Good day and welcome to the peer storage second quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask the question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. And at this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Paul Ziaz, vice president, investor relations. Go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to pure second quarter fiscal 2024 earnings conference call. On the call, we have Charlie Giancarlo, chief executive officer, Kevin Chrysler, chief financial officer, and Rob Lee, chief technology officer. Following Charlie's and Kevin's prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued after the close of market and is posted on our website where this call is being simultaneously webcast. The slides of the company, this webcast can be downloaded at investor.purestorage.com.
On this call today, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding our financial outlook and operations, our strategy, technology and its advantages, our current and new product offerings and competitive industry and economic trends. Any forward-looking statements that we make are based on facts and assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Where 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 businesses contained in our filings with the SEC, and we refer you to those public filings.
During this call, all financial metrics and associated growth rates are non-GAP measures other than revenue, remaining performance obligations, or RPO, and cash and investments. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAP measures are provided in our earnings press release and slides. This call is being broadcast 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 the property of Pure Storage.
Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to Pure Storage's Q2 conference call. We are pleased with our financial results this quarter. While the macro environment continued to be challenging, we outpaced our competitors and saw strong growth in our strategic investments, particularly in Flashblade S, Flashblade E, and Evergreen 1. Our results demonstrate that we continue to lead our market and that our strategy is working.
大家下午好,欢迎参加 Pure Storage 的 Q2 电话会议。我们对本季度的财务结果感到满意。尽管宏观环境仍然具有挑战性,但我们在竞争对手中领先,并在我们的战略投资中实现了强劲的增长,特别是在 Flashblade S、Flashblade E 和 Evergreen 1 等方面。我们的结果表明我们继续领导市场,并且我们的战略是有效的。
Pure is delivering extraordinary outcomes for our customers by transforming data storage from a highly fragmented solution set to a single consistent platform. Pure is today the first and only data storage company that can deliver a single, consistent, non-disruptive operating and management environment leveraging the most advanced Flash technology across all data storage needs. With the introduction of the E-family, our all Flash products now span from the highest performance systems to the most cost-effective systems for bulk data. Uniquely in our industry, all of Pure's products are based on one operating system, Purity, the only storage software that operates natively direct to Flash, rather than using less efficient commodity SSDs. All of Pure's products are managed with our Pure 1 management system and have consistent APIs. All of our product support, non-disruptive upgrades forever through our Evergreen technology and subscription programs and are all available to consume as a service through Evergreen 1.
The data storage industry has for decades been plagued with different tailored software and hardware solutions for the wide range of storage protocols, formats, performance levels and price points needed to cover the market. The storage portfolio of legacy data storage providers was generally assembled by acquisition and are collections of disparate, inconsistent environments. That approach left customers with a complex infrastructure with multiple software operating environments with different management systems and multiple differing operational processes. As a result, legacy storage environments are complex. They vary for each use case. They require downtime for upgrades and require forklift replacements roughly every five years. Pure is the only company that provides customers a single consolidated operating environment for all of their data storage needs, including block, file and object.
Q2 was the first full quarter of shipments for Flashblade E. Failed and pipeline have exceeded our expectations and it is experiencing the fastest growth of all prior new product releases. At purchase, Flashblade E, with three years of Evergreen subscription, has an acquisition cost competitive with hard disk-based systems and has substantially lower operating costs. It enables our customers to move ever more of their cost-sensitive workloads to all Flash. The E family of products allows Pure to now cover the entire spectrum of data storage inclusive of low-priced bulk storage, providing customers with a consistent, modern and reliable product line for all their storage needs.
Flash Array E will become available later this year during Flashblade E. Flash Array E will enable cost-effective storage for bulk data for capacities from 1 to 4 petabytes. And as part of the E family, it can also reduce customers total operational costs by up to 60% and produce 85% less e-waste compared to hard disk-based systems. We are seeing continued momentum and opening new opportunities with our cloud strategy. Last week, we announced an expanded multi-year partnership with Microsoft Azure Services and its Azure VMware solution known as ADS, using our Pure Cloud Block Store. This offers a new age of cloud migration that can drive faster, more cost-effective adoption of cloud services. Combining Pure's industry-leading data reduction with our ability to decouple storage needs from Compute, customers can significantly reduce their total cloud costs while increasing hybrid cloud capabilities.
