Earnings Call: Q2 2022

Aug 25, 2021

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Pure Storage Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2022 Earnings Release Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference call, Mr. Sanjay Khurana. Mr. Khurana, please go ahead. Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to the Pure Storage Second Quarter Fiscal 2022 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Sanjot Khurana, Vice President of Investor Relations at Pure Storage. Joining me today are our CEO, Charlie Giancarlo our CFO, Kevin Chrysler And our CTO, Rob Lee. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that during this call, management will make some forward looking statements, which are subject to various Risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding the COVID-nineteen pandemic and related disruptions, our growth in sales prospects, Our business and operations. Any forward looking statements that we make are based on facts and assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update 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 these public filings. During this call, we will discuss non GAAP measures in talking about the company's performance and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP Measures are provided in our earnings press release and slides. Additionally, when we refer to sales in our prepared remarks, we mean total Bookings excluding cancellable orders. This call is being webcast 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 a property of Pure Storage. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Charlie Giancarlo. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Pure had an outstanding Q2. As a growing share taking company, we expect every quarter to be record breaking, but this quarter was extraordinary. Sales, revenue and profitability were well above expectations. Revenue growth this quarter exceeded 23% And we had the highest Q2 operating profit in our history. I was especially pleased with the growth of both our new and existing products, The balance of performance geographically and our continuing penetration of cloud and large enterprise. These are all key parts of our long term strategy that we've shared over the past several years. These results also show that our of investing into the pandemic and specifically investing in our enterprise sales capability and expanding our product line was the right one. As we discussed in past calls, we predicted that Pure's growth would accelerate as businesses adjusted to the COVID environment. We believe that our growth will be even stronger as businesses return to an in office environment. We estimated that this would start this past Q2 And we are obviously very pleased with the results. Looking ahead, we expect that businesses will continue to adjust to the effects of the pandemic while driving digital transformation. We believe that the Delta variant has slowed As we indicated last quarter, we believe that the current environment enables us to return to our historical double digit growth rates with increasing profitability. Our leadership and innovation of the data storage and management market continues to grow. Our strategy is focused on delivering a unified cloud operating and procurement model across all data storage use cases and environments, Enabling modern cloud native applications built on containers and driving the modernization of today's infrastructure with a focus on the all flash future that modern applications will demand. Let's take a quick look at the results. This past quarter provided many areas of outstanding performance, highlighted by the highest total sales For any second quarter in the history of the company growing more than 30% year over year, continued strength In subscription services revenue, up 31% year over year with strong growth in Pure as a Service, which almost doubled revenues compared to the prior year. And our success in large enterprise continues to grow, comprising over 50% of our sales With our top 10 customers spending more than $100,000,000 in total. As I mentioned, Both our new and existing products achieved new sales milestones. Frankly, the superlatives from this quarter are too numerous to fully enumerate, But here are a few highlights. Growth of our subscription businesses were very strong this past quarter with sales of both Pure as a Service and Portworx approximately tripling year over year. All subscription sales taken together, including Portworx, Pure as a Service and Evergreen increased almost 50% year over year in Q2 and is approaching 1 half of Pure's total sales. These results show both the continued attractiveness of our evergreen model and the market's excitement for our new subscription offerings. This past quarter Portworx sales tripled year over year and continued to gain many new customers both large and small. Financial services and service providers are particularly interested in the ability to easily scale container based workflows with Portworx. FlashArrayC continues to deliver tremendous growth with sales tripling over last year. It remains the fastest growing new product in Pure's history and is enabling customers to transition to an all flash data center. Cloud customers in particular are making use of FlashArrayC To improve their reliability, to reduce their environmental footprint and to lower their operational costs. For instance, a recent 8 figure win with a top 10 hyperscaler, which will begin to ship this Q3 Q3 was won against traditional magnetic disk based on our high performance, small space and Power footprint and superior total cost of ownership. Safe Mode is another compelling reason why ever more This high performance ransomware protection solution for both FlashArray and