No risk of Pure Storage being acquired - analyst

It's a 'telling time' for the fledgling flash firm, Quocirca claims

There is very little risk that Pure Storage will be acquired by rivals, according to analyst Quocirca, which added that the firm needs to do more to fully establish itself as a mainstream vendor.

Pure Storage held its inaugural Accelerate customer and partner event in San Francisco last week, at which it made efforts to ditch its start-up image. The company's founding investor Sutter Hill Ventures pledged its long-term commitment to Pure and the vendor reiterated its ambition to remain an independent firm.

Analyst Quocirca's founder Clive Longbottom (pictured) said it is unlikely Pure will be snapped up, explaining why he thinks certain firms would not be interested.

"IBM, I think, are losing faith in storage, so that wouldn't be good," he said. "Dell-EMC - presuming that is a done deal - the last thing they want is to buy more. HP... it could be possible, but they are busy sorting themselves out after splitting the company. HDS - the stealth company buying the stealth company? It would be stealth squared. I don't think there's too much risk of [Pure Storage] being acquired.

"They are trying to differentiate themselves - look at the truly awful figures Violin has and the way that SolidFire has been acquired. What Pure doesn't want to do is reach the perception of 'you've reached a size where acquisition is the best thing'. They want to position themselves as 'we are our own vendor, we know our own way'. It's a telling time and they still have a lot of start-up mentality inside them, which in most ways is good."

At Pure Accelerate, company executives talked up the firm's culture, claiming it does as much as it can to remain transparent with staff as much as it can while sticking to the rules of being a public company.

But the company may suffer growing pains, Longbottom added.

"One of the things a customer told me is if they have a problem, Pure's engineers will fix it by the next day," he said. "You can do that with a few hundred customers, but once you get to a few thousand, you can't. It's whether customers accept that and think 'OK, economies of scale have got to come into this, we may have to wait or pay for this change'. But they might say 'well you're no better than EMC'. They've got to be careful."