In addition to operating in the cloud, our cloud operating model allows our customers to operate their storage environment like the cloud, to offer services like the cloud, to better build for the cloud, and also to consume storage like the cloud. Pure Fusion enables our customers to manage the pure portfolio as a fleet, as an integrated pool of storage across data centers and across clouds. Pure Fusion allows customers to offer their developers access to bespoke data services through APIs.
Portworks, the most highly rated Kubernetes data platform for deploying cloud native applications, was chosen for the fourth and second of year by analysts from Gigahome as the leader for enterprise Kubernetes data storage and cloud native Kubernetes data storage. Evergreen 1 allows our customers to also consume like the cloud based entirely on a service level agreement with Pure to allow them to store their data whenever and wherever they want. Evergreen 1 is available for all of Pure's product offerings. The growth of subscription services contributes significantly to our success in Q2. Evergreen 1, the industry's leading storage as a service offering, saw, fails, double again year over year. Our Evergreen technology and programs have revolutionized the industry and provide pure a sustainable competitive advantage, ending traditional legacy hardware replacement practices for customers and turning every sale into a storage as a service relationship. With our Evergreen Forever subscription, companies upgrade both hardware and software to the latest technology without paying additional capital continually without downtime forever.
As we discussed last quarter, generative AI and chat GPT have brought artificial intelligence to the top of mind for all customers and AI creates two sets of opportunities for Pure. First, we can supply products for AI training environments such as the creation of large language models or LLMs short. And second, we can support enterprises to prepare their data architecture for AI inference, meaning the use of LLMs on their own data. Most customers will leverage their party LLMs as their base. They will retune and retrain these models on their proprietary data within their own organizational boundaries. By adding guardrails, they will enable AI inference to achieve outcomes specific to their business. The former requires very high performance while the latter is enhanced with the replacement of low performance secondary hard disk systems with our e-family of cost effective flash storage.
During the quarter, Flashblade S won a generative AI footprint in a production environment in the low eight digits. Portworx also saw multiple wins in early AI development environments. Customers purchased Portworx to ensure reliable data management during the training and inference process. Over the last five years, well over a hundred customers have chosen Flashblade to accelerate their AI and machine learning environments. With the introduction of Flashblade E, AI customers are able to take advantage of a single operating and management environment for both their hot and their bulk data, dramatically simplifying their data storage infrastructure and reducing its cost and environmental footprints.
For the last few months, I have visited customers, partners and retailers across the U.S., Asia Pacific and Europe to highlight Pure's new ever more powerful position. Customers immediately gropped the benefits of and the need for a unified operating and management environment for all their data storage needs, block, file and object, from the highest performance to the most cost effective. They responded enthusiastically to the ability to operate their storage and data environment as consistent storage pools across data centers and clouds. And they welcomed the advantages of our evergreen technology and subscription available across our entire data storage platform.
Pure's products uniquely stand out in the industry due to our single operating environment and consistent APIs across our products. This is powered by our consistent use of purity and our pure one management system across all our products. Our new e-family of products leverage our latest direct to flash capabilities of purity software to unlock the most cost effective QLC flash to penetrate the bulk data market for the first time with all flash technology. Our high density direct flash modules or DFM's work with purity to power this advance. This enables better performance, better longevity, better reliability and ultimately better price performance than both hard disks and even SSD based systems. We have been shipping 48 terabyte DFM's for the last three years and we will introduce our 75 terabyte DFM later this year. Today, Pure's DFM's are two to four times denser than the largest hard disk and SSDs in competitive use. And our advantage in density is accelerating. Our roadmap calls for a 150 terabyte DFM next year and a 300 terabyte DFM by 2026.
Our improvements in performance and density of direct flash versus commodity products will enable us to increase our competitiveness in the industry by a wide margin, not only in performance and cost but also in energy efficiency and e-waste reduction. Speaking of energy and e-waste, we issued our second ESG report last week. It details the advancements we continue to make across our technology portfolio, operations and people. Our largest area of contribution continues to be the extraordinary energy, e-waste and space savings of our products which enable our customers to achieve their environmental sustainability goals. Pure products can reduce the total energy and emissions from data centers globally by upwards of 20 percent as Pure's flash optimized systems use up to five times less power than competitive SSD based systems, up to ten times less power than the hard disk systems we will replace.
