in the second half of the year as planned. Earlier this month, Pure and Meta co presented at the AtScale conference, highlighting how we are driving innovation in flash storage for hyperscale environments.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

The presentation showcased why flash is becoming a compelling storage option for a wider range of hyperscale data center workloads. I encourage you all to watch this session online to see the evidence firsthand. Yesterday, we announced a new collaboration with SK Hynix to deliver flash storage optimized for the energy efficient demands of data intensive hyperscale environments. With strategic partnerships now in place across Kioxia, Micron, and SK Hynix, Pure is actively shaping this emerging market. We are driving NAND technology collaboration to develop the industry and stay ahead of growing hyperscale demand.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

As we assess the macro environment, our near term view for the year remains largely unchanged, although we are navigating increased uncertainty. That said, our consistent performance and disciplined execution will continue to set Pure apart as a leader in our industry. We remain confident in our ability to outpace the competition. We saw very strong Evergreen One and Evergreen Forever sales this past quarter. With tariffs top of mind for many companies, pricing of our Evergreen portfolio will remain unaffected by current tariff related changes.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Pure's storage as a service offering, Evergreen One, delivers the full value of our platform with Pure managing and maintaining the infrastructure with the industry's strongest service level agreements. In this uncertain tariff environment, our evergreen model provides customers with pricing predictability, guaranteed SLAs, and a trusted partner committed to transparency. We are confident in our continued momentum to grow market share and strengthen our leadership in data storage and management. Before I turn it over to Kevin, I wanna take a moment to share some organizational news that we included in our press release. After more than five years at Pure, Kevin Chrysler will be leaving Pure to pursue a new opportunity.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Kevin will remain at Pure until a new CFO is in place, ensuring a smooth and orderly transition. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his partnership and his dedicated and loyal service to Pure. Since joining Pure in 02/2019, Kevin has played a central role in Pure's evolution. He developed and matured our finance organization and reporting, led many strategic initiatives, and partnered with our functional leaders to improve their businesses. Kevin was a great partner to me navigating the COVID and supply chain crises, helping us to continually adapt to an extremely dynamic set of circumstances while growing the business to over 3,000,000,000 in revenue.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

He also let our transition to subscriptions, now roughly 50% of revenue. On a personal note, Kevin has been a trusted and valued partner to me. I am grateful for his thoughtful counsel, steady hand, and deep commitment to Pure's mission and success. Kevin, I wish you the very best in your new endeavors. With that, over to you, Kevin.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Thank you, Charlie, for your kind words. I am grateful for your partnership and working with such a talented team over the years. It is a highlight of my career to have been part of Pure's growth journey, which I believe is only getting started. Okay. Let's get into our results.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

It was a solid start to the year with Q1 revenue growing 12%, driving $83,000,000 of operating profit and achieving an operating margin of 10.6. This performance reflects sustained demand for a differentiated data storage portfolio, in particular, our e family solutions. Our Storage as a Service solutions are also continuing to win in the market. Q1 TCV sales for our Storage as a Service solutions jumped 70% to $95,000,000 fueled by both large Evergreen One deals defined as greater than $5,000,000 as well as our higher velocity transactions. This momentum underscores customers' drive to modernize their infrastructures and lock in predictable SLA based consumption models.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Additionally, with our Evergreen One Storage as a Service solution, any incremental tariff costs we incur will be absorbed in our continuously improving back end life cycle economics. As a result, customer subscription rates will not be subjected to higher tariff costs. Subscription services revenue in Q1 reached $4.00 $6,000,000 up 17% and representing over half of total revenue. ARR grew 18% to $1,700,000,000 while total remaining performance obligations, or RPO, grew 17% to $2,700,000,000 RPO exiting Q1, encompassing our storage as a service offerings and renewals of our Evergreen subscriptions across our installed base grew 18. This backlog reflects robust renewals and new Storage as a Service commitments.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

