The end of February saw Pure drop the ‘Storage’ component of its name, synonymous with the brand’s efforts for nearly two decades. What arose in its place was Everpure, billed as “defining the future of data management” beyond its traditional base; the vendor was reinventing itself.

Some derision from staff at rivals in since-deleted memes on LinkedIn and an SDxCentral probe into its rebrand’s domain name strategy could easily leave an impressionable view of the flash storage giant.

And yet, at its first Pure Accelrate event under its new name, when taking the time to talk to execs, the change made sense. Throughout the event, the fear of being pigeonholed as a storage vendor ran true. What Pure is trying to do through its rebranding – and subsequent acquisition of 1Touch – is offer a platform providing customers with a cross‑environment contextual layer to help customers curate secure "AI-ready" data.

Now think on for a second; if a company with ‘storage’ in its name comes to you and starts talking about layers and a “data primacy architecture,” that would be inherently confusing. But the folks at Pure think of their change from offering storage to helping manage fleets with a bit more nuance.

“Think of how many meetings you go into where people spend the first five minutes trying to get the AV set up right, and you never do that at home because you know your system, and it's simple. That's what we're trying to do with your fleets, trying to let you manage the entire thing simply, easily, with surety of knowledge," co-founder John Colgrove, better known as "Coz," explained during a keynote.

Homespun analogies aside, it was easy to see Everpure exude confidence in its new sense of direction.

None more so was that confidence visible than on the face of flat-cap-wearing CEO Charlie Giancarlo, who, during a press briefing, acknowledged that while several rivals are moving in the same direction, Everpure still stakes out its view as a leader.

“We believe that where the world needs to go… is towards a data primacy model, where enterprises control their own data. And then agents of any type can work on those sources of truth.”

Everpure isn’t betting the kitchen sink on an overnight fix, either, with the company’s Accelerate position seemingly one of patience. Coz himself told gathered attendees during his keynote that Pure’s journey would take it “five, 10 years to get to where we consider it done,” adding: “And then we won't even consider it done, we'll still go on and improve it.”

In an industry hell-bent on overnight or annual change or ‘rhythms’ to hear and see, rational framing was a breath of fresh air.

Giancarlo, too, came across as confident and committed, not hand‑wavy, joining Coz’s comments on a multi‑year, organizational shift, speaking as if it’s both necessary and already underway, with Pure positioned as an early mover rather than an experimenter.

“I think it's starting to coalesce around this idea now, whether we're right in the bullseye or out in the first ring, we'll learn that over the next year, but I think there's getting to be more and more convergence, not just us, but others around this,” the CEO said during a briefing.

Evidence in the wild

Customers seemed confident on the ground, too. Pradeep Bandaru, head of platforms and AI workflows at Sanofi, told SDxCentral that the pharmaceutical giant chose Pure’s FlashBlade//S 200 as the core of their first cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) proof of concept and stuck with it for very demanding workloads.

RC Willey senior systems administrator, Chris Weiss, meanwhile, called the performance “impressive,” and described being able to get systems up and logged in from Pure in about two minutes, versus 40+ minutes on Dell Data Domain (now PowerProtect DD), where he “still couldn’t log in.”

At these sorts of events, it’s often a customer or two who gets wheeled out to talk to the press, and they read out a pre-prepared statement akin to a hostage situation. But this editor never got that perception at Accelerate … or at least they trained them well to give over that appearance.

Maybe it was because the overbearing glitz of HPE Discover down the road meant Everpure’s first outing was more sanguine, or just that these were customers who were genuinely happy and were free to admit that.

The sense of authentic enthusiasm wasn't confined to the keynote stages or customers, though, with newfound members of executive ranks further resonating, most notably with Ashish Gupta, the 1Touch CEO turned GM for data management.

While it’s difficult to put pen to paper on his beaming smile throughout the event, Gupta exuded the aura of a man who’d just won the lottery. This is a person who has been the CEO across a variety of companies, and yet when asked his view of moving to a GM role, he told SDxCentral was fundamentally a people and technology choice, as much as a career move.

During a conversation, he stressed that he cared about whether the acquirer’s culture and vision matched his own, and that earlier “intellectual honesty” and “empathy” points were directly tied to his willingness to be a part of Everpure. Clearly seeing the rebranded firm as a level-up environment where people are self‑critical and rigorous, Gupta was the epitome of what Pure seems to be all about with this transformation – and he only joined a few months prior.

While a journey to Las Vegas typically evokes the melancholic spirit of a Smiths song, at least for this editor, the pervasive sense of genuine, unscripted buy-in spanning from keynote to showfloor to executive briefing served as a fundamental strength for the event. Regardless of initial confusion and complexities surrounding its rebrand, that collective buy-in remained the core pillar of Everpure’s first outing.