Earnings Call Transcript
Everpure, Inc. (P)
Earnings Call Transcript - PSTG Q2 2024
Operator, Operator
Good day, and welcome to the Pure Storage Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings 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 Mr. Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Pure's second quarter fiscal 2024 earnings conference call. On the call, we have Charlie Giancarlo, Chief Executive Officer; Kevin Krysler, Chief Financial Officer; and Rob Lee, Chief Technology Officer. Following Charlie's and Kevin's prepared remarks, we will take questions. A press release was issued after the close of market and is posted on our website, where this call is being simultaneously webcast, and 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 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 related to our business is contained in our filings with the SEC and we refer you to those 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. Our third quarter fiscal '24 quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, October 20, 2023. With that, I'll turn it over to Charlie.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Pure Storage's Q2 conference call. We are pleased with our financial results this quarter. While the macro environment continued to be challenging, we outpaced our competitors and saw strong growth in our strategic investments, particularly in FlashBlade//S, FlashBlade//E, and Evergreen//One. Our results demonstrate that we continue to lead our market and that our strategy is working. Pure is delivering extraordinary outcomes for our customers, by transforming data storage from a highly fragmented solution set to a single consistent platform. Pure is today, the first and only data storage company that can deliver a single, consistent, non-disruptive operating and management environment, leveraging the most advanced flash technology across all of our data storage needs. With the introduction of the E family, our all-flash products now range from the highest performance systems to the most cost-effective systems for bulk data. Uniquely in our industry, all of Pure's products are based on one operating system, Purity, the only storage software that operates directly, natively to flash rather than using less efficient commodity SSDs. All of Pure's products are managed with our Pure One management system, and have consistent APIs. All of our products support non-disruptive upgrades forever through our Evergreen technology and subscription programs and are all available to consume as a service through Evergreen//One. The data storage industry has for decades been plagued with different tailored software and hardware solutions for the wide range of storage protocols, formats, performance levels, and price points needed to cover the market. The storage portfolio of legacy data storage providers was generally assembled by acquisition and consists of collections of disparate, inconsistent environments. That approach left customers with a complex infrastructure, with multiple software operating environments, differing management systems and multiple varying operational processes. As a result, legacy storage environments are complex, they vary for each use case, require downtime for upgrades, and necessitate forklift replacements roughly every five years. Pure is the only company that provides customers a single, consolidated operating environment for all of their data storage needs, including block, file and objects. Q2 was the first full quarter of shipments for FlashBlade//E; sales and pipeline have exceeded our expectations and it is experiencing the fastest growth of all prior new product releases. When purchased, FlashBlade//E with three years of Evergreen subscription has an acquisition cost competitive with hard-disk-based systems and has substantially lower operating costs. It enables our customers to move ever more of their cost-sensitive workloads to all flash. The E-family of products allows Pure to now cover the entire spectrum of data storage, inclusive of low-priced bulk storage, providing customers with a consistent, modern, and reliable product line for all their storage needs. Flash-array E will become available later this year, joining FlashBlade//E. FlashArray//E will enable cost-effective storage for bulk data or capacities from one to four petabytes. As part of the E family, it can also reduce customers' total operational costs by up to 60% and produce 85% less e-waste compared to hard-disk-based systems. We are seeing continued momentum and opening new opportunities with our cloud strategy. Last week, we announced an expanded multi-year partnership with Microsoft Azure services and its Azure VMware solution known as ADS, using our Pure Cloud Block Store. This offers a new age of cloud migration that can drive faster, more cost-effective adoption of cloud services. Combining Pure's industry-leading data reduction with our ability to decouple storage needs from compute, customers can significantly reduce their total cloud costs while increasing hybrid cloud capabilities. In addition to operating in the cloud, our cloud operating model allows our customers to operate their storage environment like the cloud to offer services that resemble the cloud, to better prepare for the cloud and also to consume storage like the cloud. Pure Fusion enables our customers to manage the Pure portfolio as a fleet, as an integrated pool of storage across datacenters and clouds. Portworx, the most highly