I want to welcome everyone to our fireside chat with the management team from Pure Storage. My name is Mehdi Hosseini, Senior Analyst covering technology hardware. Is with great pleasure to host this call. We have the entire management team from Pure Storage on this call. We have Charlie, Kevan, and also Paul from IR. We are going through a review, a set of questions and topics, including the just reported quarterly results. If there's any question from the audience, you can email me direct, mehdi.hosseini@sig.com. There's also an a way for you to text me your question through this Zoom call. Before we get started, I wanna go through some Reg FD disclosure.
Statements made in this discussion which are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements based on upon current expectations. Actual results could differ materially from those projected due to a number of factors, including those referenced in Pure Storage, most recent SEC filing on the Form 10-Q, 10-K and 8-K. With that out of the way, I wanna thank the Pure Storage team for being available. Perhaps we could start with reviewing the recent quarter. The question for Charlie and Kevan is, can you just give us an overview of what is driving the incremental weakness in demand, and how do you see the rest of the fiscal year trending?
Yeah. Thank you, Mehdi, and good to see you all. Thank you for your time today. You know, as we exited Q4, we saw a strong Q4, grew 14% year-over-year. Then of course, the full year of last year, you know, we grew 26% year-over-year. Strong growth in what was our fiscal 2023. As we looked at fiscal 2024, and as we exited the final month or so of FY 2023, we definitely saw the pace of development of pipeline slow down a bit. We think that's largely macroeconomic factors.
It's companies, customers looking over their budgets and coming to terms with whatever new realities their budgets have been set out for this year. We did see a slowing in the development of pipeline. With that really changed our view of what FY 2024 would be on a risk-adjusted basis and therefore our overall guide in that space. You know, as we look across the industry, we're seeing others that other companies that don't operate necessarily. As everybody knows, there was a supply chain pipeline constraint. Some companies are still shipping, you know, from backlog. For those companies that don't ship on backlog, I'm seeing similar things.
Some of our competitors announcing, you know, same, similar weakness. We're absolutely adjusting our budget as we go into this new year to adjust for that, ergo our guide for 15% operating margin. We're also modifying our training for our sales force to sell into a much more near-term, cost-conscious customer base. I think that should provide you the context of our view.
Sure. Great.
Maybe what I'll do, Mehdi.
Yeah.
Yeah, is just add a little bit more in terms of just discussion on the Q4 a little bit and what we saw going on specifically with Q4. Obviously Charlie talked about our revenue growth in Q4 and what gave rise to that performance. Well, you know, we continue to see some good strength across our U.S. commercial business. Obviously, international continues to perform in particular EMEA with some softness, if you will, with the U.K. The other thing that was quite interesting for us as we were working through Q4 is we saw a really good conversion and conversion trends of our advanced staged opportunities. That was still kind of aligning with expectations which we view as a positive.
Where we saw a slowdown, to Charlie's point, was really around these sales progression of these newer opportunities and early-stage opportunities. What was interesting in terms of that dynamic is that the demand was actually quite healthy in terms of what we saw in Q4, and frankly, was a little bit stronger than what we were expecting. Where the dynamic shifted is to Charlie's point, the progression of those opportunities slowed substantially versus what we've seen. When those opportunities are projected to close, moved out a lot further than generally what we've expected. That's really what gave rise to our more moderate guide as we look out to next year.
Sure. Just a quick follow-up here, guys. I get this question every quarter, been getting it since you went IPO. Some of the Q-over-Q compares, especially embedded in your guide, is different than what your peer group has reported. We've had Dell and HPE report last night. Is it just purely algebra or wrong comparison? How would you describe your guide that implies like 30 some percent decline in product revenue to your peers that have a different overview?
Yeah. Look, I think that... Charlie, maybe I can comment first, and feel free to jump in.
Yeah.
Obviously our Q1 compare, it does provide some complexity in terms of what we saw last Q1 and last year versus what we're seeing this year. It's really what we saw last year. There's a couple things going on. First of all, we, you know, as we spoke about Q1 of last year reflects a $60 million pull-in, if you will, that we were quite clear on in terms of in previous earnings, in terms of some enterprise customers who were looking for earlier delivery. You know, we believe that request was really being driven by the supply chain constraints at the time. Obviously that's impacting comparability. Again, that was all product revenue.
