Good day, and welcome to Pure Storage Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines have been muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for question-and-answer at the end.

Thank you. Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the Pure's third quarter fiscal 2023 earnings conference call. On the call we have Charlie Giancarlo, Chief Executive Officer; Kevan Krysler, Chief Financial Officer; and Rob Lee, Chief Technology Officer. Following Charlie's and Kevan's prepared remarks we'll take questions. Our press release was issued after close of market and is posted on our website where this call has been simultaneously webcast. The slide which accompanies 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 that we make 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. A discussion of some of the risks and uncertainties relating 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 revenues, 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. Our fourth quarter of fiscal '23 quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, January 20, 2023. With that, I will turn it over to Charlie.

Thanks Paul. Hello, everyone and welcome to the call. We hope that our fellow Americans had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, and that our non-U.S. listeners had a restful few days while everyone in the U.S. was offline. We are once again pleased with our quarterly results, showing a year-over-year revenue growth of 20% and subscription ARR growth of 30%, surpassing $1 billion for the first time. Our portfolio of subscription products had a strong quarter with Evergreen//One achieving record results. Our new products including FlashArray//C, FlashArray//XL, and FlashBlade S also saw excellent growth this past quarter. FlashBlade S our newest product is off to a great start in its first full quarter of sales. The number of S systems sold was above our plan and petabytes sold were well above our plan. We're also seeing S customers taking advantage of the increased performance and scale, choosing to purchase larger systems than the prior generation. Pure continues to lead the industry in product innovation having released a record number of new products and services this year, including FlashArray//XL, FlashBlade S, Pure Fusion, Portworx data services and Evergreen//Flex. We are proud to share that this innovation has once again been recognized with Gartner's highest rankings in their Magic Quadrant. Pure was named the leader for the ninth consecutive year for primary storage and a leader for distributed file systems and object storage, significantly increasing FlashBlade's ranking year-over-year. Pure's unique value proposition of advanced technology, low total cost of ownership, industry leading energy savings, combined with powerful performance is the reason that leading-edge technology and hyperscale cloud companies increasingly choose to rely on Pure. This past quarter as planned, we were pleased to ship the second phase of Meta's buildout of their research super cluster or RSC. As a reminder, our shipments for Meta's RSC consist of both FlashBlade and FlashArray//C. Meta relies on Pure's FlashBlade to provide lightning-fast data delivery to their NVIDIA GPUs and FlashArray//C to provide performance-oriented and cost-effective bulk data storage at 1/10 the space, power, and cooling of a disk alternative. NAND cost per bit continues to approach that of magnetic disks. Because of Pure's unique intellectual property, Pure's QLC-based systems are now competitive with hybrid disk-based systems on a price per bit level years ahead of the commodity crossover point. We expect that the currently anticipated improvements in Pure's NAND economics this coming year will enable Pure to deliver our QLC-based products at prices competitive with most near-line disk arrays on a total cost of ownership basis. We believe strongly that the days of the hard disk in the data center are over. Customers that do not take advantage of Pure's QLC products to replace disk systems are choosing the more expensive and energy-intensive options. New enterprise customers this quarter include a large global telco, a large global payment processor, and a major energy provider. Existing customers like Vertafore, a leading provider of modern insurance technology, continue to expand their relationship with Pure, relying on the combination of technology performance, total cost of ownership, and an Evergreen customer experience to fuel their data-dependent business objectives. This past quarter significant numbers of enterprise companies specifically chose Pure for our exceptionally low power space and cooling performance. This has been especially evident in Europe, where not only energy prices, but energy security is a major concern. As mentioned, we saw strong growth in both new and existing Evergreen customers this quarter. Evergreen's flexible approach to both consumption and pricing is helping customers of every size deal with the uncertainties that businesses and organizations face in the current environment. Many new customers also cited energy savings as a new important benefit. Also this quarter, we saw several large telco customers purchase our portfolio to support projects ranging from 5G deployment to modernizing infrastructure. For example, one of the largest telecommunication providers in Asia increased their Pure portfolio including their FlashArray//C footprint, furthering their commitment to environmental sustainability while accelerating their transformation and services offerings to their customers. Looking ahead to world economic conditions, we continue to see instances of longer sales cycles in the enterprise segment and expect that enterprises will continue to exercise caution in spending over the next year. We believe that this focus on spending uniquely favors Pure Storage in the quarters ahead. The combination of Pure's Evergreen offerings, best-in-class power space and cooling, and operating simplicity results in significantly lower operating costs for enterprise customers. Given challenging economic and energy situations around the world, more enterprises are focused on total cost of ownership and the area where Pure excels. As we look forward, we are keeping our eyes on a number of macroeconomic factors, in particular inflation, slower economic growth, and lingering supply chain disruptions. Considering the current economic uncertainty, we plan to thoughtfully invest in our expansion while continuing to deliver strong operating results. Despite the challenges and uncertainties of the current business environment, we remain confident in our ability to take share and outpace the market while delivering products, solutions, and services to customers that exceed their expectations. I'd like to hand the mic over now to our CFO, Kevan Krysler for a review of our numbers.