In Q1, U. S. Revenue was $531,000,000 growing 9%, and international revenue was $248,000,000 growing 21% year over year. We added two thirty five new customers, bringing our penetration to 62% of the Fortune 500. Total gross margin improved sequentially to 70.9% in Q1, anchored by subscription services margin of 77.2%.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Aligned with our expectations, product margin rose 1.1 points sequentially to 64. We continue to expect that product gross margin this year will settle in the mid-60s consistent with our remarks last quarter. Demand for our e family solutions, including sales strength across our core offerings and moderation of QLC flash pricing are expected to be the key drivers of stronger product gross margin this year. This is also aligned with our long term expectation for product gross margin of 65% to 70%. Operating profit of $82,700,000 and operating margin of 10.6% were both aligned with our expectations, which is notable as foreign currency based operating expenses increased sequentially by approximately $8,000,000 in Q1 due to the weaker U.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

S. Dollar. Our headcount modestly grew to over 6,000 employees at the end of the quarter. Our balance sheet remains strong with $1,600,000,000 in cash and investments. Q1 operating cash flow was $284,000,000 and our capital investments of $72,000,000 included Evergreen One deployments, scaling for the hyperscale opportunities and development for our Fusion two point zero solution.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

We returned $120,000,000 to shareholders through $2,500,000 share repurchases and paid $61,000,000 in employee award withholding taxes, offsetting 1,100,000.0 shares. And we currently have $152,000,000 of buyback authorization remaining. Now turning to our guidance. We are reiterating our FY '20 '20 '6 revenue and operating margin guidance. We are pleased with the solid start to the year and remain confident in the fundamental growth drivers of our business, while also recognizing elevated macroeconomic uncertainties that we expect to persist in the second half.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

For Q2, we anticipate revenue of $845,000,000 representing a 10.6% year over year increase. We also expect operating profit of $125,000,000 and operating margin of 14.8%. Highlighting as well that Q2 FY twenty twenty five operating expenses benefited from savings tied to our workforce realignment in Q4 FY twenty twenty four. As a result, year over year operating expense comparison will be against this benefit. In closing, we're proud to have delivered double digit revenue growth, strengthened our margin profile, and reinforced our leadership in data storage innovation.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Our robust balance sheet and growing recurring revenue base sets the stage for continued execution of our strategic priorities. With that, I'll now turn the call back to Paul for Q and A.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thanks, Kevin. Before we begin the Q and A session, I'll ask you to please limit yourselves to one question consisting of one part so we can get to as many people as possible. If you have additional questions, we kindly ask that you please rejoin the queue, we'll be happy to take those additional questions as time allows. Operator, let's get started.

Operator

Thank Our first question comes from Amit Daryanani from Evercore. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Amit Daryanani
Senior Managing Director - Equity Research at Evercore

Thanks, Scott. Good afternoon, everyone. And Kevin, it's been a pleasure working with you and best of luck in the future. Charlie, wanted to ask you about the hyperscale opportunity. Meta obviously published a white paper on how they see this evolving from their end.

Amit Daryanani
Senior Managing Director - Equity Research at Evercore

And they call that Pure, think, explicitly as a DFM software module partner. I guess from your perspective, from Pure's perspective, just any update on how this opportunity is evolving as you go from pilot to test to production? And how would you characterize your discussions with other hyperscalers as you go through this journey? Thank you.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Amit, for the question. So, as you might imagine, the, Meta, like most of the hyperscalers, takes about a year and a half, if not two years, to design their next generation data center. It goes well beyond, just the storage portion of it.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

It goes to compute, software, networking, you know, all of the, all all of the services that they plan to provide on that, on that infrastructure as well. And so the, if you will, the evaluation, and the testing of the storage part runs along, that entire process. It does it's not a separate process, but it runs in that process. That process is is just about on on time for for Meta, and it's proceeding along the path that we that we imagined really almost a year ago. It's pretty much on on target.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

And as we go through that, you know, we get further and further, first of all, they get further and further evidence of how well we work inside that environment. And we expect most of that to be to be towards the sec in the second half of this year. That being said, as I mentioned in our prepared remarks, we believe we're on track to deliver the one to two exabytes that we identified during that time frame overall. And I would say we're also similar to last quarter's discussion about progress with other hyperscalers. I think we're making steady progress there about the pace that we expected.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Hard to predict when one of those would turn into what we would call a fully validated design win. We are in some POCs that should that should be an indicator. But, you know, we like to have certain, if you will, guarantees or knowledge in place that we are fundamentally part of a next generation design before we would say so, you know, in a earnings call such as this. So, you know, we think we're on track, but there's still still more work to be done before we can declare victory.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Amit. Next question, please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Aaron Rakers from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Michael Turrin
Michael Turrin
Managing Director, Software Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

Hi, guys. This is Michael on behalf of Aaron. I wanted to ask about your newly announced AXA offering. How should we just think about the opportunity in terms of size relative to the traditional enterprise market there? I assume that's that's more of a niche product for, obviously, scale AI workloads.