FlashBlade Takes less than a millisecond to create an immutable copy of data for fast recovery. And customers can send these snapshots to a variety of Such as Flasher AC, FlashBlade or AWS, Microsoft Azure and NFS Only 6 months after introduction, over 500 customers have enabled SafeMoon. These examples demonstrate the success of our strategy to provide organizations with the modern data services They need to modernize their data infrastructure, to take advantage of modern applications and to manage their data and infrastructure through code in a multi cloud environment. Our focus on these goals has been rewarded with new and expanding customer relationships. For example, one of our enterprise customers, a global Fortune 500 Financial Services firm Recently chose a pure as a service subscription to fuel the expansion of their core operating applications in a virtual hub. While increasing the performance, flexibility and scale of this global platform, they were able to reduce their physical footprint by nearly 80%, Contributing significantly to their environmental sustainability goals. They estimate that this will reduce their total cost of ownership by nearly 70% while providing significant performance increases. And with growing global concerns About ransomware attacks, a U. K.-based securities firm with sub millisecond performance requirements found performance, Simplicity and safety in Pure's recovery capabilities. Using FlashArray Safe Mode with our FlashBlade Flash Recover solution On an Evergreen Gold subscription, they now have the data protection and unified fast file and object platform they need Our strategy since our founding is to focus on doing the right things for our customers and on doing things right. Our environmental goals dovetail with our customer first values. Part of ensuring that our products and services have the lowest With our customers' increasing focus on their own environmental footprint, we will be providing more quantitative measures and Sustainability programs going forward. Pure Storage is advantaged by the major trends in our industry. We lead in driving the all flash data center and we have the most advanced services and tools to automate data management for our modern Cloud Native Application. As we entered the year, we stated that our customers would accelerate their investment in digital transformation With renewed confidence in economic recovery this year, this was clearly evident in our performance in the first half and especially this past Q2. In the current environment, we are confident that the momentum of our first half will continue into Q3 As evidenced by our Q3 guide and Raised annual outlook. I want to thank our employees and our partners who have worked tirelessly To support our customers with great products and great service, throughout the uncertainty of COVID-nineteen and who have created our sustainable momentum. Everyone at Pure deserves to feel proud of the advancements we have made through this difficult period. One last note that I would like to add before I Turn the call over to our CFO, Kevin Kreisler. I am very pleased to announce that Rob Lee, who many of you know, has just been promoted and will serve as Pure's Chief Technology Officer. Congratulations, Rob. John Cogrove, a. K. A. Coz, Who in addition to his title as Founder also served as CTO will now take the title of Chief Visionary Officer. Congratulations, Rob and Coz. Kevin, over to you. Thank you, Charlie, and good afternoon. We could not be more pleased with the strength of our business, We saw strong sales execution across the globe, which is reflected in our sales growth of 32%, excluding Similar to what we saw last quarter, our entire portfolio, including our subscription services, contributed to our performance. Our core business of FlashArrayX gained significant strength across our enterprise, commercial and public sector Customers, FlashArray C sales more than tripled year over year and FlashBlade sales established a new record high for Q2. Our revenue growth was 23% this quarter and product revenue had its highest year over year growth rate compared to the previous seven Remaining performance obligations or RPO, switching to the continued strength of our We acquired 380 new customers, representing 10% year over year growth And we saw particular strength with new enterprise customers this quarter. Now turning to specific financial results for the quarter. Total revenue grew 23 percent to approximately $497,000,000 Revenue in the United States Grew 25% and international revenue grew 18% compared to last year. Subscription services revenue grew approximately 31 year over year and represents approximately 35% of total revenue. Product revenue was very strong during the quarter, growing 19%. The differentiated value of our software and solutions continue to be reflected in our non GAAP total gross margins of 70.5 percent this quarter. Non GAAP product gross margins continue to be on the high end of our long term expectations at We expect that product margins will fluctuate depending on product mix as our newer offerings continue to scale. Non GAAP subscription services margins were 70.7%. Revenue and gross margin outperformance and improving sales efficiency contributed to delivering strong Non GAAP operating profits of $46,600,000 Continued reduced travel due to the ongoing COVID environment related to lower operating expenses During the quarter, we ended the quarter with over $1,290,000,000 in cash Achieved a record high this quarter of $123,000,000 resulting from improved linearity and strong collections, as well as increasing operating leverage. Capital expenditures were $28,000,000 during the quarter, Slightly over 2,300,000 shares as part of our 200,000,000 share repurchase program. Now turning to