Even if you pull out, that $60 million, you know, the Q1 of last year really wasn't impacted by the macro backdrop at that point, and we reflected and drove 37% growth year-over-year. You know, our starting point on the Q1 compare for this year is a really tough compare. Then you layer on top of that the points that Charlie made really around the sales progression of these new and early stage opportunities is really what's giving rise to the guide that we've reflected for Q1 of this year.
Okay, got it. Just quickly with Meta, I remember back a decade ago, having exposure to Apple smartphone was a curse and also a blessing. Now we have the same situation with CSP. In that context, what was Meta as a mix of your fiscal year 2023 revenue, and how do you see that mix evolving in FY 2024 and 2025?
Yeah. Let me start, Kevan, then. In general, it's absolutely the case that the large tech companies which are, you know, that's a significant market for us, slowed down, you know, even more than the economy. You've seen that commentary across the board from suppliers into that environment. Therefore, you know, our, you know, the guide that we gave, you know, does not assume a big pickup in that in FY 2024. So that could be. With respect to Meta in particular, given the, you know, the frequency, if you will, of how Meta orders and when they take their shipments, we don't forecast Meta revenue until we've actually received an order.
Kevan, if you wanna give any more color on that.
No, I don't think so, Mehdi. I mean, obviously, when we first started having larger Meta opportunities, we gave some color in terms of what that looked like. We did that in particular, given, you know, back in FY 2022, in Q3, where we saw a drop in product gross margins and wanted to give some color to the drop we saw, which was really driven by the Meta opportunity. Obviously we updated, you know, from a qualitative perspective, the Meta business as we navigated through this year. You should have kind of a general guardrails in terms of the Meta business in order of magnitude.
To Charlie's point, as we look out to FY 2024, given that we didn't receive any orders in Q4, that would not be reflected in our current guide for FY 2024.
[audio distortion] repeating because we had gotten a question, you know, from, you know, an investor. The quality of our Meta relationship remains very good, so there has been no change in the tone or tenor of the relationship
Have you quantified how big Meta was in FY 2023?
We have not. We've provided some color and guardrails, Mehdi, and folks should have a and I think they do, have a general range of what that business was, obviously less than 10%, in terms of total revenue. We haven't given specifics on that.
Sure. Just one final question as it relates to the earnings conference call. You introduced FlashBlade//E, and you said it would start becoming material in the second half of fiscal year 2024. Is there any way you can help us understand how big it could be exiting FY 2024?
Look, you know, I don't think we used the word material. We said, you know, moderate ramp, and we were very intentional with those words. Look, we're super excited about the offering that we're coming out with, and maybe Charlie can spend a few minutes on that in terms of the opportunity set in front of us. Look, you know, with the macro backdrop, we wanted to build that in. We believe that the ramp of FlashBlade// E will be near or breaking what we did with FlashArray//C, which FlashArray//C was a record-breaking product in terms of ramp for us. We do believe that FlashBlade// E will follow along that track as well.
Charlie, do you wanna provide just some color and some backdrop in terms of the opportunity set, the what we're looking for in terms of workloads and overall opportunity from that lens?
Absolutely, the audience will see why we're excited about it. When Pure introduced the first all-flash array about 10 years ago, it took only about 5 years. It took about 5 years before the entire what's called primary storage market became all-flash. That represents about 40 or 50 cents, 40% or 50% of the total storage market today in dollars. It only represents 10%-20% of the total storage market in terms of bits or bytes stored. Still today, more than 80% of all data is still stored on hard disk. Well, FlashArray//E is the arguably second product after FlashArray//C to be able to compete head to head with what is called secondary tier disk storage.
It's a lower price, lower performance tier. Up until now, flash has just been too expensive for that tier. Now really we're opening up 80% of the bytes that are stored in the world, that up until now have been too inexpensive for flash to be able to go after. We believe we have at least a 3-year head start on our competition here. We do believe this is gonna be 5 years. I would project that in 5 years from now, all hard disk storage will migrate, that is, new purchases in that area will migrate to flash. It's a huge opportunity.