rated Kubernetes data platform for deploying cloud-native applications was chosen for the fourth consecutive year by analysts from GigaOm as the leader for enterprise Kubernetes data storage and cloud-native Kubernetes data storage. Evergreen//One allows our customers to also consume like the cloud, based entirely on a service level agreement with Pure to allow them to store their data, whenever and wherever they want. Evergreen//One is available for all of Pure's product offerings. The growth of subscription services contributed significantly to our success in Q2. Evergreen//One, the industry's leading storage as a service offering, saw sales double again year-over-year. Our Evergreen technology and programs revolutionized the industry and provide Pure with a sustainable competitive advantage, ending traditional legacy hardware replacement practices for customers and turning every sale into a storage-as-a-service relationship. With our Evergreen forever subscription, companies can upgrade both hardware and software to the latest technology without paying additional capital continually, without downtime forever. As we discussed last quarter, Generative AI and ChatGPT have brought artificial intelligence to the forefront for all customers. AI creates two sets of opportunities for Pure. First, we can supply products for AI training environments, such as the creation of large language models or LLMs. Second, we can support enterprises in preparing their data architecture for AI inference, meaning the use of LLMs on their own data. Most customers will leverage third-party LLMs as their base and will return and retrain these models on their proprietary data within their own organizational boundaries. By adding guardrails, they will enable AI inference to achieve outcomes specific to their business. The former requires very high performance, while the latter is enhanced with the replacement of low-performance secondary hard-disk systems with our E family of cost-effective flash storage. During the quarter, FlashBlade//S secured a significant Generative AI footprint in a production environment in the low eight digits. Portworx also saw multiple wins in early AI development environments. Customers purchased Portworx to ensure reliable data management during the training and inference process. Over the last five years, well over 100 customers have chosen FlashBlade to accelerate their AI and machine-learning environments. With the introduction of FlashBlade//E, AI customers can take advantage of a single operating and management environment for both their hot and bulk data, dramatically simplifying their data storage infrastructure and reducing its cost and environmental footprints. Over the last few months, I have visited customers, partners, and resellers across the US, Asia-Pacific, and Europe to highlight Pure's new, ever more powerful position. Customers immediately grasped the benefits of the need for a unified operating and management environment for all of their data storage needs - blocks, files, and objects. From the highest performance to the most cost-effective. They responded enthusiastically to the ability to operate their storage and data environment as consistent storage pools across datacenters and clouds. And they welcomed the advantages of our Evergreen technology and subscription available across our entire data storage platform. Pure's products uniquely stand out in the industry due to our single operating environment and consistent APIs across our products. This is powered by our consistent use of Purity and our Pure One management system across all our products. Our new E family of products leverage our latest direct-to-flash capabilities of Purity software to unlock the most cost-effective QLC flash to penetrate the bulk data market for the first time with all flash technology. Our high-density direct flash modules, or DFMs, work with Purity to power this event. This enables better performance, better longevity, better reliability, and ultimately better price performance than both hard disks and even SSD-based systems. We have been shipping 48 terabyte DFMs for the last three years and will introduce our 75 terabyte DFM later this year. Today, Pure's DFMs are 2 to 4 times denser than the largest hard disks and SSDs in competitive use, and our advantage in density is accelerating. Our roadmap calls for a 150 terabyte DFM next year and a 300 terabyte DFM by 2026. Our improvements in the performance and density of direct flash versus commodity products will enable us to enhance our competitiveness in the industry by a wide margin not only in performance and cost but also in energy efficiency and e-waste reduction. Speaking of energy and e-waste, we issued our second ESG report last week. It details the advancements we continue to make across our technology portfolio, operations, and people. Our largest area of contribution continues to be the extraordinary energy, e-waste, and space savings of our products, which enable our customers to achieve their environmental sustainability goals. Pure products can reduce the total energy and emissions from data centers globally by upwards of 20%, as Pure's flash-optimized systems use up to 5 times less power than competitive SSD-based systems and up to 10 times less power compared to hard disk systems we will replace. In closing, I have never been more confident in our long-term growth strategy or in our opportunity to lead this market. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin Krysler.