In closing, I have never been more confident in our long term growth strategy or in our opportunity to lead this market. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin Chrysler.
Kevin? Thank you, Charlie. Revenue of $689 million in Q2 grew six and a half percent year over year and exceeded our revenue guidance. We achieved record sales of our entire flash play portfolio, including Flashblade E, and saw continued high demand for our evergreen one subscription services as sales more than doubled year over year. While the spending environment remains relatively consistent to what we have seen over the last couple of quarters, our customers are choosing to invest in our high technology data storage solution for their key strategic projects as we have seen with the sales performance of both our Flashblade and evergreen one offerings this quarter.
Momentum we saw across our entire Flashblade portfolio included specific AI and ML use cases, including a significant generative AI win that Charlie highlighted. We are excited with the historic ramp for both sales and pipeline of Flashblade E throughout the quarter. Customers no longer need to settle for hard disk systems and can now choose pure as higher performance Flash solutions at competitive price points.
Q2 operating profit of nearly $112 million exceeded expectations due to the performance of our product and subscription gross margins, our unique purity software architecture working directly with raw Flash rather than less efficient and shorter lived SSDs contributed to the strength and product gross margins. Leveraging our purity software, the majority of the capacity we now ship is based on QLC raw Flash. More aggressive discounting behavior from our competitors during the quarter slightly offset product gross margin expansion.
In Q2 subscription services annual recurring revenue grew 27% year over year to $1.2 billion and included strong growth from our evergreen one storage service offering. Closed evergreen one contracts where the effective service date has not yet started are excluded from the subscription ARR calculation.
Subscription ARR growth would have been 28% when considering closed evergreen one contracts where the service date has not yet started. Remaining performance obligations or RPO grew 26% to $1.9 billion.
Similar to the remarks we've made in previous quarters, our RPO previously included an outstanding commitment with one of our global system integrators. During Q1 this remaining outstanding commitment was fully satisfied and when excluding the impact of the past outstanding commitment, RPO grew 30% year over year.
Subscription services revenue of $289 million comprised 42% of total revenue which is 6 points higher than Q2 last year. US revenue for Q2 was $495 million and international revenue was $194 million.
We acquired 325 new customers during the quarter and our total customer count now exceeds 12,000. As previously mentioned, we were pleased with our continued strong gross margin performance of 72.8% with product gross margin of 71.5% and subscription services gross margin of 74.5%.
Our head count increased slightly to approximately 5,400 employees at the end of the quarter. Pure balance sheet and liquidity remains very strong including $1.2 billion in cash and investments at the end of Q2. Cash flow from operations during the quarter was $102 million and capital expenditures total of $55 million.
In Q2, we repurchased nearly 600,000 shares of stock returning nearly $22 million to our shareholders. This represents a lower level of repurchase activity than recent quarters as a result of the fixed trading parameters that were in place throughout the quarter.
We have approximately $190 million remaining on our existing $250 million repurchase authorization. Now turning to guidance. We expect Q3 revenue to be $760 million representing double digit growth of over 12% year over year.
Our Q3 revenue guidance assumes continued strong subscription revenue growth fueled by our evergreen one subscription services. We continue to execute on aligning our cost structure with expected demand.
The results of our continued operational discipline and the economic benefits we are seeing with our unique architecture of purity software working directly with flash is reflected in our Q3 operating profit guide of $135 million or 17.8% operating margin.
Our annual revenue guidance we previously communicated remains unchanged and assumes revenue growth in the mid to high single digits as we expect significantly stronger year over year revenue growth for the second half of FY24.
As a reminder, revenue for our evergreen one subscription service offering is recurring and is recognized over time. The sales strength of our evergreen one offering through the first half of the year has outperformed our expectations and this momentum is expected to continue throughout the remainder of the year.
The success of our sales of evergreen one subscription services has been considered in our annual revenue guidance as the growth of this offering creates a near term headwind to the total revenue growth rate as revenue is recognized over time.