Thank you, Charlie. Through solid execution, we delivered strong financial results in Q3, growing revenue 20% and increasing our operating profits by over 50%, while navigating the effects of the macroeconomic environment. Substantial revenue from sales to Meta also contributed to our financial results this quarter. Our customers, which now exceed 11,000 and represent 58% of the Fortune 500, leverage our portfolio of innovative data storage and management products and subscription services to drive optimal business outcomes and performance. Revenue performance growth in demand for our FlashArray//C and FlashBlade S solutions, both leveraging QLC Flash, was very strong this quarter. Our leadership in Flash management, enabled by our software and declining costs of Flash, is accelerating our progress in replacing traditional disk solutions and substantially reducing data center energy consumption. We also continue to be pleased with meaningful contributions from new business as we acquired approximately 390 new customers this quarter, including across the telecom industry. Subscription annual recurring revenue or subscription ARR exceeded $1 billion this quarter, growing 30% year-over-year. Record sales of Evergreen//One in Q3 represent a key driver of our subscription ARR growth. Remaining performance obligations or RPO grew 26% to $1.6 billion. Similar to the remarks we made in previous quarters, our RPO growth is impacted by product shipments for an outstanding commitment with one of our global system integrators. Excluding these product shipments, RPO grew 31% year-over-year. Our headcount has increased to nearly 4,900 employees and our investments in talent continue to be disciplined and focused around our key business objectives. Total revenue for the quarter grew 20% to $676 million. For Q3, U.S. revenue was $493 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year with international revenue, which continues to be impacted by foreign exchange headwinds, growing 19% year-over-year to $183 million. Product revenue grew 15% and subscription services revenue increased 30%. Subscription services comprise 36% of total revenue for the quarter. Contributions from both product and subscription services gross margins continue to be strong, as total gross margins were 70.9% in Q3. Sales of our larger configuration systems and new FlashBlade S contributed to slightly higher product gross margins of 70.1%. Subscription services' gross margins were 72.3%. Our strong Q3 operating profit of $107 million and operating margin of 15.9% was driven by a combination of factors including strong gross margins. We ended the quarter with approximately $1.5 billion in cash and investments. Cash flow from operations was $155 million in Q3, resulting from the combination of strong sales, collections, and operating profit. Capital expenditures trended higher this quarter at nearly $40 million due to deliveries of test equipment, which had previously been on backorder. In Q3, we returned approximately $24.5 million in capital to repurchase approximately 900,000 shares of stock. This represents a lower level of repurchase activity than recent quarters as a result of the fixed trading plan parameters that were in place throughout the quarter. We expect that share repurchase volume will increase next quarter. We have approximately $100 million remaining from our $215 million share repurchase program. Now, turning to guidance, we estimate revenue for Q4 to be approximately $810 million, up 14% year-over-year. For comparison purposes, a couple of reminders: our Q4 of last year included an additional week of revenue of approximately $20 million as a result of FY '22 including 53 weeks. Also, from our previous remarks, approximately $60 million of product revenue recognized in the first quarter of FY '23 had been forecasted to close in the second half of the year. Adjusting for this impact of seasonality, our expected revenue growth in the second half of FY '23 would have been nearly 21% year-over-year. For FY '23, we are reiterating our annual revenue guidance of approximately $2.75 billion, an increase of 26% versus FY '22. Our operating profits remained solid, which is reflected in our Q4 operating profit outlook of $130 million or operating margin of approximately 16%. As a result of our performance in Q3 and outlook for Q4, we are increasing our operating profit outlook for the full year to $430 million. Operating margins are expected to be approximately 15.6%, reflecting a significant expansion from 10.8% last year. Revenue growth and strong product and subscription services gross margins have contributed to our strong operating profit and operating margin outlook for this year. During the first half of the year, our operating profits also benefited from less travel, higher attrition and slower than anticipated hiring. We do not expect that our operating profits will continue to benefit from these tailwinds next year. While it remains too early to provide guidance for FY '24, our current preliminary view is for operating margins to remain robust, around 14% to 15%. In closing, through our unwavering commitment to innovation, and customer service, we continue to be in a unique position of creating valuable outcomes for our customers, including dramatically reducing energy consumption and e-waste. With the strength of our portfolio of products and the power of our evergreen offerings, the opportunities in front of us remain compelling.