Kevin Krysler, CFO
Thank you, Charlie. Revenue of $689 million in Q2 grew 6.5% year-over-year and exceeded our revenue guidance. We achieved record sales of our entire FlashBlade portfolio including FlashBlade//E and saw continued high demand for our Evergreen//One subscription services, as sales more than doubled year-over-year. While the spending environment remains relatively consistent with what we have seen over the last couple of quarters, our customers are choosing to invest in our high technology data storage solutions for their key strategic projects. The momentum we saw across our entire FlashBlade portfolio included specific AI and ML use cases, including a significant Generative AI win that Charlie highlighted. We are excited about the historic ramp for both sales and pipeline of FlashBlade//E throughout the quarter. Customers no longer need to settle for hard-disk systems and can now choose Pure's higher performance flash solutions at competitive price points. Q2 operating profit of nearly $112 million exceeded expectations due to the performance of our products and subscription gross margins. Our unique Purity security software architecture, which works directly with raw flash rather than less efficient and shorter-lived SSDs, contributed to the strength in product gross margins. Leveraging our Purity software, the majority of the capacity we now ship is based on QLC raw flash. More aggressive discounting behavior from our competitors during the quarter slightly offset product gross margin expansion. In Q2, subscription services annual recurring revenue grew 27% year-over-year to $1.2 billion and included strong growth from our Evergreen//One storage-as-a-service offering. Close to Evergreen//One contracts where the effective service date has not yet started are excluded from the subscription ARR calculation. Subscription ARR growth would have been 28% when considering closed Evergreen//One contracts where the service date has not yet started. Remaining performance obligations or RPO grew 26% to $1.9 billion. Similar to the remarks we've made in previous quarters, our RPO previously included an outstanding commitment with one of our global system integrators. During Q1, this remaining outstanding commitment was fully satisfied and when excluding the impact of the past outstanding commitment RPO grew 30% year-over-year. Subscription services revenue of $289 million comprised 42% of total revenue, which is 6 points higher than Q2 last year. U.S. revenue for Q2 was $495 million and international revenue was $194 million. We acquired 325 new customers during the quarter and our total customer count now exceeds 12,000. As previously mentioned, we were pleased with our continued strong gross margin performance of 72.8%, with product gross margin of 71.5% and subscription services gross margin of 74.5%. Our headcount increased slightly to approximately 5,400 employees at the end of the quarter. Pure's balance sheet and liquidity remain very strong, including $1.2 billion in cash and investments at the end of Q2. Cash flow from operations during the quarter was $102 million and capital expenditures totaled $55 million. In Q2, we repurchased nearly 600,000 shares of stock, returning nearly $22 million to our shareholders. This represents a lower level of repurchase activity than recent quarters, as a result of the fixed trading parameters that were in place throughout the quarter. We have approximately $190 million remaining on our existing $215 million repurchase authorization. Now turning to guidance. We expect Q3 revenue to be $760 million, representing double-digit growth of over 12% year-over-year. Our Q3 revenue guidance assumes continued strong subscription revenue growth fueled by our Evergreen//One subscription services. We continue to execute on aligning our cost structure with expected demand. The results of our continued operational discipline and the economic benefits we are seeing with our unique architecture of Purity software working directly with flash are reflected in our Q3 operating profit guide of $135 million, or 17.8% operating margin. Our annual revenue guidance we previously communicated remains unchanged and assumes revenue growth in the mid to high-single digits, as we expect significantly stronger year-over-year revenue growth for the second half of FY '24. As a reminder, revenue for our Evergreen//One subscription service offering is recurring and is recognized over time. The sales strength of our Evergreen//One offering through the first half of the year has outperformed our expectations and this momentum is expected to continue throughout the remainder of the year. The success of our sales of Evergreen//One subscription services has been considered in our annual revenue guidance, as the growth of this offering creates a near-term headwind to the total revenue growth rate, as revenue is recognized over time. We also continue to assume no significant improvement or worsening of macroeconomic conditions from what we have seen over the last few quarters. Finally, we are increasing our annual operating margin guidance from 15% to 15.5%, driven by our continued operational discipline and the benefits we are seeing as a result of our unmatched flash management technology powered by Purity software. In closing, treating data storage and management as high technology, as demonstrated through our continuous innovation across our portfolio and business models, we have established an extraordinary advantage in reducing power consumption, real estate space, labor, and e-waste for our customers. Our business value and total cost of ownership advantages are unmatched against our competitors. With that, I will turn it back to Paul for Q&A.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thanks, Kevan. Before we begin the Q&A session, I'll ask you to 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. And we'll be happy to take those additional questions if time allows. Operator, let's get started.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. We'll go first this afternoon to Amit Daryanani at Evercore.