guidance. We are very pleased with our sustained momentum and improving operational efficiencies. We expect Q3 revenue to It will be approximately $40,000,000 I have mentioned in previous quarters that we would not be updating our annual view. However, Given the strong performance of our business over the last several quarters, including our strong financial outlook for Q3, we have also updated our annual view. We now expect that revenue for the year will surpass $2,000,000,000 growing approximately 21% to $2,040,000,000 We also expect that operating income will be approximately $150,000,000 This is an Executing with a focus on accelerating revenue growth and increasing profitability. Thank you to all of our employees and partners. I'm also really looking forward to having you join us at our Virtual Analyst Day on And your first question comes from the line of Pinjalaman with JPMorgan. Great. Hey, thank you guys and good afternoon. Congrats on the quarter. It seems like a super solid quarter here. Probably one of the highest beats, I think, if I was just looking at it going backward. Charlie, maybe at a high level, did anything surprise you in the quarter when we were doing checks? A lot of partners kind of highlighted That Pure continues to be continues to see relatively short lead times while competitors kind of struggle with elongated lead times. Do you think that is helping you to gain share? Anything that surprised you in the quarter, we'd love to know. Yes. Thanks, Pindjal. I think the reason why we continue to gain share and why the quarter was so good is that we've been preparing A portfolio of products that are really second to none. And while that was being done during the beginning of the COVID crisis, course, there's a lot of disruption in our customer base. But as the customers have become accustomed to operating within the COVID environment, That portfolio and our focus on developing a set of enterprise capabilities both Sales support as well as with our products, it's finally all coming together and hitting stride. And so no, we expect this to be beginning, if you will, of very evident growth for the company as we go forward. Wow, strong comments. Thank you for that. One follow-up for Kevin. It seems like you were able to maintain the Margin sequentially, if I did my math correctly quickly, despite the inflationary pressures that have been creeping up, Is it fair to say that you saw kind of a better pricing environment maybe as the component price inflation presumably made the competitors do less discounting in the field? Well, hey, Pincha, one is I think the your math is right. So absolutely, we held on gross margin. And I really think that's a testament to a couple of things. I think the our operations team continues to do an outstanding job, our sales team, and the discipline Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo. Yes, thanks for taking the question. Also, congrats on the solid results and guide. Throughout today's call, you referenced the fact You've now got a top 10 hyperscale customer, it sounds like for the FlashArrayC product. I guess the question on that is that Tied to their cloud offerings or is that for internal usage? And do you expect this to kind of be the beginning of more Potential hyperscale customer traction for the company going forward? And I have a follow-up. Yes. It's part of their overall operations. So I think the answer is affirmative from the question that you asked. And we do feel that this is Most of the hyperscalers, the vast majority of what they store, they store on disk. They may have a little bit of flash in their servers, but for the most part, all storage is on disk. And we think this is the beginning of breaking that kind of price performance that can They compete within the disc market. Very helpful. I wanted the follow-up questions on actually You referenced the subscription revenue up 31%. And then I think you mentioned that on a combined basis, Pure as a Service, Portworx and I believe Evergreen was up close to 50% year over year, if I correctly got that. So I guess, I'm curious of what is other what is in that other subscription services line that maybe Wasn't growing as fast as the 3 combined that you mentioned. Hey, Aaron, this is Kevin. This is just a clarification. I think the 50% reference is really towards sales and bookings. Okay. And then obviously the revenue and there's a lag with the revenue. So 2 different metrics here that we're referring to. Okay. So just to be clear, Evergreen, Portworx and Pure as a Service basically are the majority, if not all of the services line in the P and L? That's correct. That's correct. Okay. Thank you very much. Your next This is Jeff Brand on for Cindy. Just wanted to kind of Follow-up on the FlashArray C into the hyperscalers. Can you give us a need for better performance by the cloud providers? Yes, this is Rob. I'll jump in and take Yes. So when we look at FlashArrayC relative to the hybrid and the hybrid, we see being very Price competitive and actually price advantageous, up to 30% price advantage in some cases. But I think what we're seeing, especially with this large hyperscaler deal is that prices But all of the other attributes and benefits we're able to bring from Flash, such as the performance, such as Power, cooling savings, footprint savings, those are all very meaningful across the board. But at the hyperscale, They become super, super meaningful, right. And so as we look at, for example, this customer, FlashArrayC was the only product that could meet their needs Without them having to go build new data centers. Great. Thank you. And then just as my follow-up, you didn't mention anything on supply chain in your Great remarks. Can you give us an update on that if you're missing out on any revenue due