Thanks, Kevan. Before we begin the Q&A, I'll please ask you to limit yourself to one question consisting of one part so we can get to as many people as possible. Operator, let's get started.

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from the line of Amit Daryanani with Evercore. Amit, your line is now open.

Perfect. Thank you and congrats on the print book. I guess my question is, Charlie, do you believe the print and the guide you provided is fairly impressive especially in comparison to the commentary from some of your peers like Dell and NetApp recently. So I'd love to just understand, what do you think is driving this contrast within your peers? I don't think you both have a sizable backlog, for example, that could be helping you. So would be great to just hear what you think is enabling the divergence of performance at Pure versus your peers? And then, what do you think the durability of the divergence as you go forward? Thank you.

Thank you, Amit, and hope you're well. Thank you for the question. Well, Amit, I think it's based on a variety of different things, but fundamentally upon our core strategy. So, the core strategy is to drive an all-Flash data environment in the data center and to provide a product that's very modern in terms of its software capabilities and management abilities. We have consistently grown market share since the day that we were founded, based on the fact that we have all the vendors develop a software stack that focuses on the benefits of using a Pure semiconductor versus just refilling disk-oriented architectures with SSDs. And that's allowed us to provide a product that's simpler to operate, uses less power, space, requires far less labor, is far more reliable, and has more performance than competitive products that are out there. Our competitors still compete with SSD alternatives. Secondly, it's based on a much broader portfolio, going from our initial product, which was block-oriented, to now having file and object-based systems. Thirdly, it's now starting to pursue our replacements for secondary-tier disk alternatives. This allows us to expand into a lot of market adjacencies and provides a lot of elasticity in our market as flash prices decline. We are very excited about this. Finally, once we penetrate an account, our ability to expand in that account is very large because of the improved experience our customers have. When I repeat to our team that our Net Promoter Score is the most important number in the Company, it's the customer experience that allows us broad expansion capabilities in an account once we penetrate. Adding all these factors together, it allows us to operate as a market share taker in this $50 billion market, and we're still coming up upon $3 billion in total revenue. So, there are lots of growth opportunities in the future.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Meta, your line is now open.

Maybe a question for me of, clearly you are highlighting that some of the memory pricing getting cheaper is helping with the QLC conversion. So just wanted to kind of get a sense of what kind of traction you're seeing with either very large enterprises or hyperscalers with that motion, and whether you're seeing shortening of sales cycles as we kind of get closer to some of these conversion points?

Yes, let me address the hyperscaler first. I spoke about Meta in my initial remarks, the fact that we were able to deliver FlashArray//C for their bulk data requirements at a price point that competed with their own software running on their disk arrays, really speaks to the power of being able to use QLC and Flash to compete with disk. That environment also benefited from the lower power and space requirements. I think that's part of what enables Flash to compete against disk in this environment, especially as NAND costs start to come down. We're seeing the same in large enterprises, although I would say that that's in an earlier phase right now. FlashArray//C has been an incredible grower for us, and that competes largely with the hybrid disk market. We think we'll be able to go after the non-hybrid, what’s called the near-line market, as we go into this new year. We believe that the lower power while we've been speaking about lower power and cooling requirements for many years, is now starting to become evident in Europe, and also Asia, with companies saying specifically because of power savings that they're buying Pure products.

Our next question comes from the line of Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. Wamsi, your line is now open.

Charlie, I was wondering if you could share some color around the outlook on IT spending into 2023, particularly for the storage market? Some of your competitors are talking about that being down on a year-on-year basis. You mentioned your confidence in your ability to take share and outgrow that market. So, curious if you could give us some high-level thoughts of what those trends look like if storage is going to grow or decline and how much you can outgrow that market? And what's embedded in that inside of that operating margin of 14% to 15%? Thank you.

Yes, let me start with our view on GDP and then go into what we think will happen in the IT side with storage. For GDP, there are many analysts out there discussing the current economic environment and their projections for next year. We are looking at a roughly flat U.S. economy next year, and perhaps a slightly recessionary international economy, with variations country by country. As we go into that, we're seeing IT spending holding steady, maybe slightly up relative to overall GDP growth. In addition, we believe that storage will remain relatively healthy compared to the rest of the IT economy. We actually believe that storage might show moderate growth next year. That said, we believe we'll continue to take market share and stay in the double-digit growth area, perhaps with a bit more moderation than our overall growth this year, but still solidly in well into the double digits.