Amit Daryanani, Analyst
Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping you could talk a bit more about the FlashBlade portfolio. I think in the press release you talked about record sales over here. So I'd love to understand where the strength is coming from, what's driving the success you had given a challenged macro. And we are really related to this, any sense on FlashBlade//E adoption is looking and is there some traction there? I think NetApp recently talked about how their equivalent product at least is having a very strong launch. So I'd love to hear you, whereas FlashBlade broadly resonating with customers. And is there any way to quantify what you're seeing that would be really helpful. Thank you.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Absolutely. Thanks, Amit. Well, I just as a reminder to the audience. We launched FlashBlade about five or six years ago now. And then more recently, a little over a year ago updated it with what we call our FlashBlade//S program, which shares our direct flash modules with our FlashArray series, as well as more recently just last Q1, our FlashBlade//E product. FlashBlade//S addresses the high-performance end of the market and FlashBlade//E, as I mentioned in my script actually addresses the high-capacity but bulk data, lower cost market overall. To answer your question directly, I believe the greater focus around AI certainly helps in FlashBlade sales, but frankly FlashBlade has continued to grow, especially since the introduction of FlashBlade//S, which gave it even greater compatibility with our FlashArray series. Ever since we introduced that product and now that we've introduced the E, it really allows customers to look at the full range of price performance for their high-capacity workloads with one consistent platform. And I think completing, if you will, the family with E, has really helped FlashBlade sales overall.
Rob Lee, CTO
Absolutely, Amit. This is Rob responding to the second part of your question. It's important to understand that E truly has no market equivalent. As Charlie mentioned, it is powered by our uniquely differentiated Purity software and direct flash technology tailored for that software, which distinguishes us from the disk market we are targeting and any competitors attempting to catch up with SSD technology. As Charlie pointed out, we've been using this technology to integrate QLC into enterprise solutions for over three years now with FlashArray C, aiming to replace hybrid disk systems. Now with E, along with FlashBlade//E and FlashArray//E launching later this year, we have a complete portfolio to address all of a customer’s data storage requirements. Again, as Charlie said, we can provide this with a consistent approach to hardware, software, and management.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Amit. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Aaron Rakers at Wells Fargo.
Aaron Rakers, Analyst
Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. I guess, I wanted to ask about the AI opportunity. Charlie, if you can, can you unpack a little bit about the eight-figure deal that you won in AI this quarter? Have you revenue recognized that? Just kind of any context on that? And then also just to clarify the Meta deal, are you continuing to not assume any kind of follow-on from that footprint deployment, next-generation data center opportunity at Meta in your guidance for fiscal '24? Thank you.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
You bet. So the eight-figure deal was nice, as I said low eight-figure deal, but in a production environment that has opportunity for expansion. So very excited and it was the largest Gen AI deal of its type, which is why we wanted to highlight it, not be only AI deal that we did in the quarter, but just because of its scale is something we wanted to highlight. I would also say that it's an area that where we are seeing additional interest overall in the market. That being said, as I said last quarter, I'm just excited about the opportunity to upgrade customers’ existing data environment to the lower performance environment because of the needs of wanting to use that data for AI inference in the future. So I'm seeing both those opportunities in front of us. Separately, with respect to the Meta RSC, which we've commented on in the past, because when new shipments happen into that, it tends to have an effect on our overall P&L. Yeah, as I've stated in the past, there’s really no change from prior quarters. It continues to be an environment that Meta is happy with, and our relationship with them is very good. There are no changes as far as we know of their plans to expand in the future. In other words, that's still our expectation, but we don't know the exact timing.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Kevan, did you want to make a comment about revenue recognition for that eight-figure deal that was included in our revenue?
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Yes. It's included in our revenue. Yes. Thank you, Paul.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Okay. Thank you, Aaron. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
Next now to Meta Marshall at Morgan Stanley.
Meta Marshall, Analyst
Great. Thanks. A couple of questions from me, just coming out of accelerate. You guys have made some very bold statements about kind of customers not named us anymore, and I just wanted to get a sense of how you found that message resonating with customers and what pieces of the portfolio, do you feel like or pieces of the roadmap that you need to demonstrate over the next kind of coming years to demonstrate to customers that they can have more comfort in that transition. And then, just maybe a clarification on FlashBlade//E, just kind of typical order to ship time. Thanks.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
I can address the first part of your question in several ways. Firstly, customers have already seen the advantages of transitioning from disk to flash storage, recognizing benefits such as smaller footprints, increased reliability, reduced maintenance, and overall less effort, especially with Pure flash. They perceive this as a positive outcome. Now, as we offer lower price points and performance levels, their excitement grows. However, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, what truly energizes them is the opportunity to consolidate their environments into a more uniform hardware and software setup, which simplifies their IT datacenter and eases their transition to the cloud. Therefore, the interest is not only in the flash transition but also in the customers' ability to adopt a more consistent overall portfolio.