to supply chain constraints? Yes. No, again, I think we're doing Great job with our operations team in partnership with our suppliers. Obviously, the environment from our perspective hasn't changed much from what we saw last quarter To be focused on it and obviously you see the results in our print. And so this will be an area that we'll continue to focus on through We'll manage that, but again, a testament to our sales team to continue selling the value, especially the software value associated Your next question comes from the line of Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America. Yes, thank you. Your guidance for next quarter calls for close to 30% growth, But all that can be explained from sort of that acceleration from 20 23 to 30 can be explained really through easier compares. On the one hand, you're seeing Very good traction. Charlie, you spoke about share gains. You essentially are reiterating sort of this Better outlook for the full year as well. Just trying to reconcile why wouldn't you see a further organic on top. I'm not saying 30% is really good, but why aren't we seeing a further acceleration, especially when you think about The comments around the backdrop of Delta being maybe somewhat transitory. Yes. Wamsi, I'm not sure I would follow your math in terms of 30% being Entirely explained by the easier compare last year. It does represent a significant growth rate, not just over last year, but frankly over if we take and as a company, we are looking at not just at year over year growth rates, but year over year growth rates because of obviously the anomalous compares with last year and it's a substantial gain Even over a 2 year compare rate. So we think it's a suitably appropriate guide for this coming quarter given the entire environment. And it is of course a raise both from Our annual look forward as well as to what was consensus. So we do feel that it's an appropriate Ray's? Yes, we're very pleased with what we're seeing in terms of the Q3 outlook and the idea We're driving almost 30% growth next year with the opportunity we highlighted on flasher AC. So I think The guide that we've come out with with Q3 is actually quite strong. We're very pleased with that. Okay, great. And if I could, I think I heard you, Kevin, maybe say that some of the operating margin improvement, the operating profit dollar improvement was a function of Not able to hire as fast as maybe you would have liked to. Can you just elaborate a little bit on that? How much behind are you versus target in terms of hiring? How should we think about the trajectory of that for the next few quarters? Thank you. Yes, absolutely. And again, what I really was pleased with the quarter was not only the top line growth that we're driving, but the operating leverage That's coming with it and really that's coming really from the sales organization. We're seeing really strong Productivity and sales efficiency and discipline and then we're seeing that come through primarily on the operating leverage that we saw for Q2 and frankly the increased outlook for the remainder of the year. And so when I think about the Increasing operating leverage, I would look at first what we're doing in terms of outperforming on sales as well as the gross margin performance, Execution of the sales team. And then, yes, we've got a little bit of tailwind from the COVID environment. As I look at Q2, I would kind of view that between 1 to 2 points of the 9 points that we saw this quarter. So not a significant tailwind, but there is a bit of a tailwind that we saw for Q2. And yes, we're managing that quite well. Obviously, with on the sales side, even though we're got some more hiring to do on the sales side, they are just Doing such a great job in terms of productivity. Participation rates are tremendous. We're seeing a great growth Your next question comes from the line of Steve Enders of KeyBanc. Hi, this is George on Steve, thanks for taking the question and reiterate my congrats on the quarter. I just wanted to ask if you could give us an update on your ability to close new logos. And the past, you've mentioned how COVID is a bit of a constraint from that, but then we've seen things sort of open up and then the Delta variant coming back. Just an update on where you stand from that perspective. Thank you. Yes. We do feel that people working at home, offices Not really being open is a bit of a constraint on new net new logo growth. Despite that, Of course, we were pleased with the 10% growth we saw year over year, but in past years, of course, we saw more. So As we believe that as things open up more, obviously, that's been delayed a bit because of the Delta variant. But as things open up more late this year, early next, we expect that to actually just improve our net new logo gains. But in the meantime, our continuation to penetrate deeper and deeper into existing accounts, to penetrate deeper and deeper into the enterprise. And I might point out as well that our net new And I might point out as well that our net new logo gains in Enterprise was actually quite a bit quite strong. So As you might imagine, the commercial logo gains swamp, because there are so many more commercial accounts. In terms of net new logos, Net new logos tend to be dominated by commercial, but actually our gain of enterprise net new logos this past quarter was actually quite healthy. Great. Thank you. That's very helpful. Quick follow-up. Obviously, you had some nice bottom line outperformance this quarter. Can you give us an update on how you're thinking about driving Growth versus operating leverage over the long term. Thank you. Yes. We feel like at this point in time, given Our product portfolio and given the productivity that we're seeing from the sales force, we're going to be able