We also continue to assume no significant improvement or worsening of macroeconomic conditions from what we have seen over the last few quarters. Finally, we are increasing our annual operating margin guidance from 15% to 15.5%.
We are continuing operational discipline as well as the benefits we are seeing as a result of our unmatched flash management technology powered by purity software.
我们在继续保持操作纪律,并且通过纯净软件提供的无与伦比的闪存管理技术所带来的好处。
In closing, treating data storage and management as high technology as demonstrated through our continuous innovation across our portfolio and business models, we have established an extraordinary advantage in reducing power consumption, real estate space, labor and e-waste for our customers.
Our business value and total cost of ownership advantages are unmatched against our competitors. With that, I will turn it back to Paul for Q&A.
我们的商业价值和总拥有成本优势在与竞争对手相比无可匹敌。因此,我将把这个问题交给Paul进行问答。
Thanks, Kevin. Before we begin the Q&A session, I'll ask you to limit yourselves to one question consisting of one part so we can get to as many people as possible. If you have additional questions, we kindly ask that you please rejoin the Q&A and we'll be happy to take those additional questions if time allows.
If you would like to ask a question, please press star, follow above the number one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, simply press star one again. Again, that is star one to ask a question.
Good afternoon. Thanks, Dig my question. Yeah, I was hoping you folks could talk a bit more about the Flash Play portfolio. I think the person you talked about, you know, record sales over here. So I'd love to understand, you know, where's the strength coming from, what's driving the success here, given a challenge macro. And really related to this, any sense on our Flash Play, E adoption is looking and very interesting traction there. I think NetApp recently talked about how their equivalent product at least is having a very strong launch. So I'd love to hear, you know, where's Flash Play broadly resonating with customers? And if anybody who quantified what you seem to be really helpful, thank you.
Absolutely. Thanks, Amit. Well, just as a reminder to the audience, you know, we launched Flash Play about five or six years ago now. And then more recently, a little over a year ago, updated it with what we call our Flash Play to S program, which shares our direct Flash modules with our Flash Array series, as well as more recently just last Q1, our Flash Play, E product. Flash Play to S addresses the high performance ends of the market and Flash Play, E, as I've mentioned in my script, actually addresses the high capacity, but both data, lower cost market overall. To answer your question directly, I believe the greater focus around AI certainly helps, you know, in Flash Play sales. But frankly, you know, Flash Play has continued to grow, especially since the introduction of Flash Play to S, which gave it even greater compatibility with our Flash Array series ever since we introduced that product. And now that we've introduced the E, it really allowed customers to look at the full range of price performance for their high capacity workloads, you know, with one consistent platform. And I think, you know, completing, if you will, the family with E has really helped Flash Play sales overall.
当然。谢谢,阿米特。好的,只是作为对观众的提醒,我们大约五六年前推出了Flash Play。然后在一年多前,我们更新了Flash Play到S计划,与我们的Flash Array系列共享我们的直接Flash模块。最近在去年的第一季度,我们又推出了我们的Flash Play E产品。Flash Play到S解决了市场高性能方面的需求,而Flash Play E,则专注于高容量、数据成本更低的市场。直接回答你的问题,我认为对人工智能的更大关注当然有助于Flash Play的销售。但说实话,自从我们推出了Flash Play到S,Flash Play一直在继续增长,这个产品使它与我们的Flash Array系列更加兼容。现在我们推出了E,这真的让客户能够以一致的平台查看高容量工作负载的完整的价格性能范围。我认为,完成了“家庭”的E产品确实有助于整体的Flash Play销售。
Yeah, absolutely. And Amit, this is Rob just to jump into the second part of your question. You know, look, I think it's important to realize that E really has no equivalent on the market. You know, E, as Charlie mentioned, is really enabled by our highly differentiated, uh, purity software and direct Flash technology that's designed for that software, which really sets it far apart not only from disk, which is largely the displacement market we're going after. But also, any of the competitive set that might try to follow us with SSD-based technology. And as Charlie mentioned, you know, we started, you know, using this technology, leveraging it, bringing it, using it to bring QLC into the enterprise over three years ago with Flash Array-C at the time to displace hybrid disk-based systems. And then now with E, with both Flash Play-D and Flash Array-E joining later this year, really see a complete portfolio to go after the entirety of a customer's data storage needs. And again, as Charlie said, being able to do that and offer it with a very consistent hardware software and management approach. Thank you, Amit. Next question, please.