Rob Lee, CTO
And Meta, just to jump in here. I think part of your question had to do with building comfort with customers around the transition. Look I think it's important to realize that the transition from hard disk to the flash we're offering with E, is completely seamless. Another way to look at it is, there are basically no reasons that our customer says, hey, I would like to get disk. I would like to keep disk, there are really no puts and takes. The only reason that customers have held onto disk in a lot of these environments has been price. And then now with our technology and what we've been able to do with E, we have effectively neutralized that. And so, I think that’s something that perhaps goes less appreciated. And I think we’ll use that transition because it’s not a re-architecture, it's not a redesign. It really is, just a seamless and really instantaneous improvement on all dimensions.
Kevan Krysler, CFO
And let me just touch on that last question on order to ship time for FlashBlade//E. It's consistent with what we see across our portfolio, so no significant difference there.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Meta. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Pinjalim Bora at JPMorgan.
Pinjalim Bora, Analyst
So great, guys. Congrats on the quarter. Staying on the AI theme. I wanted to ask you about Portworx seems that was a little bit surprising. I don't think people are thinking about Portworx and AI together, maybe talk about that AI opportunity with respect to Portworx, what are you seeing? What kind of workloads are these on-premise or cloud attachments? Are these more of a training or influence time of AI that would be helpful. Thank you.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Yeah. Thanks, Pinjalim. Well, first of all, it's both influence and training. And as you might imagine, a lot of these new developments are being made in container-based and Kubernetes-based environments. Portworx is without equal in terms of its ability to manage storage of all types, for Kubernetes and containers and to do it both on bare metal, in the cloud or on top of our infrastructure. And so, these are very large environments. Portworx has always been really superior when it gets to large-scale production, and so before going into a development where the developers know it's going to scale out, they're starting off with Portworx for their stateful data management.
Kevan Krysler, CFO
And Pinjalim, just to add on to that. I look at the Portworx and cloud-native piece of this puzzle as really a part of the overall set of environments that we see as being positively impacted by the uptake of AI technology. And so, certainly, number one, AI training infrastructure and environments, we've talked to you a lot about that. Number two is really the demand to store more and more data in the enterprise, remove the silos and really move more of that cold data into the warm. And then as Charlie says, number three, looking at the application environments that the trained AI models are connected to. If you look at where a lot of that data is coming into enterprises, it's coming from multiple sources, it is coming from business data, databases, IoT sensors, machine data all over the place. A lot of these application set environments are very highly dynamic and very aligned to open-source cloud-native technologies. It's also important to realize that getting these trained AI models deployed and connected to real-time systems is ultimately the goal for many of these enterprises. And so, when you look at the application environments driving these real-time systems that folks want to plug chatbots or what have you into, again, all very heavily based on and built on cloud-native architectures, open-source software and they have the needs for agility, scalability, and elasticity that those architectures afford, while at the same time having the enterprise capabilities that technologies like Portworx can offer. And really that's what we're seeing out there today.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Pinjalim. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We'll go next now to Wamsi Mohan at Bank of America.
Wamsi Mohan, Analyst
Hi. Yes. Thank you so much. Charlie, we've not really seen a large uptick on-premise AI-driven workloads, but you mentioned sort of this large inference opportunity at enterprises. Any thoughts on when that can happen? Do you see that in calendar '24 or '25 from a materiality perspective? And if I could like subscription ARR has been decelerating over the last four quarters. How should we think about the growth trajectory here? Thank you.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
It's an interesting question. I would say that we do see opportunities on-prem for AI in highly specialized environments. That's a real situation; many of them are currently waiting for the delivery of GPU and AI-based processing systems. There has been a significant focus on the compute aspect, while customers have given a bit less attention to the storage infrastructure. I believe that understanding this requirement for AI systems is just starting to improve. However, I would disagree, Wamsi; we are beginning to see interest, if not deployments, on-prem.