to deliver both. We're going to be able Our operating profit margin. So, yes, no, we're quite confident in that. Your next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold of Raymond James. Thank you for taking the question. I first wanted to sort of check on how you're thinking about the longer term growth trajectory because in the past, Charlie, you've mentioned growth exceeding 20%, and now you put up 23%, you're guiding for 29%, which Maybe there's some easy comp to it, but if you could just sort of update us on how you feel about the overall trajectory relative to your Prior comments about exceeding 20%. Yes. No, we've made that commentary in the past We feel quite comfortable that we will be exceeding 20% for the foreseeable future. I think we're going to stick to that point right now, which is exceeding 20 I do think that we have room to grow beyond that again as COVID wanes, but predicting that right now is probably not A fool's errand for all of us. But we do feel comfortable that in this type of COVID environment that we can And Simon, we'll provide some more color on that as well in our Virtual Analyst Day. So we look forward in terms of our longer term growth rate. So Great. And then just as a follow-up, you were helpful in terms of talking about, bucketing revenue recurring, but Maybe another way to segment your contributions is if you could talk a little bit about what portion of revenue and what's the trajectory for revenue that you would consider Off premise, so what you're doing with hybrid cloud and things like cloud block storage with Azure, what you're doing with AWS. Could you help us get a better assessment of how that fits into the model? Yes, very much so. So first of all, we've stated in the past that cloud revenues has been about 30% plus. We haven't really Calculated it for this quarter to be talking about, but it's trending generally the same. Of course, Cloud is an area that we're very focused on and it's an area that we hope can actually continue to increase For us, especially as more and more customers and workloads go to either SaaS environments, cloud environments and as the consumer cloud And we feel as you're seeing with the FlashArrayC that over time we because of our belief in the all flash data center, The last bastion of mostly disk data center right now is actually in the cloud. And so it represents a great opportunity for us. Your next question comes from the line of Shannon Cross of Cross Research. Thank you very much. Just a couple of questions. The first, strengthened cash flow, free cash flow, obviously you're buying back stock. Curious how you're thinking about acquisitions and other uses. You're about a year off from when you announced Portworx. And then I have a follow-up. Thanks. Yes. Thank you, Shannon. We continue to be Gaining opportunities for M and A. We believe that M and A that really enhances our ability to provide a cloud operating model for our customers is the right way For us to be focused and there isn't a quarter or even a week that goes by where we're not investigating Yes, a potential combination for the company. So M and A continues to be an active area of investigation for us. Let me just I do want to comment on the strong operating cash flows, which I think were tremendous for the company. And again, I think there are kind of 3 areas that I would attribute that to this quarter. 1 was really that the great linearity that the sales team drove this quarter, which really improved collection And we saw that come through with the record operating cash flows that we saw this quarter. And the other thing obviously is the continued focus as a company we have On operating leverage and we're seeing some good benefits from that as well. Okay, thanks. And then I'm just curious given the inflationary environment, Are you how are you thinking about component costs longer term and also just some of the increased headcount, etcetera, costs that you're seeing? I know you're managing things well and the pricing environment remains fairly, I don't know, positive. But How are you thinking about this given what we're at least seeing coming from an inflationary perspective? Thank you. Yes, it's a Let me start, Kevin, you might have more. I would really separate it into the 2 items that you mentioned. 1 is component costs, which we have seen an increase on average about Probably about 10% this year in increased component costs. But of course, we live in a on a longer term deflationary environment So we really view that as a temporary phenomenon having to do with supply chain shortages And that should come back in the next year or so to where to the standard long term price reduction curve that exists in that environment. On the flip Absolutely, there is going to be and we're already starting to see the signs of an inflationary environment around wages. Our forecast and guides take that into account, but certainly what you speak of is becoming evident. Yes. One other thing I would just make sure to highlight too back to the component costs is, look, our approach to sourcing raw NAND really It continues to be an advantage for us really when we look at some of other folks who are leveraging sourced And leveraging our software capabilities to enable NAND management is really beneficial for us in this time as well. So I think that's an important color. Your next question comes from the line of Karl Ackerman with Cowen and Company. Yes. Good afternoon, gentlemen. With Portworx tripling revenue year over year, Is it now accretive to operating income? And then second, you are exiting the fiscal year in the low double digit EBIT range. That's in line with record quarterly results exiting 2019. That's certainly really good. The question is, while some skeptics may suggest that's maybe