With the next now to Erin Rakers at Wells-Hargo. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I guess I wanted to ask about the AI opportunity. You know, Charlie, if you can, can you unpack a little bit of about the eight-figure deal that you won in AI this quarter? Have you revenue recognized that? Just kind of any context that? And then also just to clarify, the meta deal, are you continuing to not assume any kind of follow-on from that footprint deployment next-generation data center opportunity at that end-your-guide for fiscal 24? Thank you.
You bet. So the eight-figure deal was a, you know, nice, as I said, a low eight-figure deal, but in a production environment that has opportunity for expansion. So very excited. And it was the, you know, the largest gen AI deal of its type, which is why we wanted to highlight it, not the only AI deal that we did in the quarter, but just because of its scale, something we wanted to highlight. I would also say that, you know, it's an area that where we are seeing additional interests overall in the market, that being said, as I said last quarter, I'm just as excited by the opportunity to upgrade customers' existing data environment, the lower performance environment, because of the needs of wanting to use that data for AI inference in the future. So I'm seeing both of those opportunities in front of us.
You know, separately with respect to the meta RSC, which we've commented on the past, because, you know, when new shipments happen into that tends to have an effect on our overall P&L. Yeah, you know, until as I've stated in the past, we have, there's really no change from prior quarters. It continues to be an environment that that meta is happy with. Our relationship with them is very good. You know, there are no change as far as we know of their plans to expand in the future. In other words, that's still our expectation, but we don't know the exact timing.
Evan, did you want to make a comment about revenue recognition for that eight figure deal that was included in our revenue? Yes. Okay, thank you, Aaron. Next question, please.
Good next now to Nita Marshall at Morgan's family. Great. Thanks. A couple of questions for me. Just coming out of Accelerate, you know, you guys had made some very bold statements just about kind of customers not needing this anymore. And I just wanted to get a sense of, you know, how you found that message resounding with customers and, you know, what pieces of the portfolio do you feel like or pieces of the roadmap that you need to demonstrate over the next kind of coming years to demonstrate to customers that they can have more comfort in that transition. And then just maybe a clarification on Flashblade E, just kind of typical order to ship time. Thanks.
So, you know, I can answer the first part of that question, you know, in a number of different ways. First of all, I believe that customers have already experienced the disk to Flash benefits when they went with their primary storage from disk to Flash. And what they found was, you know, smaller footprints, higher reliability, less maintenance, less effort overall, especially when they moved to pure Flash. And so they already recognize that as a positive effect. And so when we can now go in at these lower price points, lower price performance levels, they get very excited about it. But as I had mentioned in my prepared remarks, what gets them even more excited is consolidating their overall environment to a more consistent hardware, software environment because it reduces the complexity in their overall IT, you know, data center reduces their complexity when they want to move to the cloud, just reduces complexity generally. So it's not, E is interesting, not just in the, just the Flash transition, but in the ability of customers to move to a more consistent portfolio overall. And me to just to jump in here, you know, I think part of your question had to do with building comfort with customers around the transition. Look, I think it's important to realize that the transition from hard disk to the Flash we're offering with E is completely seamless, right? In other way to look at it is there are basically no reasons that a customer says, hey, you know, I would like to get disk, I would like to keep disk, there are really no puts and takes. The only reason that customers have held onto disk in a lot of these environments historically has been priced. And then now with our technology, with what we've been able to do with E, you know, we have effectively neutralized that. And so, you know, I think that's something that, you know, perhaps goes less appreciated and, you know, I think we'll use that transition because it's not a rearchitecture, it's not a redesign. It really is just a seamless and really instantaneous improvement on all dimensions. And let me just touch on that last question on order to ship time for Flashplady consistent with what we see across our portfolios. So no significant difference there. Thank you, Mita. Next question, please.