Michael Turrin
Michael Turrin
Managing Director, Software Equity Research Analyst at Wells Fargo

And then, you know, tied to that, what are the financial model implications or just the economics given that this is a disaggregated offering relative to kind of your traditional system sales? Thanks.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Yeah. It it's a it's a great question, and I think a little bit of a complex one. We, so we do believe that the opportunity here is in more niche markets. That being said, the niche markets are things like government, sovereign clouds, large scale GPU clusters, you know, for both training and cloud inference sites. And so, you know, it can be a substantial, a substantial market, albeit probably not as large as the entire enterprise market for sure.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

It is a disaggregated infrastructure where we charge for the, for the metadata node, you fully which is fully both our hardware and software. And then the customer can bring their own data nodes, or buy them separately, but we do charge for the software on those data nodes. So my expectation would be that the, margins would be at or above, you know, our standard, company margins on a long term basis. Over time. Yep.

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

And, Mike, this is, Rob. I'll just jump in on that. You know, I think if we if we step back and we look at FlashBlade X and where it sits in the overall portfolio and really our AI strategy, you know, number one, important to realize, this is really building off of the success that we have today with FlashBlade s in supporting hundreds of customers across various sizes up into including the largest scale enterprise AI. Now what we've done with Exa is, you know, build off of that core technology, expanded it with this disaggregated architecture, as as Charlie's mentioned. Now going after and targeting, you know, that that next level of scale typically found in those GPU clouds, neo clouds, sovereign cloud and tech titan type territories.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Michael. Next question, please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Howard Ma from Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Howard Ma
Director & Equity Research Analyst at Guggenheim Securities, LLC

Thank you. And it's encouraging to see the solid start to the year despite the uncertain macro. That's actually what I want to ask about. And the question is, we've been trying to figure out during periods of macro uncertainty, especially this year, are you seeing any changes in buyer behavior? For instance, is there a halt on flash storage purchases in lieu of less expensive options?

Howard Ma
Director & Equity Research Analyst at Guggenheim Securities, LLC

Or are you opting are customers opting more for Evergreen One, which you kind of alluded to, Charlie, in in, in your script, but I'm not sure if there's a high correlation, with macro or or just anything else that's interesting, to note? Thank you.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

You know, Howard, you know, it's been a question that we've been asking ourselves and and looking into our data quite extensively. It's the obvious question. Are we seeing pull ins in the market? We have to say from the Q1 results, see that. Of course, that was through April.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

I I would say that right now, it's really a de minimis amount. If there's a pull in, it's really a de minimis amount. You know, q two might be a slightly different story, but I I wouldn't, you know, again, I I wouldn't say that it's gonna be a substantial amount. We're much, you know, it's the second half where we have much less visibility just because of the dynamics, you know, in the market with the with both with tariffs, retaliatory tariffs and just the economy in general. You know, there's less less ability we believe to predict, the second half.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

But I would say for the first half or sorry, for the first quarter and and probably for the first half, we're not seeing a significant change either in customer sentiment, or in, actual, substantial, pull ins.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Yeah. And Howard, this is Kevin. I would affirm that with Charlie as well. And I think when you look at the Q1 results, it's broad based strength across the board in terms of our traditional sales as well as Evergreen One. So I don't think that we can specifically say Evergreen One benefited because of the tariff or potential tariff environment.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

But we do think that could be an opportunity for Evergreen One over time possibly. And that's because we're just not planning to increase our subscription rates in the event we incur higher tariff costs because we can actually absorb those costs in the operation of our service.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Howard. Next question please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Pindulom Bhora from JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director - Equity Research at JP Morgan

Great. Thank you for taking the questions. Kevin, sad to see you go, but hope our paths cross again. All the best. One question and might sound like two parts, but it's actually one part.