the best you could do, could you discuss the operational improvement Since the beginning of 2020, that would argue operating profit improvement is sustainable and able to grow. Thank you. Yes. Well, thanks for the question, Carl. That's been on people's minds. Focusing on operational improvement, productivity enhancement across the board at the company Something we've been very focused on over the last several years. COVID obviously set us back a bit because obviously we plan to grow into productivity And with COVID, we decided to continue to invest in areas that were we felt very important to our long term growth. Particular, investing in our ability to penetrate large enterprise, which by the way is part of productivity improvement And 2 was to invest in your broad scale portfolio of products, again, to help us to be able to penetrate and You've much greater wallet share in our customer base. It was only a few years ago where we could only address maybe 10 For the top line change that we've already discussed, we know quite strongly what our productivity gains are going to be in the different parts of And these are productivity gains that we're going to be able to continue to maintain inside the company. Again, Last year was the anomaly as it was for many companies, but in different ways. For us, it meant that our continued investment That we wouldn't see the productivity or the sales return on that until the economy started to improve and now we're starting to see that. Yes, let me just add on to that a little bit if you don't mind. Look, I think we've made none of this is a surprise for us in terms of the increasing operating leverage we're driving for the All due to the points that Charlie is making. And you actually see the great strides GoToMarket is making in terms of Their costs and expenses as a percentage of revenue, I think that's going to continue. I think we'll see over time, We'll get some benefits on R and D as well. And obviously, on our gross margins continue to be strong. We've seen that on the product Gross margin side and also believe we can get more scale and improvement on subscription gross margins over time as our unified subscription and peer as a service So I absolutely believe there's upward trajectory to our operating leverage. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Rod Hall of Goldman Sachs. Yes, thanks for the question. I guess I wanted to start, Charlie, with this Slasher 8C sale to the hyperscaler. I'm really intrigued by that as And I wonder if maybe you could give us any more color on what that use case looks like and are there other hyperscalers in your pipeline with very similar use cases? Just how big is that opportunity for you and what does that pipeline look like with those types of customers? And then I've got a follow-up. So first of all, the individual opportunity itself is a very large opportunity. It's not a one off. It will it's something that will continue As we go forward, as we understand it, it is a you can think of it as a general purpose Implementation for one of their key application environments inside the organization, but I really can't go much, Much further than that, but it's not something that is unusual or extraordinary in a hyperscale environment. So it is something that's easily transferable to other hyperscalers. It's not the by the way, it's not the first of the top 10 hyperscalers that we've sold This Flasher AC into, it's just one that is significant for a single quarter. And we do believe that this is something that we can continue to expand to other hyperscalers as well. Yes. And just to be clear too, in terms of the strength we're seeing In our Q3 guide, look, when we exclude this great opportunity that we're seeing with FlashArrayC and a Top 10 Hyperscale, we're still in our comfortable 20% plus 20% year over year growth rate excluding that opportunity. So I think that's important to note as well in terms of the strength is across the business and is across the portfolio. We're really excited about Okay, great. That's helpful. Thanks for that. And then I was also interested in this comment you made on wage inflation. And I guess it's tough to know kind of how that might play out over the next 18, 24 months. So just curious if you guys have any thoughts on what sort of inflation we'd be talking about? Are we talking about a few percentage points you think you might incur or any kind of thoughts on quantification of that? I don't want to go over I don't want to over What it might be, but our thinking is it's going to be a few percentage points, yes. Okay, great. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Your next question comes from the line of Amit Dharinani with Evercore. Thanks and thanks for taking my question, I guess. I have 2. First one, I was looking at the subscription growth metrics of 31%, which is obviously fairly impressive. I think investors tend to struggle with that number a bit. So I'm wondering, is there a way to think about How much of this growth is coming from existing customers versus new customers? And then could you also quantify the size of some of the components that are within the subscription line? Yes, we're not going to get into a whole lot of detail on that. Now obviously on virtual Financial Analyst Day, we'll provide some color that hopefully you'll find helpful in terms of our subscription momentum. But look, nothing's changed significantly. We've got great momentum on our unified But the performance is excellent. And obviously, our Evergreen is our bread and butter. It's our baseline, largest Peace continues to be so for the in terms of what we're looking at for this year. So we'll get some more details on that as we look out Fair enough. And then if I could just follow-up, if I look at The growth guide