Staying on the AI team, I want to ask you about Portwork seems to stay a little bit surprising. I don't think people are thinking about Portwork and the AI together. Maybe talk about that AI opportunity with respect to Portwork. What are you seeing? What kind of workloads are these on-premises or cloud attaches? Are these more of the training or inference time or the AI that would be helpful? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Pendulum. Well, first of all, it's both inference and training. And as you might imagine, you know, a lot of these new developments are being made in container-based and Kubernetes-based environments. And Portwork is without, you know, without equal in terms of its ability to manage storage of all types, you know, for Kubernetes and containers and to do it both, it could do it on bare metal, could do it in the cloud, can do it on top of our infrastructure. And so, you know, as these are very large environments, Portwork has always been really superior when it gets to large-scale production. And so before going into a development where the developers know it's going to go large-scale when they scale out, they're starting off with Portworks for their stateful data management.
And Pendulum, just to add on to that, you know, I look at the Portworks and cloud native piece of this puzzle as really a part of the overall set of environments that we see as being impacted by the uptake of AI technology, positively impacted. So certainly, number one, you know, AI training infrastructure and environments. We've talked to you all a lot about that. Number two is really the demand to store more and more data in the enterprise, remove the silos and really move more of that cold data into the warm. And then as Charlie says, number three, looking at the application environments that the trained AI models are connected to. If you look at, you know, where a lot of that data is coming into enterprises, it's coming from multiple sources. It's coming from business data, databases, IoT sensors, machine data, all over the place. A lot of these application sets, environments, very highly dynamic, very aligned to open source, cloud native technologies.
而 Pendulum,只是为了补充一下,你知道,我将 Portworks 和云原生技术作为整个受到人工智能技术影响的环境的一部分。所以当然,第一,AI训练基础设施和环境。我们已经和你们谈论了很多次。第二是企业存储更多数据的需求,消除数据孤岛,将更多冷数据转移到热数据中。然后正如 Charlie 所说,第三,看待训练好的AI模型所连接的应用环境。如果你看看这些数据进入企业的来源,它来自多个渠道。来自业务数据、数据库、物联网传感器、机器数据,到处都是。很多这些应用设置、环境非常动态,非常与开源、云原生技术相配。
You know, it's also important to realize that, you know, getting these training, trained AI models deployed and connected to real time systems is ultimately the goal for a lot of these enterprises. And so when you look at the application environments, driving these real time systems that folks want to plug chatbots or what have you into, again, all very heavily based on and built on cloud native architectures, open source software, and they have the needs for agility, scalability, elasticity that those architectures afford while at the same time having the enterprise capabilities that technologies like Portworx can offer. And really that's what we're seeing out there today. Thank you, Pendulum. Next question, please.
We'll be next now to Womsey and Milan at Bank of America.
我们将在美国银行的Womsey和Milan接下来进行。
Hi, yes. Thank you so much. Charlie, we've not really seen a large uptick on on premise AI driven workloads, but you mentioned sort of this large inference opportunity at enterprises. Any thoughts on when that can happen? Do you see that in calendar 24 or 25 from a materiality perspective? And if I could like subscription ARR has been decelerating or the last work orders, how should we think about the growth trajectory here? Thank you.
You know, it's an interesting question. I would say that we do see opportunities on prem for AI in, you know, I would say highly specialized environments. And so I think that is a real thing. Of course, many of them are waiting for delivery of GPU and AI based processing systems and environments. And I would say that a lot of focus has been on the currently on the on the compute side of it, a little bit less focused by the customers because they've been so focused on the compute side, a little less focus on the storage infrastructure. I believe that's just starting to become a better known and understood requirement for these AI systems. But I'd say that I just I would disagree, WAMSE. I'd say that that we do we are starting to see interest if not yet deployments on on prem.
And WANSI, let me touch on the subscription ARR growth. I definitely pleased with what we saw in terms of subscription ARR growth, especially evergreen one, which is outperforming our already strong expectations that we had at the beginning of year. And as a reminder, in my prepare remarks, closed evergreen one contracts where the effective service date has not yet started are excluded from the ARR calculation.
And our subscription ARR growth would have been 28% have we included those contracts where the service date had not begun.