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director - Equity Research at JP Morgan

It seems like TCV Evergreen bookings is doing quite well. RPO growth, CRPO growth seems are fine. It seems like it's bouncing back. So I want to ask you is the Q1 results on Evergreen, is that above your expectations? And are you assuming a bit more headwind to full year revenue?

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director - Equity Research at JP Morgan

Or are you changing your expectation of TCV bookings for the year that might impact revenue for the year?

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Thank you, Pindulan. Yes, this is Kevin. Look, we're certainly pleased with what we saw in the TCV sales performance of Evergreen One in Q1. And frankly, we were expecting growth of Evergreen One coming into the year following frankly a record Q4 in Evergreen One TCV sales last quarter. We did close a larger Evergreen One deal this quarter that was a little bit earlier than expected, which creates some variability quarter to quarter.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

But I would say that that doesn't change really our expectations for the year. So when your second part question of expecting a headwind on revenue for the year and again while certainly pleased with the sales performance, we would not expect at this point to see a significant headwind to our annual planning guide.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Pindulim. Next question please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Mike Sykos from Needham and Company. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Mike Cikos
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Hey, thanks for taking the question here guys. And great to hear some of the statistics regarding the uptake, whether it's for Portworx or Fusion two point zero here. Can you help us think about what the Venn diagram would look like if I'm thinking about the customers that are taking Evergreen One versus the customers that are adopting Fusion and Portworx. Are those relatively lined up? Or is it a little bit more disparate or still too early to call?

Mike Cikos
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

I'm just interested in what that adoption looks like for those Evergreen One customers specifically.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Well, in the case of Fusion, let me answer and start with Fusion. In the case Fusion is available and just is a part of our the software that operates on our products. So it's available both to Evergreen One subscribers as well as to customers who have purchased our arrays. In the case of Evergreen One, we do a lot of the operations for of those because there are in Evergreen One, there are arrays on our customer's premise, but we take responsibility for managing them. We will be managing them via Fusion.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

So it's almost automatic in the case of Evergreen One. In the case where the customer operates their own arrays, owns and operates their own arrays, that's where, as we mentioned, yeah, we have a very large number that in just the five months since we released the the second version of it, there are large number of customers both either testing or using fusion. And, so we think that what it does is create an environment that makes it easier for them to manage and allows them to manage their data by software rather than through manual processes. So there's a high overlap, I would say, there. In the case of Portworx, Portworx is a separate license, from Evergreen One.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

So, the the customers may be the same or they may they may be different.

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

Yeah. And, Mike, this is Rob. Just to add on to that. You think if we step back from it, when I think about Evergreen One, when I think about Fusion, when I think about Portworx, at the end of the day, all of these offerings are really geared towards delivering elements of the cloud operating model to customers. In the case of Evergreen One, you know, really, this is about delivering a far, you know, more a far more agile, high optionality mode of consumption and risk reduction and risk offload to customers.

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

When we think about Fusion and Portworx, those are really, offering customers a more cloud based management and automation model. We do expect over time, greater degrees of integration between Fusion and Portworx as we bring those together across both, the traditional, workload sets with back end and back office business applications as well as the more modern cloud native or container based application sets.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Mike. Next question, please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Jason Ader from William Blair. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Jason Ader
Co-Group Head - Technology, Media & Communications at William Blair

Yes, thanks and good luck to you, Kevin. We're going to miss you. On the question the revenue the question is the revenue contribution from the one to two exabytes for Meta in the second half. How does the rev rec work for that? Is it just a, kind of a a pilot and, therefore, you're not recognizing revenue, or have you baked in any revenue contribution?