that you're providing for October quarter and the full year, the implication obviously is October will be up 29%, 30% year over year. You've touched on that a bit. Then I think your implication for Jan quarter is it's going to decelerate to like 19%, 20%, I mean, that's still a really good number, but I would love to understand why the deceleration? Are you seeing a bit of a pull in? Or are you just being conservative with the implied hand corner numbers? That would be helpful. Well, I think it's important that we've been talking about the large hyper Scalar with the top 10 hyperscalar on the FlashArrayC that's putting some more strength on our Q3 Look sequentially, it's even sequentially Q3 to Q4, I'm pleased with what we're seeing year over year, close to 20% for The annual outlook exceeding 20%. So overall, quite pleased with it. Don't really view it as a decel, especially when I about our larger opportunity that we're digesting or expect to digest in Q3 with the FlashArray seed opportunity. Your next question comes from the line of Kathy Huberty with Morgan Stanley. Yes, thank you. Kevin, just to come back to the 3rd quarter contribution from the hyperscaler Account, was that was the revenue contribution from that customer baked into the original full year revenue outlook? And Are you expecting any contribution from that customer that would be material in the 4th quarter? It's a great question. Look at when we were looking at the annual guide at the beginning, no, it's fair to say that we wouldn't have contemplated. So it's part of our beat both from an annual perspective and how we're looking Added for Q3. And we're not expecting a significant amount to come through in Q4. We would expect a larger piece in Q3. Okay. Thank you. And then just a follow-up maybe for Charlie. If we step away from the slower hiring in 2Q, which I assume is more A function of the tight labor market, how are you thinking about hiring in the coming quarters to support the stronger demand you're seeing and the intention to sustain growth rates north of 20% for the foreseeable future? It's a great question, Katie. Obviously, we want to sustain And then continuing to develop further develop our infrastructure to be able to support So I would say largely the areas of IT, other areas to support sales growth, but The largest focus is going to be on sustaining sales momentum. Okay, great. Thank you. Congrats on the quarter. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital. Thank you and congrats on the really strong breed and some beat and the 7% above consensus guide for Q3 So just to be clear, this Top 10 hyperscalerrevenue contribution for Q3, very clear now what it's going to how much should it contribute though during Q2 though? We don't have an impact for Q2 now. No impact for Q2. Okay, great. And then you said that PAS doubled in revenue year over year, but what about PAS bookings? So PAS bookings almost tripled, almost tripled year over year. Yes. Wow! Okay. That's very impressive then. And then finally yes, absolutely. And then finally, have you ever had your long term model listed in your presentation for a couple of quarters now? Presumably that's because you're looking to update at the upcoming Investor Day, is that correct? That's correct. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Your next question comes from the line of Matt Cabral with Credit Suisse. Yes. Thank you very much. I want to dig a little bit more into Cloud Block Store. I think it's 5 coming up in 6 months since you guys went GA on Azure. Just curious The ramp has been there so far and if there's any way to compare or contrast what the ramp on Azure has looked like compared to what you saw on AWS the first time around? Yes, absolutely. Well, as we've said in the past, Cloud Block Store, a fundamental part of our overall pure as a service subscription. And no doubt, it was very critical in driving part of that growth of the Pure as a Service. As you know, many customers already determine which of the hyperscalers they want to use and it's been Instrumental in several of our pure as a service deals, some with some very large, certainly Fortune 50 companies that had set their sights On Azure, so from that standpoint, very strong. And then with respect to actual deployment on Cloud Blocks, we're actually I'll let Rob take that because he's the one that's been most tied into it. Yes. So on the deployments, Azure has come on really strong, Right. So we've seen we see customers now deploying across AWS and Azure. I would say demand for Azure Tends to be a little bit stronger. But if we step back from it, I think we look at Cloud Block Store and Portwix as a combination, Really as forming the backbone of our cloud portfolio and we're seeing strength across the There are really both from customers that are deploying in cloud day 1 with both Portworx and Cloudblocks are now available on multiple cloud providers, But as well, customers that are starting with peers of service through the unified subscription on premise and then later on growing And transitioning into Azure or AWS in time. And so we see both of those motions and I think that just validates Our strategy as well as our thesis that customers continue to value the flexibility and uniformity that we're able to deliver across the prem, hybrid, cloud and Multi cloud environments. Yes. I will say just to finalize our thoughts on Cloud Block Store that it is a fundamental part of Unified subscription. We rarely see, although we do see some customers that will just go to Cloud Block Store without having a raise on prem, But far more customers are using it as a way for them to be able to transition from on prem into the cloud And therefore, it starts off as a unified subscription and then they start to migrate whether