And look, you know, as a just as a result of product revenue being low to lower for our CAPX sales, we do have less a catch of our evergreen subscription, which is also reflected in our subscription ARR growth rate. Thank you, WAMSE.
And just a kind reminder to everyone to please ask one question consisting of one part. And we'd be happy if you'd like to ask another question later on in the queue. Next question, please.
The next now to Chris Stanker at TD Common. Yeah, thank you. So, I'm going to give you a question. Charlie, I had a question on AI2. From a storage standpoint, do you think benefits the most for AI workload between block storage and objects? Do you think benefits the most? And also, can you help us clarify what products in your portfolio today support in any bank and how to think about it in the future?
Absolutely. I would say that a lot of the AI environments use block because it's very straightforward, especially with programmers and block can be utilized for any structure that you want underneath. But increasingly, it's moving to an object-based environment because over time, block is easier, it's more efficient. And it requires less state than what's generally necessary in a block environment. So I think we're starting to see that shift, but it's been taking a lot of time to get to a very high performance object. Rob, do you want to add?
Yeah, no, Wamsi, I think, sorry, Chris, a couple of things. You know, look, I think if we step back from the application sets, we're seeing AI technology being applied to today and we look at the long-term drivers, I think it's going to have a positive effect on all forms of storage. And what makes me believe that is, look, the source data that enterprises are looking to feed into AI technology and get benefits from are coming from all over the place. They're coming from business systems, they're coming from traditional databases, they're coming from more modern databases, they're coming from unstructured data, log files, images, and that really spans the gamut of block file and object. I also think that the enterprises kind of source data that they're collecting through those means today and is going to increase in the future. I think that's the larger opportunity set.
AI is clearly a fast-moving technology space that every enterprise is looking to adopt and looking to take advantage of, and that's just going to drive a greater demand to collect and store data across the enterprise. I think just to address the second part of your question on Infiniband, look, we've really focused on addressing the AI space as one of several very important segments in the portfolio. One of the things that really sets us apart on the market and really with our customers is the benefits we can deliver by having a consistent hardware software and management experience across all of their workload sets. This is where we see the benefits of Ethernet-based technologies. We see the benefit of more ubiquitous technologies that, again, as the current application sets that you see perhaps in AI training environments broaden and those environments need to connect to other parts of a customer's data center. Special purpose technologies, if you will, such as Infiniband really hinder that, really get in the way. And so, Infiniband is nothing new. We've been around for quite some time, but mostly found in more specialized environments.
We see the bigger demand and a value to the enterprise and being able to give them a complete solution set, not just for the AI training environments, but for all of the data environments that are going to be impacted by the uptake of AI technology. Thank you, Chris. Next question, please.
We're next now to Sydney Ho at Deutsche Bank. Great. Thanks for taking the question. My question is on the remaining purchase application that is still showing really good growth in 26% growth year over year. But the unbuilt portion really accelerated in the past few quarters. Can you talk about the most driving that acceleration, the sort of anything to do with the new products or maybe Evergreen just growing rapidly? Thanks.
I appreciate the question. And it's a real simple answer. You're exactly right. It's due to the Evergreen 1 acceleration and just timing of buildings is really what it comes down to. Okay. Thank you, Sydney. Next question, please.
We go next now to Shannon Cross at Credit Suites. Thank you very much. You mentioned that he is exceeding your expectations. I'm going to, if you can talk a bit more about how the customer conversations are going, how much you're seeing this, you know, being sold into existing customers versus some of the new customers. Is this opening up, you know, a new opportunity for RF to bid on new RFPs? Just any more color you can give there.
Thank you. Yeah, let me let me start. It first of all, it is exceeding our expectations both in terms of the revenue that we saw in our first full quarter of shipments as well as in the pipeline growth, which continues at unprecedented rates very, very fast. The conversations are, first of all, you know, they're happening all around the world. They're happening across a very broad set of use cases. And, you know, in some cases, at prices higher than what the customer would be paying for new disk environments because of the lower total operating costs that they're able to get in the better performance that they're able to get out of the out of the all flash E environment. So, and I would say that it's really, I have yet to hear of a use case around for an existing disk based system that flash flash blade E was not able to address.
Next question, please. We'll go next now to Jason Adder at William Blair.