Our next question comes in the line of Sidney Ho with Deutsche Bank. Sidney, your line is now open.

I want to ask about your visibility beyond this quarter. I am not asking specifically for financial guidance for calendar '23, but previously, you talked about having good visibility and the pipeline for the second half of the year, and that there are some delays, but not a known permanent pause. I also think you mentioned you could still be on one quarter. How would you characterize the pipeline in the first half of next year at this point? And maybe comment on demand trends between the Enterprise versus Commercial customers? Thanks.

Sure. Generally, our ability to have visibility in the pipeline extends about two quarters. So you're asking if that extends to Q1 of next year, not our Q1. Generally, we don't have visibility three quarters out just to be really clear. So I can't speak about the first half from a visibility perspective. What I would say is visibility into our Q4, the remainder of this year, and visibility into Q1 of next year remains quite good. That will help form our view for next fiscal year. We're in the middle of planning right now, so it's difficult to give you further insight, but as I mentioned, our visibility into Q plus 1, and Q plus 2 remains fairly good.

Our next question comes from the line of David Vogt with UBS. David, your line is now open.

Maybe just a follow-up to Kevan's comments about preliminary margins next year and Charlie's comments about growth being well into the double digits next year. I know you mentioned, Kevan, that there are going to be some items that are not going to repeat this year versus next year. But just quickly, kind of doing back-of-the-envelope math, it would suggest that your incremental margins next year are going to be under pretty material pressure. If your margins are going to come in at 14% to 15%, can you kind of walk us through what's really the incremental spend categories or spend that you're looking at next year given where you are and sort of where the long-term operating model should shake out over the medium term?

Yes, I'd appreciate that, David. Look, we're quite pleased with the overall margin expansion that we've seen this year. Key drivers of that being strong revenue growth and product gross margins, and subscription services gross margins. I've talked about the fact that we had some tailwinds that accounted for roughly 1.5 points to our operating profits this year. It's kind of in three areas. We've talked about as we were exiting last year, early in the first half, we had higher attrition levels. That continued through Q1 and Q2, resulting in a benefit. There was also slower than planned hiring during the first half as well. Now, we've made significant progress as you've seen on hiring talent, particularly in Q2 and this quarter. Obviously, that will play into next year in terms of how we're thinking about it. Additionally, we are planning for a slight increase in travel costs. For example, we're doing our first in-person sales kickoff in the New Year after not having done so for two or three years. We're factoring that into our operating margin and profits for next year.

Our next question comes from the line of Mehdi Hosseini with Susquehanna. Mehdi, your line is now open.

Just a quick follow-up for Charlie and the team. You have done a good job of expanding margin very diligently, keeping OpEx reasonable, and realizing margin expansion. I just want to get an update on the strategy looking into the next one to two years. Especially into next calendar year, perhaps as enterprise budgets are more constrained. How is that strategy going to evolve? Are you going to spend more to capture more dollars of revenue, or will the strategy focus on having more leverage in a P&L? And I'm not asking for guidance, but it would just be helpful if you could give us an update on any potential strategy changes into a rather challenging macro environment?

Absolutely, and it's a fair question, Mehdi. We are consistently focused on revenue growth. That said, we never like to sacrifice margin, largely because it’s about operational discipline and maintaining a high-performing company with good internal practices. We want to grow at an optimal rate, delivering good operating margins. As we go into next year, we have increased our headcount already, and will see the full impact of that next year. We want to continue investing in our quota-bearing heads. We'll continue to invest there. We also want to continue developing core products but will be diligent and focused while being thoughtful about potential pitfalls in the economy. Staying agile is key, allowing us to be flexible in how much we spend given the uncertain economic situation. We will prioritize revenue growth while ensuring we can deliver good results on the bottom line.

Our next question comes from a line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets. Nehal, your line is now open.

Provided just very generic color regarding the contribution from Meta's research SuperCluster, can you give a little bit more detail around that? And more importantly, trying to get a sense as far as what is the revenue growth excluding Meta?

You're right. We did ship the vast majority of the second phase of our Meta program this past quarter, and we're pleased to have done so. The relationship remains strong, and we look forward to continuing to build good strength and business with Meta as we go forward. So, Kevan, I know there's a lot behind this quarter, perhaps you can provide some additional insight.

When you think about the economics of our Phase 2 shipments to Meta, without getting into specifics, we made some modifications to the deal structure of Phase 2, which resulted in less revenue but improved product gross margins, as reflected in the strength of our product gross margins this quarter. If we had used the same deal structure for Phase 2 that we used in Phase 1, revenue growth would have aligned with the remarks I made earlier in the year.