You know, we estimate $5 billion-$10 billion, you know, TAM, maybe for FlashBlade//E alone, let alone, you know, its successors that will go after ever less expensive on a per byte basis, tiers of disk storage.
In terms of Mehdi, I'll just wanna probably continue the dialogue a little bit more on FlashBlade//E with Charlie. You know, we were very intentional about putting a dollar per gigabyte out, which is very much... That's very, We don't do that.
Yes.
I'd love you to provide some color on why that we were very intentional about doing that and the importance of that from our lens.
Yeah. Look, as Kevan says, the first time ever I've put out a price, publicly, right? There are lots of reasons why you don't do that. The reason we did it is because there has been general disbelief, that flash can compete with hard disk at a price level. By identifying $0.20 per GB, not only did we sort of set an upper level, you know, which could be used competitively, et cetera, but we should turn, take any non-believers and let them know right away that this can compete head to head with hard disk in both the enterprise, not to mention in the large data center environment. You know, we're going direct for hard disk replacement over the next several years.
Sure. It seems to me that the funnel or backlog of opportunities over the next 2, 3 years is significant. You also have a macro headwind near term. Why change your sales team given the longer-term opportunity? The near term is macro. Who knows? Why modify your sales team?
We're not. I'm not quite sure the nature of the question. We're not modifying the sales team. We are modifying the training that we're providing to them in terms of selling into a, you know, the different. Customers look at costs from a variety of different lenses. You know, when money was cheap, they were looking at providing functionality and capability at a reasonable price, but not necessarily looking at the first 12-18 months for breakeven. As you get into a recessionary environment like this, the expectation of getting to, you know, getting to cost effectiveness comes down, right? They're looking for solutions that make sense in the next 12-18 months.
That training, which we used to do a lot, you know, years ago, then, you know, as we went through the COVID period, that became less effective, because customers were looking more for feature functionality and other capabilities. Now that's back in vogue, we're retraining the team. We're not changing. There's no fundamental. You know, we have the same sales management. We have the, you know, there's nothing other than normal sales management going on. What's the nature of the question, Mehdi?
Actually, you answered it. To me, what separates Pure is focus on growth and free cash flow margin. You introduced this target of 35%-40% revenue growth plus free cash flow margin. As you modify or enhance your OpEx, I think this target is the main driver. That's why I ask, well, you have all these opportunities, but why think about moderating OpEx? Is that correct to assume that you have this target of 35%-40% revenue growth plus free cash flow margin?
Yes.
Yeah, right?
Yes. Why?
Yeah.
Go ahead, Kevan.
Yeah, no, look, Mehdi, fantastic. Obviously, you know, with the continued strength of our subscription business that we're seeing with Evergreen//One in particular, especially in this environment, as well as Evergreen//Flex, hopefully we'll spend a little bit of time across our subscription business. When you take a step back and reflect on FY 2023, you know, it was terrific in terms of our revenue growth, as well as our operating margin expansion, as well as our free cash flow expansion. We were pretty proud of that. Now, as we look out to next year and the opportunity set in front of us, the opportunity set remains fantastic, and we're quite excited about it.
That opportunity set has a backdrop of a tightening economic environment that we're certainly considering, and that's why that, you know, we've reflected that in our guide for top line revenue. We're also very focused in terms of prioritizing profitable growth. We're committed to a 15% operating margin next year. Both Charlie and I are very aligned with that. That 15%, you know, provides, you know, a slight expansion when you account for the 2 points of tailwind in FY 2023. But it also considers the fact that, you know, operating margins expanded at a much faster pace in FY 2023 than we anticipated.
We're still well ahead of our expectations, specific to operating margin performance, and our commitment of 15% for FY 2024. You know, specific to free cash flow margins, you know, we expect that to continue to be strong, outpace and be slightly above our operating margin. You know, obviously being affected somewhat by product sales and slower product sales, given the growth objectives we've given for next year specific to revenue. Hopefully that provides you a little bit of color, Mehdi, in terms of how we're thinking.
Yes. Yes. You added to your buyback budget, but if I would just go with this free cash flow margin trend, you will still accruing more cash. How should I think about priorities? Would you become even more aggressive with buyback, or would you be on the lookout for tuck-in acquisitions or doing both?