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Yeah. Thank you, Jason. There there is gonna be some de minimis revenue contribution that we've already contemplated in our annual guide, and so we'll see that come through in the second half. And and, our view would be that that would be a licensing fee model. So you wouldn't see the full gross value coming through.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

But we certainly have considered that in our guide that we currently have communicated to you.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Jason. Next question please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thanks. Great success with the Evergreen One portfolio this quarter and you noted a large deal closing earlier than expected, but just wanted to see if there was an update on kind of some of the larger deals from last year that had slipped, whether those are kind of contributing to the pipeline this year or just kind of what you're seeing maybe with some of these larger deals and just kind of overall time to close? Thanks.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Yeah. Appreciate that. And look, two quarters doesn't represent a trend for us, but certainly pleased with the strength we've seen both in Q4 and now in Q1. And I would say it's business as usual in terms of what we've been seeing over the last two quarters with Q4 and Q1, both with the larger deals, which we define as over greater than $5,000,000 tracking as we would be expecting as well as our higher velocity traction continues to be quite solid for us. So hopefully we can continue that momentum as we progress through the year.

Meta Marshall
Meta Marshall
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thanks.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Meta. Next question please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Simon Leopold from Raymond James. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to see if maybe you could walk us through sort of a compare and contrast of a project like what you're doing with Meta relative to other projects. In other words, I'm trying to understand why it takes so long. Is it a matter of customization on your part? Or is it around long test cycles?

Simon Leopold
Simon Leopold
Managing Director at Raymond James Financial

Or is it things like modifying their own network management systems? I'd just like a little bit more detail so we can understand the timeline better. Thank you.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

You bet, Simon. Why is it taking so long is the question I keep asking, Kaz and Rob. No. All kidding aside. The the reason is because it's not the testing of our products specifically that's taking a long time.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

It is their design cycle of their next generation descent data center which goes well beyond just the storage components of it. So, you know, we had this is why we had indicated the sort of the overall time for and by the way, this will be the same for all any of the hyperscalers that we serve. We will have to fit into their design cycle for when they are designing their next generation design, which might be including us. So, generally, it takes us somewhere between eighteen months and two years to design a new product here at Pure. It's the same for these hyperscalers who are designing their next generation data center.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

And so, you know, we may be using a chip that already exists, but it doesn't matter. We're not going be buying those until the full product is is designed. The same for these, large scale data centers as well.

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

Yeah. Simon, this is Rob. Just to add on to that. I think, you know, I think Charlie said it well. This goes back to how we originally, framed our engagement with Meta in the early days as really a co engineering exercise, an engineering to engineering as opposed to a more traditional sales process.

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

And, you know, I think the the upshot of that is, you know, with our typical sales process, our customer is expecting a pretty much ready to go product that they're gonna go figure out how to how to use, integrate into their management processes, but pretty much figuring that they're gonna hit the ground running. Right? With a co engineering process, as Charlie mentioned, you know, the we are one element of their broader data center architecture and data center design, inclusive of other hardware components, inclusive of their software, etcetera. That said, you know, these are very typical engineering processes and timelines as as Charlie mentioned, and it's playing out as we expected. And, you know, if you look at the language, you know, of these phases, we've progressed from proofs of concept to really production validation testing.

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

When we think about production validation testing, this is considered production ready equipment that they are bringing together in the full design and the full solution set, really validating that this is gonna work. And, you ultimately, we see this as really the principal gate to the anticipated one to two exabytes of shipments of the solution we're expecting in the second

Rob Lee
Rob Lee
Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage

half.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

You, Simon. Next question, please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Assia Merchant from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Michael Cadiz
Michael Cadiz
Assistant Vice President, Equity research at Citi

Hi, good afternoon. This is Mike Cadiz for Assia Merchant at Citi. So my one question is, would you be able to give us further clarification on how to think about subscription margins given the expected absorption now of any possible higher tariff costs? Thanks.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

What was the last part of

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

that Subscription margins in the event of higher tariff costs.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Oh, yeah. No. Absolutely. And and, you know, we've talked about this. Right?

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

So in terms of effectively absorbing these costs in the operations of our business and in operating Evergreen One, look. We're we're just very efficient with leveraging the technology impurity as well as Pure One of Evergreen One. While at the same time, I think we're gonna do, based on what we're seeing right now, be able to manage tariffs effectively given the agility of our manufacturing footprint and supply chain. So as we sit here today, I would not see a significant burden or impact on our subscription gross margins.

Michael Cadiz
Michael Cadiz
Assistant Vice President, Equity research at Citi

Thank you,

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Mike. Thank you, Mike. Next question please.

