Pure Storage CEO: Subscription services opportunity trumps tariff concerns

“In this uncertain tariff environment, our Evergreen model provides customers with pricing predictability, guaranteed SLAs, and a trusted partner committed to transparency,” says Pure Storage CEO

New storage and AI-focused technology releases combined with increasing hyperscaler cloud opportunities led to a robust first fiscal quarter 2026 and strong future guidance for Pure Storage

Charlie Giancarlo, chairman and CEO of the storage leader, told financial analysts that the company delivered solid performance for its first fiscal quarter, including double-digit revenue growth despite the dynamic macro environment thanks in part to its growing subscription services.

Giancarlo also said that CFO Kevan Krysler is planning to leave the company to pursue new opportunities but will remain to help transition his successor into the role.

The new CFO is slated to be named in the future.

Looking at the macroeconomic environment, Giancarlo said the company’s near-term view for the year remains largely unchanged despite increased uncertainty.

“That said, our consistent performance and disciplined execution will continue to set Pure apart as a leader in our industry,” he said.

“We remain confident in our ability to outpace the competition.”

Actually, Giancarlo said, Pure Storage has escaped some of the uncertainties caused by the Trump administration’s tariffs via its Evergreen//One and Evergreen//Forever subscription services.

“With tariffs top of mind for many companies, pricing of our Evergreen portfolio will remain unaffected by current tariff-related changes,” he said.

“Pure’s storage-as-a-service offering, Evergreen//One, delivers the full value of our platform with Pure managing and maintaining the infrastructure with the industry’s strongest service level agreements.

“In this uncertain tariff environment, our Evergreen model provides customers with pricing predictability, guaranteed SLAs, and a trusted partner committed to transparency.”

When asked by an analyst about the impact of the macroeconomic environment on Pure Storage’s business, Giancarlo said that the company didn’t see any pull in during its first fiscal quarter.

“Of course, that was through April,” he said.

“I would say that right now, if there’s a pull in, it’s really a de minimis amount.

“Q2 might be a slightly different story, but I wouldn’t say that it’s going to be a substantial amount.”

Krysler added that when looking at the first fiscal quarter results, Pure Storage saw broad-based strength across the board in terms of traditional sales as well as Evergreen//One.

“I don’t think that we can specifically say Evergreen//One benefited because of the tariff or potential tariff environment, but we do think that could be an opportunity for Evergreen//One over time, possibly, and that’s because we’re just not planning to increase our subscription rates,” he said.

“In the event we incur higher tariff costs, we can actually absorb those costs in the operation of our service.”

When specifically asked whether Pure Storage expects improved subscription margins in the event of higher tariff costs, Krysler said the company is very efficient with leveraging its technology in general.

“[We’re] able to manage tariffs effectively given the agility of our manufacturing footprint and supply chain,” he said.

“So as we sit here today, I would not see a significant burden or impact on our subscription gross margins.”

Giancarlo said in his prepared remarks that version 2.0 of Pure Storage’s Fusion hybrid storage cloud operating model, introduced during the quarter, has received an outstanding reception, with nearly 100 customers already using or testing it to manage their data infrastructures.

“Customers are implementing their data management policies in software and applying their governance across their global data estate, ensuring consistent policy enforcement at scale and reducing human error,” he said.

“As I shared last quarter, our Fusion v2 software eliminates data silos, transforming fragmented storage into a unified enterprise data cloud.”

During the Pure Storage //Accelerate conference being held next month in Las Vegas, the company will introduce new innovations to let customers create their own enterprise data clouds, which Giancarlo said will let them focus more on business outcomes instead of their infrastructure.

The past quarter also saw the launch of Pure Storage’s FlashBlade//EXA, which Giancarlo called the industry’s highest-performing storage platform for AI and high-performance computing.

It is slated to start shipping later this quarter.

“Modern AI environments require a wide variety of performance levels consistently delivered across tens of thousands of GPUs,” he said.

“FlashBlade//EXA delivers ultra-fast data access with unmatched read and write bandwidth, using a new disaggregated architecture which scales effortlessly to support massive GPU clusters.

“It provides the ease of installation, operation, management, and upgradability that Pure is known for.”

The first fiscal quarter 2026 also saw several important customer wins, Giancarlo said.

This includes delivering high-performance storage for public and private GPU farms supporting small, medium, and large machine learning and training workloads.

“As enterprises adopt inference engines and retrieval-augmented generation or RAG to apply commercial large language models to proprietary data, they need storage infrastructure that scales non-disruptively and adapts to evolving AI demands,” he said.

