Pure Storage, Inc. has announced Q4 financial figures for FY2024 and full-year accounts. The data shows a modest 2.8% growth in revenue compared to FY2023, with a slight drop in revenue year-on-year for the quarter compared to Q4 FY2023. However, subscription services and ARR are both trending upwards for what looks like another positive year of growth. So, what’s next?
Background
Pure Storage announced Q4 FY2024 and annual financial data on 28 February 2024. For the full year, revenue was up 2.8%, gross margin slightly improved over FY2023 at 71%, while a declared profit of $86.9 million was similar to the previous year. For the quarter, revenue was down 2.5% on Q4 FY2023 (which was an outlier), while gross margin reached 72% with a profit of $57.4 million.
The company reported Q4 subscription revenue of $329 million (up 24.1% on the previous quarter in FY2023), with full-year subscriptions at £1.21 billion (25.6% increase). Although not shown on our charts, ARR was up 25% in Q4 year-on-year at $1.4 billion.
New Products
During 2023 (which comprises much of Pure Storage’s FY2024), the company announced the 4th generation of FlashArray hardware and the new FlashArray//E capacity-optimised model. FlashBlade//E was announced in March 2023. FlashArray received native file and block protocol support in April 2023.
In October 2023, Pure Storage announced operational cost rebates for customers, SLA guarantees and a new Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service capability (DRaaS). DRaaS was enhanced with incremental improvements in a version 1.1 release in March 2024.
In July 2023, Portworx Enterprise 3.0 was released, with enhancements and features to support both public cloud and on-premises deployments. Version 3.1.0 was announced in February 2024, increasing the performance I/O options with a new “journal” I/O profile.
The Architect’s View®
Looking back at our FY2023 analysis, we highlighted the benefit of the increased TAM introduced by FlashBlade//E. Since then, FlashArray//E has extended the practical possibility of transformation to an all-flash data centre and reduced the financial barriers against refreshing HDD-based systems with flash solutions. With 300TB drives on the roadmap, the justification for using hard disks in the enterprise data centre continues to diminish (assuming the large capacity of these systems can be utilised by the customer).
The Paid Power & Rack (PPR) commitment was an exciting move that may not yet be fully understood by the market. For customers that want to deploy in the public cloud or on-premises with consistent storage costs, PPR starts to chip away at the pricing model difference and align the TCO more equally between the two deployment models. Whilst PPR is a competitive move, it will ultimately benefit customers with dynamic hybrid cloud solutions.
Portworx continues to evolve, adding depth and maturity for I/O profiles whether running on the public cloud or on-premises infrastructure. We would like to see more diversity in storage and data solutions, particularly based on the Portworx and PDS frameworks.
When looking at future opportunities, we highlighted data protection and analytics as two options. The former has been addressed (in part) by DRaaS, while the latter has some hardware-based capabilities within Pure1. We think there is more scope for data analytics tools, especially in light of the boom in AI.
Of course, no analysis would be complete without mentioning the rise of Generative AI. With new //E models of both FlashBlade and FlashArray, AIRI is perhaps in need of a re-launch for the GenAI generation. We can’t find any documentation of GDS (GPUDirect Storage) support, for example.
GenAI will, no doubt, feature highly at the annual Accelerate event in June 2024. All the pieces are in place to support large-scale deployments. We already know that Pure’s storage solutions support Meta’s AI supercomputer (details here and here). Hopefully this aspect of the business can be expanded upon, with more detail on exactly how typical enterprises can use GenAI and Pure Storage solutions.
Overall, Pure Storage’s business looks in good shape. We expect to see more product announcements (150TB flash drives, perhaps) throughout the year. As usual, we will add all of this information to our X-Ray eBook and review the details in further analysis blog posts.
Related Content
- Pure Storage Announces Q3 FY2024 Results
- Pure Storage Announces Q2 FY2024 Results
- Pure Storage Announces Q1 FY2024 Results
- Pure Storage Announces Q4 FY2023 and Full Year Results
X-Ray: Pure Storage, Inc. (Second Edition)
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