Yeah. I'll let Charlie hit the M&A side at the end here. You know, specific to our stock buyback and return of capital through the stock buyback program. Look, our primary business objective with the stock buybacks, which remains the same today, is really to help offset dilution. That's the primary business objective of using the share buyback program. You know, we did commit a couple years ago with Analyst Day that we would look to drive about 50% of our free cash flow towards stock buybacks. Obviously, given the strength of our free cash flows in FY 2023, we're a little bit behind on that, but I think directionally, we'll still target that 50% target.
The other thing to think about in terms of use of cash is we do have the maturity of our converts coming up. You know, we're quite fortunate, frankly, to have the strength of the balance sheet that we have. You know, currently... our current thinking on that is that, you know, we'll use all, and if it's not all, it'll just be a small portion of our cash to fund that could be maturity of the converts and maybe use a little bit of our revolver, but we'll make that call closer to maturity of the notes. Charlie, do you wanna talk a little bit about M&A thinking?
Yeah. Well, as the audience knows, we've made a couple of acquisitions over the last five years. I, you know, the Portworx acquisition, you know, continues to perform for us, and we're very pleased with that. I would say that in general, however, you know, we're blessed as a company with lots of opportunity for organic investment as FlashBlade//E, you know, demonstrates. It's the reason why we have still a relatively high R&D investment. We believe we have lots of opportunity to continue to expand our product line and our TAM through internal development. We as everybody knows, external M&A was quite expensive during the bubble.
We're starting to see some of those expectations come down in the market. If the right opportunity comes along, either for tuck-in or a small acquisition that can add to our, you know, internal momentum around innovation, we certainly are always open to that. We do have an active set of activities out there, looking at different opportunities. One never knows when one of those is right at the right price and available for us to take. You know, we continue to consider M&A, and we'll do so as we go forward.
Okay. I'm gonna switch gears and focus on industry trend. I'm getting a lot of questions. I still some questions on the FY product revenue trend. I think going back to the industry trend may answer or may help clarify some of the concerns or confusion. In that context, Charlie, help us understand. Unstructured data is growing much faster than structured data. Unstructured data, cloud is structured data on-prem, just to put in perspective. This is where like, okay, merchant versus captive market. To what extent would the cloud service providers would continue to work with a Pure or merchant storage vendor versus building out their own storage solution?
Yep. Excellent question. The hyperscalers, as opposed to, let's say, the large SaaS vendors, and a number of the cloud, the non-hyperscale cloud service providers. The hyperscalers, in particular, developed their own storage software and use probably 90% plus hard disk. They've done very similar development to our major enterprise competitors. What I mean by that is that each of them, both our competitors and the hyperscalers, started out with software that was designed to run hard disks, manage hard disks, manage data on hard disks.
To the extent that they needed to deliver higher performance, they would slide in a SSD, which is a device that uses Flash to mimic a hard disk, and they would slide that in, but their software was still designed for hard disks overall. What that meant, you know, an SSD is like using a computer as a typewriter. It's underperforming. It is underutilizing the inherent Flash technology, which is a semiconductor. We are the, literally the only company that actually writes our software to manage the Flash itself at a system level. That is why we've been consistently years ahead of our competition in the area of price performance, in the area of Flash technology, as well as being able to utilize some of its inherent advantages.
We're able to provide Evergreen, we're able to provide non-disruptive upgrades with that software, which is unlike anything else in the storage industry. The hyperscalers have the same handicap, if you will. They don't have the advanced IP necessary to leverage flash at its best, including at a cost at its best. We think that gives us an opportunity over the next several years to sell into that environment at a system level. If you go beyond the hyperscalers to cloud service providers, and certainly to SaaS companies, you know, those are areas where they don't develop their own code for their at the system level other than managing their individual application environments. This is something where we've already seen success.
The interest in our Fusion product, which allows for large data centers to manage their storage like the cloud, like the cloud hyperscalers manage theirs, you know, has been very high, and we're working very closely with both cloud service providers, MSPs, as well as very large private clouds to allow them to manage their storage and offer it as a service to their developers, just like the cloud companies do. I hope that answers your question. What it is that because we have this unique IP in managing Flash at a system level to maximize its performance and its cost, that gives us the opportunity well ahead of the rest of the industry.