Our next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Simon, your line is now open.

I wanted to see how you're thinking about product gross margins in light of the idea that memory prices appear to have come down and will likely be down meaningfully over the next several quarters. I appreciate that there are other inputs, but I imagine that's a significant contributor to your bill of materials. So, I'm just wondering, if you're expecting maybe some price deflation or responses from others in your competitive space, cutting prices. What are you assuming in terms of the inputs for product gross margin?

Yes, that's a great but complex question. As you know, we have a lot of experience in this area, especially for me coming in without prior experience in this market. My five years of experience have shown me that costs and prices operate on different timeframes, and they aren't 100% connected to each other. We compete with companies using SSDs and therefore are not exposed to the raw costs of raw Flash as we are. Our perspective is that we tend to have opportunities for lower costs compared to our competitors. However, this does not mean that competitors won’t discount in the market. We believe we'll see pricing come down, perhaps not immediately, but overall, it should benefit us, allowing us to target more of the disk market. This round of NAND reductions will enable Flash, especially with our QLC products like FlashArray//C and S, to be much more competitive against disk-based products. We will utilize any cost reductions to target that market. Predicting gross margins with absolute accuracy is difficult, but you should expect us to stay within the range we identified and leverage cost savings to pursue the disk market.

It's important to emphasize the sustained and structural advantages that Pure has in terms of using raw NAND Flash versus being limited to enterprise SSDs, as seen with most of our larger competitors. These advantages stem from our direct Flash technology, a result of over a decade of software and hardware IP, giving us a sustained advantage over the competitive set, allowing us to source raw commodity NAND rather than the higher-priced enterprise SSDs. This ability enables us to utilize NAND more efficiently and deliver significant reliability and performance advantages to our customers.

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Sheerin with Stifel. Matt, your line is now open.

As we think about modeling for next year, it looks like you're going to face some tough comps with Meta. Are their expectations for contributions from that customer next year? Additionally, in terms of other hyperscale opportunities, could you update us on what that pipeline looks like?

Absolutely. Regarding Meta, we have identified that we shipped Phase 2, and according to Meta's own blog, they indicated an exabyte to be shipped in total. There remains more to be completed in that project's RSC, but there is no further guidance on the timing we can provide you right now. In terms of other hyperscalers, conversations are ongoing, and we are optimistic about realizable opportunities moving forward, but it is still too early to provide concrete guidance.

Our next question comes from the line of Krish Sankar with Cowen. Krish, your line is now open.

Charlie and Kevan, thanks for taking my question. Very interested in the operating margins of 16% last quarter, and your guidance of 14% to 15% for next year. I'm just wondering what the operating margin last quarter would have been without Meta. Kind of you mentioned that you cannot quantify Meta revenue, but you highlighted that 14% to 15% operating margin is a guidance. I'm curious how to think about that with Meta included since my understanding is that Meta is operating margin accretive since you don’t utilize the channel. Any insights there would be helpful.

When we consider Meta from an operating margin perspective, it’s important to frame this in relation to our company profile on operating margins. We do not see it as a detractor or a positive factor. The benefit was really on product gross margin, which resulted due to utilizing a different deal structure. But I think from a company profile operating margin standpoint, I would place Meta in that category.

I do want to correct the statement about Meta. We do have a partner with Meta, which is an integration partner, and there are economics involved in that.

It looks like we have one more question in queue. So this will be the last question.

Our last question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street. Eric, your line is now open.

Yes, you've talked about having a little bit better success on the hiring side. As we look at Q4, is that kind of equally distributed across R&D and sales and marketing?

While we're continuing to hire in both R&D and sales, particularly on the R&D side, we are expanding overseas to take advantage of a generally lower cost profile. We aim to balance our onshore and offshore headcount in R&D while focusing on expanding quota-bearing heads on the sales and marketing side. We believe continued growth necessitates an improvement in our capacity on the sales side, so we'll continue to invest there.

Thank you, Eric. Before we conclude, I think Charlie has a few parting comments.

Thank you, Paul. Pure continues to outpace our industry in both innovation and customer satisfaction. Our advantages in total cost of ownership, energy efficiency, and price performance are setting the pace in this new economy. They are making Pure the preferred choice for leading organizations around the world. I remain confident that we will continue to take share and outperform the market as we have done since our founding. I want to thank our dedicated employees, partners, suppliers, and especially our customers for choosing to partner with Pure for the world’s best data storage and management solutions. Thank you.

This concludes today's Pure Storage third quarter fiscal year 2023 financial results call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.