Kevan Krysler, CFO
And Wamsi, let me touch on the subscription ARR growth. Definitely pleased with what we saw in terms of subscription ARR growth, especially Evergreen//One, which is outperforming our already strong expectations that we had at the beginning of the year. And as a reminder, in my prepared remarks, closed Evergreen//One contracts where the effective service date has not yet started are excluded from the ARR calculation. And our subscription ARR growth would have been 28% had we included those contracts where the service date had not begun. And look, is it just, as a result of product revenue being lower for our CapEx sales. We do have less attach of our Evergreen subscription, which is also reflected in our subscription ARR growth rate.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Wamsi. And just a reminder to everyone to please ask one question consisting of one part, and we'd be happy if you'd like to ask another question later on in the queue. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
Next now to Krish Sankar at TD Cowen.
Krish Sankar, Analyst
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Charlie, I had a question on AI too. From a storage standpoint, where do you think benefits the most for AI workloads - between block storage and object? Which do you think benefits the most? And also, can you help us clarify what products in your portfolio today support InfiniBand and how to think about it into the future?
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Absolutely. I would say that a lot of the AI environments use block because it's very straightforward. Especially with programmers and block can be utilized for any structure that you want underneath, but increasingly, it's moving to an object-based environment because, over time, block is easier. It's more efficient and requires less state than what's generally necessary in a block environment. So I think we're starting to see that shift, but it's been taking a lot of time to get to very high-performance object. Rob, do you want to add?
Rob Lee, CTO
I believe if we take a step back from the current applications of AI technology and consider the long-term factors, it will positively impact all types of storage. The data that enterprises are aiming to input into AI systems comes from various sources, including traditional databases, modern databases, unstructured data, log files, and images, covering a wide range of formats such as block, file, and object storage. I expect that the data enterprises are collecting through these methods will continue to grow. AI is undoubtedly advancing quickly, with every enterprise eager to adopt and benefit from it, which will drive increased demand for data collection and storage throughout organizations. Regarding your question about InfiniBand, we have concentrated on the AI sector as one of several crucial segments in our portfolio. What distinguishes us in the market and with our customers is our ability to provide a consistent hardware, software, and management experience across all workloads. This reflects the advantages of Ethernet-based technologies and widespread solutions. As the current applications in AI training expand and require connections to other areas of a customer’s data center, specialized technologies like InfiniBand can become obstacles. Although InfiniBand is not new and has primarily been used in specialized settings, we recognize a greater need and value in delivering a comprehensive solution that addresses not only AI training environments but all data landscapes influenced by the rise of AI technology.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Chris. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
Next now to Sidney Ho at Deutsche Bank.
Sidney Ho, Analyst
Great. Thanks for taking the question. My question is on the remaining purchase obligation. That is still showing really good growth with 26% growth year-over-year, but the unbilled portion really accelerated in the past few quarters. Can you talk about what's driving that acceleration? Does it have anything to do with the new products or maybe Evergreen just growing rapidly? Thanks.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
All right. I appreciate the question and it's a real simple answer. You're exactly right, it's due to the Evergreen//One acceleration and just timing of billings is really what it comes down to.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Sidney. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Shannon Cross at Credit Suisse.
Shannon Cross, Analyst
Thank you very much. You mentioned that E is exceeding your expectations. I'm wondering if you can talk a bit more about how the customer conversations are going, how much you're seeing this being sold into existing customers versus some of the new customers? Is it opening up a new opportunity for RF to bid on new RFPs? Just any more color you can give there. Thank you.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Let me start by saying that E is exceeding our expectations in terms of revenue from our first full quarter of shipments and pipeline growth, which is happening at unprecedented speeds. The discussions are taking place globally and across a wide range of use cases. In some instances, prices are even higher than what clients would pay for new disk environments, due to the lower total operating costs and improved performance of the all-flash environment. So far, I have not come across any use case in existing disk-based systems that FlashBlade//E has been unable to handle.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Great. Thank you, Shannon. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We'll go next to Jason Ader at William Blair.
Jason Ader, Analyst
Yeah. Thank you. Hey, guys. Can you quantify the revenue growth headwind over the last 12 months from Evergreen//One? And also just any color on materiality to the total services revenue? I mean, can you give us a ballpark of how big it's becoming?
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
It's a great question, and Evergreen One's performance has been excellent in the first half, and we expect that momentum to continue. However, there is a short-term challenge regarding revenue due to it being recognized over time. From an annual perspective, we estimate it at about one to two percentage points. At this moment, we're not specifically quantifying Evergreen One.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Okay. Thanks. Thank you, Jason. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Mehdi Hosseini at Susquehanna.
