As Expected, Pure Storage Leveraging Portworx Acquisition Successfully

According to a recent report, the global NAND flash memory market is estimated to grow from $46.62 billion in 2020 to $85.36 billion by 2026 at a CAGR of over 11%. Mountain View-based Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) recently reported its fourth quarter results that surpassed market expectations.

Pure Storage’s Financials

Pure Storage’s fourth quarter revenues grew 2.2% to $502.7 million, ahead of the market’s estimates by 4.63%. Adjusted EPS of $0.13 also beat analyst estimates of $0.09.

Subscription services revenue grew 31.9% to $152.3 million. Product revenues fell 6.9% to $350.4 million.

For the fiscal year, revenues grew 2.4% to $1.68 billion and loss per share was $1.05.

Pure Storage forecast first-quarter revenues of $405 million, versus the markets forecast of $394.9 million. For the full year, Pure Storage expects revenue growth of 14%-15%, while the market forecasts a revenue growth of 15.3%.

Pure Storage’s Partnerships and Acquisitions

Recently, Pure Storage announced a tie-up with Equinix to deliver Pure Storage on Equinix Metal, a Bare Metal as a Service storage offering that provides an interconnected and secure platform for all stages of an organization’s cloud transition. Equinix Metal applies a developer and API-first approach to foundational infrastructure and provides a fully automated way for digital businesses to access Equinix via a collection of DevOps and open-source integrations.

It provides an environment that allows physical, dedicated, single tenant servers, and high-performance storage to be provisioned to customers with ease and speed. To eliminate upfront capex investment for hardware and ongoing stack management, it embeds storage procurement of network, storage and compute, with hosting, deployment, and support of all physical aspects through one vendor under one contract.

Last quarter, Pure Storage had announced the acquisition of Portworx. I believe that this was a well-made match and recent results support the idea. Cloud-native databases, analytics applications and AI frameworks, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Spark, and Tensorflow, are some of the tools upon which customers are building their data pipelines. Pure has been serving these applications through FlashBlade. Post the acquisition, it has integrated Portworx’s capabilities to expand the support for these applications on any infrastructure both on premise or in cloud at any scale. It also saw significant growth of in-cloud deployments of Portworx driven by its partnership with IBM. Pure Storage believes that the it is just beginning to leverage its GTM engine to drive growth through Portworx.

Pure Storage’s stock is trading at $20.67 with a market capitalization of $5.67 billion. It had touched a high of $29.53 earlier last month. The stock fell to a 52-week low of $7.93 in March last year due to the global crisis. Pure Storage had listed on the NYSE in 2015 by raising $425 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion and a stock price of $17.

Disclosure: All investors should make their own assessments based on their own research, informed interpretations, and risk appetite. This article expresses my own opinions based on my own research of product-market fit, channel execution, and other factors. My primary interest is in product strategy. While this may have bearing on stock movements, my writings tend to focus on long-term implications. The information presented is illustrative and educational, but should not be regarded as a complete analysis nor recommendation to buy or sell the securities mentioned herein. I am not a registered investment adviser and I am not receiving compensation for this article. I am an investor in this company.

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