LAS VEGAS – Everpure CEO Charlie Giancarlo explicitly rejected claims that it’s profiteering from the ongoing memory crunch, while claiming its transition to a data-centric model will help customers yield token and storage savings.

Having addressed in an open letter that its prices had jumped around 70% since the beginning of the year, Giancarlo and the firm formerly known as Pure Storage faced accusations from rival Vdura of exploiting the component shortage.

Speaking in a press briefing during the company’s annual Pure Accelerate conference, Giancarlo responded to an SDxCentral question on the topic, arguing that its gross margins have tightened even as chip costs have surged.

“We're effectively a middleman for semiconductors; we add a lot of software and so forth, but our physical bomb is affected by the price that we have to pay for semiconductors, which has gone up somewhere in the 6 to 8x range in just the last six months. It's breathtaking,” Giancarlo said. “Our prices have gone up by far less than that, and we're operating at a lower gross margin.”

Pure’s most recent earnings saw GAAP gross profit of approximately $723 million, achieving a 68.7% GAAP gross margin, with the CEO saying at the time that it was choosing to operate at the lower end in order to help customers while component costs escalate.

“That's the proof point,” Giancarlo said, noting that Pure was actively monitoring the wider competitive landscape, adding: “They've been sooner than ours, and they've been larger than ours.”

He told the press that he had “a lot of sympathy for customers” regarding the pricing increases, and even apologized for the industry “as a whole.”

“We'll eventually get through this. Unfortunately, it's probably going to take a little bit of time,” Giancarlo said. “We've worked both with our partners and with our customers who are ordering with us to make sure that this is as painless as it can possibly be. I just wanted to put that out in the open, because we know how much trouble and how much pain this is causing you.”

Pure bets on ‘data primacy’

Away from the component crisis, the center point of Everpure’s first annual showcase under its new name was the company’s shift toward a data-centric, or “data primacy” model.

Pure’s new Data Intelligence platform augments the flagship offering from the recently acquired 1Touch, offering a governed, AI-ready data foundation that can unearth actionable context out of fragmented enterprise data silos.

Giancarlo said the move would greatly reduce duplicated data and, in turn, lower the token bills attached to enterprise AI.

“As an industry, the way we’ve structured our data is that the data is created by, used by, and managed by the application itself. It is secondary to the application, trapped in the silo, and as these applications have grown, those silos have grown.”

Pure’s concept, showcased at Accelerate, instead looks to make the data the source of truth and control, with enterprise customers able to use its new platform to build a governed, semantic layer that applications, analytics, and AI agents plug into to obtain coherent definitions and optionality across vendors.

“You don't have these brutal handoffs that every time one of the application suites changes, it changes the answer that you might get, it changes the definition, it breaks all the linkages. Instead, you have plug-and-play apps, [which] gives you optionality, because you have a source of truth, you have context that you've defined,” the CEO explained.

“Now you have a platform that can manage data and datasets at the data level. You create your own sources of truth and your own systems of record, and then you create your own context and shared context across them, and you have a system that is much more automated, much more coherent, that you can manage at scale.”

Flash ambitions undimmed

Despite Pure’s newfound lease of data-centric life, however, it doesn’t show signs of slowing when it comes to traditional storage. Giancarlo told Accelerate that although it’s going in a new direction, the vendor is set to “ship more flash than really anyone else.”

In what he described as a “dead heat” for flash market supremacy, the CEO said it has a 14% share of the overall total storage enterprise storage space, “including the hard disk and everything.”

Giancarlo claimed Everpure was “gaining at the expense of everyone else” with its spending on data storage research and development outpacing that of its rivals as its primary driver.

“Every single one of them invests less in storage research and development for a very simple reason: we came into this market with a differentiator, and that differentiator was we thought data storage was high technology, and every other vendor thought it was a commodity,” he said. “We've constructed the company around that simple concept. We really focus on R&D.”

And while the company is looking to make waves into data management with its newfound Intelligence platform, Giancarlo made a bold claim: “This year, we will ship more flash, or as much flash as all of our competitors combined.”

“The first 10 years of our life, we focused on simplifying your array. Over the last five years, we brought in Fusion to simplify your fleet overall. Now we have unified the management of this environment, and what our next challenge is, I think, not just as Pure, but as an industry, is to help you to be able to unlock the power of your data,” he added.