Just a quick follow-up. When you say 90% of the storage is HDD based, that is predominantly the cold near line storage, right?
Well, yeah. Near line storage would not be classified as cold. You could think of it as warm. It's what's known as secondary tier. There's, you know, several different layers of secondary tier, if you will. You know, it's slower. It's databases that don't have a high-performance characteristic to it. It is data that is being held for later use. You know, again, it went nearly all of, you know, whether it's AWS or Azure or even if you were to go into Meta Facebook in terms of the type of storage, you know, for pictures and movies and even user data and posts, that tends to be all hard disk.
Sure. Now, you also made a reference on an earnings call the other night that, you're focusing on is replacing the 7,200 RPM HDD. Does that also include some of the near line or?
Oh, oh, yes.
Sure.
You know, there used to be, without getting too technical on this, there primary storage, there for primary storage, there used to be 15,000 RPM and 10,000 RPM hard disks to satisfy the high-performance storage environment. Those don't exist anymore. Those have largely been discontinued, because of because flash has taken over the primary disk market. What's left is this so-called 7,200 RPM disk drives, which are slower obviously, but much less expensive. What we're saying is it's the beginning of the end for that segment of the disk drive market, that flash now is able to compete at a price level.
Sure. If I just try to bring it all together, like in the near term, like what is implied in your fiscal, in your eighth quarter guide, perhaps could there be some volatility in the near term? You said 90% of the storage is still HDD. As we look into that mix coming down, there will be volatility. Just because one quarter you have a higher decline on a quarter-over-quarter basis doesn't mean that there is a change. Perhaps some of your peers have more exposure to the more expensive legacy product. Maybe that would skew some of these compares. It's still very early. I think what you said would have a more meaningful impact one or two year or a longer term, not more so in the near term.
Is that the right way to think about the near term and longer term?
Well, I suppose, you know, like any new product, or any product going into a new category or a new segment, always has a ramp. It doesn't turn on a dime. It's not like a, you know, coming out with a new, you know, the latest iPhone where consumers say, "Okay, well, I won't buy 13, I'll buy 14 now," in mass. In the enterprise segment, customers take time to change behavior. We're expecting to see a ramp for FlashBlade//E similar to what we saw with FlashArray//C, which was a ramp, but it was a very, you know, FlashArray//C was our the fastest growth of a new product we had ever seen in the company.
We would expect to see something similar with FlashBlade//E, but it's still a ramp.
When you, just Mehdi, when you talk about the product revenue, seasonality implied.
Right.
FY 2024, and I think that's what you're getting at, right?
Yes.
As Charlie talked about, the new contribution of revenue from FlashBlade// E, you know, we're really contemplating that in the second half. That obviously would be a factor in our consideration. Another factor.
Yes. I'm sorry.
Yeah, another factor.
Go ahead.
...for consideration, Mehdi, is again, we talked about the strong demand that we saw in Q4 of early and new stage pipeline, which again, was quite positive, and frankly, higher than what we were expecting. Again, as we looked at the slower sales progression of those opportunities, that takes us, you know, to Q2, Q3 timeframe in terms of really looking at converting those opportunities. Obviously that's contemplated in the seasonality when you think about our implied prod. The last thing that I'd probably point to is that when we look at seasonality overall, and it's probably more first half, second half type of view, I think FY 2022 is kind of a data point for reference as well for consideration.
Got it. Okay. On FlashBlade//E, how does this product open the disk market? Is there any more analytical way of thinking? Because I'm assuming the FlashBlade//E compared to FlashArray//C uses QLC, but, I mean, my impression is that it's actually focusing on a more cost-sensitive workload. Any color here, how does it help gain share from the disk market?
Yeah. Thank you, Mehdi. First of all, you know, we're very pleased. More than half now of our shipments of capacity, that is the total number of bytes that we ship are now on QLC. You know, we have QLC on our FlashArray//C, as you mentioned. Also all of our new FlashBlades now are on QLC technology. The question is, okay, how is E different than FlashBlade//S, which we introduced last year, which also uses QLC? Well, FlashBlade//S was designed for high performance. It's the second generation of the technology that powers that Meta research supercluster, the AI supercluster.