it's for disaster recovery or other capabilities, dev test, into the cloud environment using Cloud Block Store. So it tends to be a first of all, an attractive element to the unified But secondly, taking advantage of subsequent to the engagement on Pure as a Service. Got it. All that's really helpful. And then just a quick follow-up. You called out enterprise momentum several times in the prepared remarks couple of times in the Q and A, but just wondering if you could expand a little bit more on just biggest contributors or drivers to that strength. And I'm curious if there's any way to think about How much of that momentum is just bigger footprint within existing customers versus getting into some net new wins versus the competitive landscape and maybe those being a little bit bigger were in the past? Yes, it's actually all of the above. First of all, having a broader portfolio gets you more respect Within an enterprise customer, whether that's a new customer or an existing customer. We had enterprise customers 4 years ago When I first joined and their first response to me is, Pure, you're great, but we can only use you For this specialized environment, why can't you build products that cover the rest of our storage footprint? And so having a broad portfolio is necessary to be a good partner to an enterprise customer. It also allows you to compete for larger deals inside And then for a number of customers and this was certainly true with a lot of banking customers, until we could reach a certain scale and address a So really, so then going back to the beginning of your question, it's been because of the investment that we've made into enterprise capabilities, both sales well as support, it's been investment in the broadening of the product line and it's been about maturing Our own organization in terms of how to work with enterprise customers. So all of those have contributed to our ability to and our success that we've seen And expanding our enterprise business. And just to add on to that, I think one of the areas we haven't talked too much about today in the portfolio is Flash I think that's a great example of where we've invested in broadening the portfolio, broadening our enterprise capabilities and feature sets. And that's reflective in strength we saw, FlashBlade did extremely well in terms of large deals. And just getting back to Charlie's point, having the breadth of enterprise capabilities in Portfolio, whether it's FlashArray C, which we've talked quite a bit about, FlashArray X or FlashBlade, having all of that together really just helps us go and prosecute these opportunities. And your last question comes from the line of Matt Sheerin with Stifel. Yes. Thanks for squeezing me in. Charlie, in your opening remarks, you talked about seeing somewhat The slowdown in return to office on prem add customers and certainly we've heard that from other Companies as well, your guidance for the quarter is strong even without that hyperscale deal. So could you give us more color on what you're hearing Customers and partners about timing of projects and your visibility, is it better or perhaps weaker because of that? So I think our visibility into their build outs has been excellent. It really has. So they share very share openly with us. Obviously, planning of build outs takes some time, so they do want to share openly. I would say that the returns we've been remember, there's only about a couple of months when there was people returning to the office and then it Slow down right away. So most of the improvement we're seeing is from the improvement of working in a COVID environment, not because It's freed up tremendously over the summer. So our guide just as I mentioned before just reflects the way the world is As we see it today, not based on any further opening up, we do think that when the world does open up, we'll see even better performance to be clear. I would say that if anything, On a very small basis, what we did see was some projects move out, but not because of COVID, it was all because of Customers' ability to get other products for their build out, with servers, networking, sheet metals, power supplies, whatever it might be, We definitely saw expected timelines push out a bit In some customer environments. So but all that I think bodes well for us in the future as things improve. Okay. Thank you. And you talked a lot about the strength you're seeing from the enterprise customer base. Again, last quarter, you called out commercial as finally picking up. Is that continuing to hold up? Are you seeing any other signs there? It did hold up, but it didn't improve any more than it did last time. So that's what we're waiting for. As COVID improves, we think Commercial will pick up even more. But it did hold up certainly through this last quarter and we expect it to hold up through this quarter. Yes. I think the commercial business did Really well. I mean, obviously, coming off such a fantastic quarter last quarter and then holding on to that strength, I think, is pretty impressive. So we're impressed with both Enterprise and Commercial. And this concludes the question and answer session. At this time, I'll turn the Call back over to Charlie Giancarlo for closing remarks. Thank you, operator. Well, Q2 has really been a fantastic quarter for Pure as our strategy It's a very exciting time at Pure and we are in a great innovation cycle with our portfolio and our sales momentum And our execution has never been stronger. I do want to recognize again the hard work of all of our employees at Pure and the strong collaboration that we from our business partners. Everyone is singularly focused on delivering strong results for our customers. Thank you all and have a good evening. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.