Mehdi Hosseini, Analyst
Yes. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to better understand the dynamics of the folks that you're talking to, decision-makers at the customer side and how is that changing. And I'm asking you, because I'm looking at your OpEx that is on track to grow in the low-teen versus revenue growth target of mid to high-single digit.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Yeah. Regarding the type of customer environment, the new positioning. The new messaging, we're talking about is definitely getting us into the C-Suite, increasingly, and it's both, that message is made up of several parts. One is an extremely consistent environment, that first of all can take care of all of their storage needs and the same with the same environment, reducing their total operating costs. The dramatically lower power, space, and cooling that both lowers costs and improves their ESG ratings, which are extremely important. And then also, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the ability now to be able to rise above just individual arrays attached to individual use cases and enable customers to create an environment where they can have consistent storage pools across their entire enterprise, multiple data centers, multiple clouds. This is really a new message, it's one that addresses the concerns of CIOs of CTOs, even business units and developers. So this is getting us certainly a higher level of attention in major accounts.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Mehdi. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
Next now to David Vogt at UBS.
David Vogt, Analyst
Great. Thanks, guys. So Kevan and Giancarlo. I just want to go back to the current demand environment and the macro. You touched on the challenging macro backdrop and FlashBlade//E had a really strong launch during the quarter. Just curious about what you saw from customers. Was there any sort of potential spin down where it did make sense to maybe use more lower-cost all-flash solution in the quarter at the expense of maybe a little bit more performance solutions in addition to maybe disk replacement? And then how do you think about that sort of dynamic as we move through the balance of the year? It doesn't sound like the macro is getting dramatically better, and so should we expect to see, obviously on the Blade E side and then ultimately on the Array E side, sort of be a key growth driver in the second half of the year? Thanks.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Yeah. We haven't really seen that type of what do you call it a spin down or cannibalization. We track this very-very closely, as you might imagine when we bring in a lower-price performance product to see if customers are trading down. We really don’t see that; it really did open up net-new opportunities for us to go into new areas. I think we were in a better economic environment. All of these numbers would be enhanced, but no, I think it's just the. We’d all love to see even stronger growth than what we’re seeing now and of course, we’re pedaling very hard to drive more performance out of the team overall, but the economic effect has been broad-based. I would say if anything, when you have an economy that started off the year the way it did, customers reduced their intention to spend, and they have their high-priority projects, and because we announced the disk-to-flash transition after the beginning of the year. I think if anything it's muted and will be increased next year as customers start to plan for it in their budgets. So, no, I think it's more of an economy than anything else.
David Vogt, Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
Next now to Thomas Blakey at KeyBanc.
Tom Blakey, Analyst
Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to circle back to the subscription service line, and from a puts-and-takes perspective, Evergreen//One is doing great, off to a great start. Just what maybe focuses on the other areas that maybe you're experiencing some pressure, specifically want to know it's like maybe there is just understanding how you relatively start smaller and grow with your customers, if there's any pent-up demand that you can see there heading into next year from that for many pressures in the other areas of the Evergreen products. Thank you.
Kevan Krysler, CFO
Yes. I know this is Kevan and I'll start off and then have Charlie add on any more commentary, but it's a good question. And again, we commented on the strength of our subscription ARR, which really has been driven and fueled by our Evergreen//One subscription offering. Now, obviously, with demand being a bit lower on the CapEx side, the attach of Evergreen subscriptions, whether that's forever or foundation, is impacting somewhat our subscription ARR growth rate, which I've talked about a little bit earlier. Now, if we look at - and really that's the only thing going on that I would highlight, in particular. If you're looking specifically at our subscription revenue growth rate. Do you want to let you know, we've got professional services in that line item as well, and obviously, that's not growing at the same pace as our subscription offerings. And so, that would be driving your difference that you might be noting.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Tom. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Simon Leopold at Raymond James.
Simon Leopold, Analyst
Great. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to see if we could maybe step back and help us size the AI opportunity, as to sort of where it is now and where it's going? I think in the past you've talked about sort of where FlashBlade is and that maybe AI use cases, not just generative, were probably more than half of those use cases. You've given us some customer metrics. I wonder if we could get some revenue metrics as well, even a ballpark. Thank you.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
We generally prefer not to break these details out, but I can say that AI is a notable contributor to our revenue. However, it is not the main focus, nor do I expect it to become one. This area is certainly exciting, and we anticipate growth, but traditional data storage, including both high-performance databases and more moderate performance bulk data, will continue to lead our market. What excites us about the AI landscape is that high-performance systems often generate higher profits, which is encouraging. We hope to see environments, like the Meta RSE, where scales begin to significantly increase. That said, I believe, aside from GPU manufacturers, AI is likely to account for a relatively small, perhaps low double-digit, share of overall revenues.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Simon. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Nehal Chokshi at Northland Capital Markets. And Nehal your line is open, if you do have a question.