It is what we ship into machine learning environments and, you know, some of the highest performance environments that are out there. FlashBlade// E, which also uses QLC technology. It's being designed to do several things that really lower the price on a per byte basis. First of all, it is very high density. It actually starts, you know, the opportunity for customers to buy FlashBlade// E starts at about 4 petabytes. 'Cause it is a, you know, it's a large, very dense, system, which means the ASPs are high, even if the price per byte is relatively low.
It's designed to eke every last bit of efficiency out of out of the QLC Flash, and it's designed to leverage the common elements, so power supplies and the controllers to manage as much Flash as possible so that the contribution of the common equipment it is lowered on a per byte basis. Again, really designed for cost. We have because of our intellectual property, we're able to use a much greater amounts of the Flash that's inherent in the chip, and that gets into a technology that I'd be very willing to do a separate tutorial on that for anyone that might be interested in it. It does allow us to lead in the area of the low cost per byte.
Now, just to be clear, we expect over time to have similar margins in this area that we have with any of our products that are similar to our company as a whole. Obviously, because it's a new product, we won't see that until we get to a little bit of scale.
I see. Okay. Follow-up to this, it has to do with cost of ownership to your customer or data center custodian. You are using QLC. There's also ESG requirement. Does this change the trajectory of HDD penetration? Like if HDD is still 90%, would it take a year, 2 years, or this is more like a 3-5 year to reduce that to like 80% or 70%?
Right.
How does that trajectory look like?
Understood. Well, you know, you mentioned the ESG component of this. I, you know, even though, you know, we're introducing FlashBlade// E at roughly the same price as, let's say, a new hard disk system, it operates with 1/10 or 90% less space, power, cooling, labor, and e-waste. That's an incredible ESG benefit. If you look at large data centers, with, as we said, 80%, 90% of their data being stored on hard disk, and that hard disk taking up 20%-25% of data center power, if you reduce it by 90%, you're saving roughly 20% of total data center power, and that's a huge number. And so, especially in Europe, we're getting incredible response to that. The US, somewhat less sensitive to this thing right now, that is to energy savings.
Although the Meta deal was won because of the space and energy savings that we put into place because of how large and significant, the amount of data was in that environment. The ESG savings is absolutely incredible. That being said, you're right. That 80% or 90% is just not one tier disk. Some of it is more nearline, meaning, has a little bit more performance requirement. That'll be replaced first. There's other hard disks that is, as you pointed out earlier, sort of cold storage that has a lower price performance. We're not quite there yet, but expect to get there by next year. It'll be layer by layer. That's part of the ramp that's involved in all of this.
I truly believe that in 5 years, as I mentioned, not a single there will no longer be hard disks purchased in this, you know, for this environment. You can think of it as a ramp over 5 years. Relative to our size, however, you know, it can be a significant revenue growth element for us over the next several years.
Sure. Then just on the Meta, just a follow-up here. They're a private service provider. They have their own source of generating revenue through ads. What about public cloud, the AWS, Azure, and Google? How is the opportunities there, trending? I'm looking at it from a private cloud to the public cloud. Is there any differentiation here?
Well, the only real differentiation is that the hyperscalers as I'd mentioned earlier, have developed their own storage software technologies. They use hard disks, and they use standard compute for their controllers. Other than that, they run all of their own software for hard disks. As I've also mentioned, they have not created their own intellectual property for really managing flash as a semiconductor. When they use flash, they use SSDs, so the same software that they developed for hard disks. We believe, well, first of all, these companies are large enough that they can do anything they want, but it doesn't really shorten the period of time it might take them to develop the kind of intellectual property that we've developed over the last 10 years.
We do believe that it would take them some time to be able to really leverage flash to its best price performance. Even if one of them does it, we feel that there will be other, some of the others that will perhaps prefer to get a head start by utilizing someone like us. It's anybody's guess. Our conversations with them continue. You know, hopefully we'll be able to convince one or more of them that it's better to work with us for time to market and for mature technology than to attempt to do it all on their own.