“AI is accelerating the push to modernise IT by breaking down infrastructure and data silos, enabling faster, broader access to real-time information.

“Unlike other vendors requiring different products for different use cases, Pure’s unified platform handles the full range of AI workloads with simplicity and efficiency.”

Pure Storage also unveiled an agreement with Nutanix under which the Pure Storage platform will integrate with the Nutanix Cloud Platform to help build modern, scalable, virtualised environments purpose-built for datacentre-scale workloads when it becomes available generally available later this year, Giancarlo said.

“Our partnership will deliver a high-performance virtualised environment providing Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure with Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud using Pure FlashArray storage,” he said.

Pure Storage is also helping businesses transition modern virtualisation in several ways, including reducing the cost of existing virtualisation solutions through efficient CPU utilisation and reduction of compute cores along with Pure Portworx support for multiple modern virtualisation technologies including RedHat OpenShift and other Kubernetes platforms, Giancarlo said.

Pure Storage also worked with Microsoft to integrate Cloud Block Store with Azure VMware Service (AVS) to let customers lift and shift their VMware workloads and data to Azure under Microsoft’s VMware license, Giancarlo said.

The company is expanding this integration into a fully managed service available natively through AVS, and is expected to be generally available later this year, he said.

A number of customer wins, including one with a global automotive manufacturer which used Pure Storage with a modern virtualisation solution with Portworx, and one with a global healthcare company which included the Pure Storage platform and Portworx to unify operations with a single workflow across the customer’s application landscape, reflected what Giancarlo called a broad enterprise trend.

“Customers are moving away from legacy systems in favour of modern, flexible infrastructure,” he said.

“Pure is at the forefront of this shift, helping enterprises redefine their data storage and management architectures.

“This strategic engagement drives deeper customer relationships and sets the stage for continued expansion across the business.”

Pure Storage’s strategic collaboration with hyperscaler company Meta continues to advance, with production validation testing and solution certification on schedule, Giancarlo said.

“We remain on track to deliver our anticipated 1-2 exabytes of this solution in the second half of the year, as planned,” he said.

When asked by a financial analyst about Pure Storage’s opportunities with other hyperscalers, Giancarlo said that alliances such as the one with Meta take up to two years as next-generation datacentres are designed.

“It goes well beyond just the storage portion of it,” he said.

“It goes to compute, software, networking, all of the services that they plan to provide on that infrastructure as well.

“And so, if you will, the evaluation and the testing of the storage part runs along that entire process.

“It’s not a separate process, but it runs in that process.

“That process is just about on time for Meta, and it’s proceeding along the path that we that we imagined really almost a year ago.”

Pure Storage is making steady progress at about the pace expected with other hyperscalers, Giancarlo said.

“It’s hard to predict when one of those would turn into what we would call a fully validated design, when we are in some PoCs (proofs of concept),” he said.

“That should be an indicator.

“But we like to have certain, if you will, guarantees or knowledge in place that we are fundamentally part of a next-generation design before we would say so in an earnings call such as this.

“We think we’re on track, but there’s still more work to be done before we can declare victory.”

The company Tuesday also unveiled a new collaboration with SK Hynix to deliver flash storage optimised for the energy-efficient demands of data-intensive hyperscale environments, Giancarlo said.

This comes on top of similar partnerships already in place with Kioxia and Micron, he said.

Pure Storage by the numbers

For its first fiscal quarter 2026, which ended 4 May, Pure Storage reported total revenue of $778.5m (£578m), up 12 per cent over the $693.5m the company reported for its first fiscal quarter 2025.

This included product revenue of $372.1m, up 6.3 per cent, and subscription revenue of $406.3m, up 17.4 per cent.

Pure Storage’s total revenue beat analyst expectations by $8.1m, according to Seeking Alpha.

Pure Storage also reported a GAAP net loss of $14m, or four cents per share, a significant improvement over the net loss it reported last year of $35m or 11 cents per share.

On a non-GAAP basis, the company reported net income of $97.6m or 29 cents per share, down from last year’s $107.3m or 32 cents per share.

Non-GAAP earnings beat analyst expectations by four cents per share, according to Seeking Alpha.

Looking ahead, Pure Storage reiterated its full fiscal year 2026 revenue and operating margin guidance despite the elevated macroeconomic uncertainties it expects to persist in the second half.

For its fiscal second quarter 2026, Pure Storage expects revenue of $845m, which would be up by 10.6 per cent year-on-year.

The company also expects operating profit of $125m and operating margin of 14.8 per cent.

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.