Nehal Chokshi, Analyst
Yes. Thank you. Hey. Thank you for the question, and I really like the new presentation content format, it's really great, thank you for that. So, FlashBlade//E, it sounds like you've had better-expected revenue and pipeline. With respect to pipeline, are you assuming a lower conversion rate of that pipeline for the remainder of this fiscal year that's more or less driving the no change in forward guidance here?
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Yeah, Nehal. It's a great question and the answer would be no. Our conversion rate, especially for FlashBlade//E is quite healthy. And we considered that in our overall annual revenue guide that we provided. The other thing to highlight as well is the strength of Evergreen//One, which needs to be considered as well because obviously that takes more time to make its way to revenue. And that's been considered as well as we've looked at our overall annual guide for this year. So hopefully, that's helpful for you.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Nehal. Next question, please.
Operator, Operator
We go next now to Matt Sheerin at Stifel.
Matt Sheerin, Analyst
Yes. Thanks. My question is on the recent Azure VMware announcement. Could you help us understand the significance of that, in terms of your position with Microsoft, within that Azure ecosystem, how that positions you versus competitors in the cloud and how we should think about the product roadmap going forward?
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Yeah. We consider it to be a very significant announcement. It is a combination of VMware in the cloud, Azure VM services, VMware services as well as our Cloud Block Store, providing a simpler methodology for customers to move their existing workloads into the cloud. And also at the same time, dramatically reducing their overall cloud costs. So it's really a one-two punch that's hard to beat. We consider the relationship with Microsoft very strong and continuing. We're looking forward to doing more things with them as we go forward and I think this is going to be a very competitive offering in the market. Rob?
Rob Lee, CTO
Yeah. No, I mean I would just add on to that Charlie said. I think one of the things that really makes us unique is the integration that we've undertaken with the Azure team really over the last year-plus to bring this service to market. We have had a number of Cloud Block Store customers that have really been pushing both of us in this direction and have been part of early previews and beta activities. They’re very excited now to be able to move into production and frankly, it's seeing even better-than-expected cost reductions and savings as a result of that. And so overall, we see this as continued validation of the benefits that customers are seeing from the Cloud Block Store technology in reducing their cloud costs and really giving them a much better environment on the cloud. Infrastructure to run their production workloads. As we mentioned last quarter, we had our largest individual sale in the quarter of cloud blocks to a large healthcare organization that organization is now moving into production and frankly is seeing, even better-than-expected cost reductions and savings, as a result of that. And so overall, we see this is just continued validation of the great technology, the ability to drive meaningful savings for customers. And then now in partnership with Azure, tightly integrated to a very important use case for our customers.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Matt. It looks like we have time for one more question. I'm happy to say we have a person who's rejoined the queue. So this will be second step back. So our last question.
Operator, Operator
We will take that now from Mehdi Hosseini.
Mehdi Hosseini, Analyst
Thank you for the opportunity. I would like to revisit my earlier question. As you engage more with C-level executives, opportunities are evident in your subscription. Is there an additional metric we could monitor to gain insights into your long-term revenue growth? Your operational expenditure growth significantly exceeds this year's revenue growth, which contributes to sustainable revenue. I'm curious if there's another metric we can examine to more effectively assess your long-term revenue growth.
Kevan Krysler, CFO
Nothing specific that Mehdi I would point you to other than the rich amount of in our portfolio and the opportunity associated with that portfolio across our entire data storage platform. So obviously navigating through this year, I provided a guide for this year and as we navigate through the second-half we will be looking at next year as well.
Paul Ziots, Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Mehdi, before we conclude. I think Charlie has some final comments.
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO
Thank you. Customers appreciate our new capabilities and the positioning as I had mentioned, the only consistent, consolidated data storage and management platform for all of their data storage needs. I want to thank our customers and partners, suppliers, employees, and investors, your collaboration, your innovation, your hard work, and your trust propel us forward. So we look forward to meeting you around the world. We have a number of accelerate roadshows set-up in various major cities around the world. We look forward to seeing you all there. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
That concludes the Pure Storage second quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.