Operator

Our next question comes from Max Michaelis from Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Max Michaelis
Equity Research Associate at Lake Street Capital Markets, LLC

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just kind of want to go back to the ramping of the investment on the hyperscaler win. Just when we think about future hyperscaler wins, I mean, should we expect a substantial investment going forward for each win? Or is there some points or some areas that you've seen where you can find savings?

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Yes. Thank you for the question, Max. We expect to see leverage, if you will, in the design in our design and investment requirements as we add, if assuming we add, more hyperscalers. I I always knock on wood, until they actually come in. Right?

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

And the reason for that is that there are certain, capabilities that are quite fundamental that where meta is is the first. And once but once we've designed those capabilities, the elements that will need to change for most of the other hyperscalers will be a a fraction of to add on to that, mostly in the areas of management, some form fit and function, but not some of the more fundamental capabilities. One example, as you saw, we're expanding the number of suppliers that we have on the flash side. We have to do testing for each one of those suppliers as well as for each different form of chip that we use from those suppliers. We won't have to do that again.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

That's a very expensive, area for us. When we're building 150, three hundred, eventually 600 terabyte drives, Each one of them costs a lot of money, and we have to buy and burn, you know, a lot of them in our testing process. That'll be leveraged to that's just one example, but that'll be leveraged across all of the hyperscalers.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Thank you, Matt. The last question is up next.

Operator

Our last question will come from James Fish from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Caden Dahl
Caden Dahl
Equity Research Analyst at Piper Sandler Companies

Hi. This is Caden on for Jim. Just a quick one. What did you see linearity wise throughout the quarter and through May?

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Thanks. It was a very typical linearity quarter actually. So we, yeah, we we were pleased with it. Started off strong, stayed strong through the through the quarter. Nothing out out of the ordinary, I'd say.

Kevan Krysler
Kevan Krysler
CFO at Pure Storage

Yeah. Probably more to the positive, Charlie, on revenue linearity. And and that's why we're actually seeing some stronger free cash flows and operating cash flow. And that's why also we didn't get impacted as much from an FX standpoint. So I would say that it's out of the ordinary just into the positive in terms of what we saw in revenue linearity for this quarter.

Paul Ziots
Paul Ziots
Vice President-Investor Relations at Pure Storage

Okay. Before we wrap up, I think Charlie has final few comments.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

Yeah. Thank you, Paul. And thank you all for joining us, today on today's earnings call. The platform strategy as you see is really redefining what's possible in the data storage and management environment. We're breaking down data silos.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

We're unifying fragmented storage environments. We're enabling software defined storage management, and we're leading the shift to modern virtualization. We'd like to share all of this with you in greater detail at our Accelerate conference coming just next month and look forward to seeing you there. We want to thank all of our customers, our partners, our employees and our investors. We very much appreciate your continued support.

Charles Giancarlo
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman & CEO at Pure Storage

And thank you, Kevin.

Operator

That concludes the Pure Storage first quarter fiscal twenty twenty six financial results conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.

Executives
    • Paul Ziots
      Paul Ziots
      Vice President-Investor Relations
    • Charles Giancarlo
      Charles Giancarlo
      Chairman & CEO
    • Kevan Krysler
      Kevan Krysler
      CFO
    • Rob Lee
      Rob Lee
      Chief Technology Officer
Analysts
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Key Takeaways

  • Q1 revenue grew 12% year-over-year with an $83 M operating profit and 10.6% operating margin; subscription services revenue increased 17% to $406 M, now representing over half of total revenue.
  • The introduction of Fusion 2.0 has seen almost 100 customers testing or using the software to unify data infrastructure, enforce governance policies, and reduce human error at scale.
  • Pure launched FlashBlade Exa this quarter, promising ultrafast, disaggregated storage for AI and HPC workloads with seamless scaling across tens of thousands of GPUs.
  • Hyperscale collaboration with Meta remains on track with production validation testing, targeting 1–2 exabytes of FlashBlade Exa deliveries in H2 FY26, and new NAND partnerships (SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron) expand hyperscale flash offerings.
  • Strategic virtualization partnerships were strengthened through a Nutanix integration with Pure FlashArray, expanded Portworx support for KubeVirt, and Azure VMware Service integration, all slated for general availability later this year.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Pure Storage Q1 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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