Let me approach it differently. This is a question that's not on our list. Does the bus lane make a difference? Like, I'm assuming that your blade or flash array works with PCIe, SATA, and so forth. There are some of the new AI applications that rely on a proprietary, like an NVLink. As you look into the future, is this something that could work in your favor or create some challenge or is not relevant?
It's always relevant. To give a sense, we were the first ones to deliver flash on what's called NVMe, that, you know, which was a significant improvement in overall performance of the system. We support, you know, NVMe over TCP, over Fibre Channel, over what's called RoCE. We support many of the different NVMe technologies. There's always a new link being looked at to improve the speed of performance between the processor and storage. As you know, that's something that is performance-based, storage is something we care very deeply about, and so we're always on top of those. You know, it's like many other things. It's a new feature or capability.
As long as you stay on top of these, I don't view it as something that is either, you know, as long as we're at the forefront of it, you know, I think it's something that, you know, will allow us to stay on top. I don't view any of them as a threat.
Got it. Okay. Then 2 follow-up, maybe more from Kevan. How should we think about the length of these software sub-subscription services?
Multi-year. I mean, you know, the duration that we're seeing with our. And this is, you know, whether it's Evergreen//One or Evergreen subscriptions that are attached to product sales are actually pretty consistent in terms of what we've seen. Now, you know, we also see a healthy amount of on-demand usage as well with Evergreen//One. But overall, when customers are committing with us on our Evergreen//One SLA offerings, it's multi-year and generally consistent with what we've seen on our CapEx sales that also attach Evergreen. Mehdi, there's also been some other questions, I think, really trying to understand the seasonality from Q4 to Q1.
Let me just provide a little bit of color because we've talked a lot about the Q1 to Q1 compare, and then obviously the implied product revenue from Q4 to Q1 is steeper than what we've seen historically. I wanna give a little bit of perspective on that as well. Really, if we go back to our Q4 performance in print, I mentioned that we did really well in terms of our conversion of our advanced stage pipeline. It was quite consistent with our expectations. We did not have any significant or unusual pull-ins outside of trends specific to Q1 into Q4.
Really what's driving the more pronounced seasonality from Q4 to Q1 is exactly what Charlie and I have been walking through, which is we saw a really strong demand for new and early stage pipeline opportunities. Given that the sales progression of those opportunities have slowed, obviously that's impacting the implied view in terms of product revenue for Q1 and really creating a more pronounced, you know, Q4 to Q1 impact. I wanted to walk through that just to make sure that we were answering the audience's questions on that piece as well.
No, thank you. No, I've received some of those questions too. What's the revenue mix by the channel partner, direct versus OEM versus distributors? How would it change over time?
Well, first of all, we are only, we sell 100% of our product is fulfilled through a partner, so there is no direct whatsoever. We use distribution internationally, but not in North America. In North America or rather U.S. and Canada, we don't use distribution. But internationally, especially in the Asia Pacific region, that is almost all based on distribution and then resellers after that.
Okay. Those partners are not part of prolonging the sales cycle, right? It's just purely end customer that is prolonging the sales cycle.
Oh, yes. I mean, you know, the amount of time it takes to go from, you know, through the partner is typically reasonably short. No, there's no, it's all customer driven. Yes.
Okay. We are a minute over time. Is there any other topic that we need. Did I didn't address or question you that you wanna just comment on before we wrap it up?
Yeah, well, the only thing that I'd like to add is that, you know, we're as confident in our, you know, medium to long-term growth opportunity as we've ever been. There's a lot of concern and consternation in the market overall, with, you know, with some of the announcements that are coming out and the guides that are coming out. The thing to remember about recessions is they always end, and we know this very well, and we're just tooling ourselves up to make sure that, A, we gain more ground during the recession than any of our competitors, but more importantly, that we're able to accelerate coming out of the recession as well.
We have our eyes, you know, fully focused on the future and the opportunity ahead of us.
Great. Well, Charlie, Kevan, and Paul, thanks so much for giving us opportunity to host this fireside chat. For investors on the call, if there's any follow-up question, hopefully not on the April quarter guide, send me an email. I wish everyone a great Friday and a happy and great weekend. Thank you all.
Thank you, Mehdi.