下一个问题,请。现在我们将转向William Blair的Jason Adder。
Yeah, thank you. Hey, guys, can you quantify the revenue growth headwind over the last 12 months from Evergreen 1 and also just any color on materiality to the total services revenue? I mean, can you give us a ballpark of how big it's becoming? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And Evergreen 1 performance has simply been terrific in the first half. And we're expecting that momentum to continue. And you're right, you know, there is a short-term headwind on revenue as a result of revenue being recognized over time. And when we think about it from an annual lens, it's probably about one to two points is how we're thinking about it currently. And then we don't, we're not quantifying Evergreen 1 specifically at this point in time, Jason.
Next question, please. We'll go next now to Medi-Hosani at Susquehana.
请提出下一个问题。现在我们将致电Susquehana的Medi-Hosani。
Yes, thanks for taking my question. I want to better understand the dynamics of the folks that you're talking to decision makers at the customer side and how is that changing? And I'm asking you because I'm looking at your impacts that is on track to grow in the low team versus revenue growth, talk it off mid to high single-digit. Yeah, regarding the type of customer environment, the new positioning, the new messaging that we're talking about is definitely getting us into the C-suite increasingly. And it's both, you know, that message is made up of several parts. One is, you know, an extremely consistent environment that, first of all, can take care of all of their their storage needs in the same with the same environment, therefore lowering their their total operating costs. The dramatically lower power space and cooling that both lowers cost but improves their ESG, their own ESG ratings, you know, which is extremely important. And then also, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, the ability now to be able to rise above just individual arrays attached to individual use cases and enable customers to create an environment where they can have consistent storage pools across their entire enterprise, multiple data centers, multiple clouds. You know, this is really a new message. It's one that that addresses the concerns of CIOs, of CTOs, even of the business units and developers. So this is getting us, you know, certainly a higher level attention in major accounts.
Thank you, Maddy. Next question, please. With the next map to David Vogue at UBS.
谢谢,Maddy。请提下一个问题。下一个地图给大卫·沃格在瑞银银行。
Great. Thanks, guys. So, Kevin and John Carla, I just want to go back to the current demand environment in the macro. You touched on the challenging macro backdrop and, you know, flashplady was a really strong launch during the quarter. Just curious about, you know, what did you see from customers? Was there any sort of potential spin down where it did make sense to maybe use a more lower cost off-lash solution in the quarter at the expense of maybe a little bit more performance solutions in addition to maybe disk replacement? And then how do you think about that sort of dynamic as we move to the bounce of the year where it doesn't sound like the macro is getting dramatically better? And so should we expect to see, you know, obviously on the blade east side and then ultimately the right east side sort of be a key growth driver in the second half of the year?
Thanks. Yeah, we haven't really seen that type of, you know, what do you call it, a spin down or cannibalization. We track this very, very closely, as you might imagine, when we bring in a lower price-performance product to see, you know, if customers are trading down, we really don't see that. It really did open up net new opportunity for us to go into new areas. I think if we were in a better economic environment, all of these numbers would be enhanced. But no, I think it's just, you know, we'd all love to see even stronger growth than what we're seeing now. And of course, we're pedaling very hard to drive more performance out of the team overall, but, you know, the economic effect has been broad-based. And I would say if anything, you know, when you have an economy that started off the year, the way it did, customers, you know, reduce their intentions to spend and they have their high priority projects.
And because we announced the disc to flash transition, you know, after the beginning of the year, I think if anything, it's muted and will be increased next year as customers start to plan for it, you know, in their budgets. So no, I think it's more economy than anything else.
Great. Thanks, John. Next question, please. The next now to Thomas Blakey at KeyBank.
太好了。谢谢,John。接下来的问题,请由KeyBank的Thomas Blakey回答。
Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to circle back to the subscription service line. And, you know, if I'm going to put some takes perspective, I've agreed in one doing great, also a great start. Just what maybe focus on the other areas that maybe are experiencing some pressure and I specifically want to know if like maybe there's just understanding how you relatively, you know, start smaller and grow with your customers. Is there any pent up demand that you could see there heading into next year from that, from any pressures in the other areas of the evergreen products? Thank you.
Yeah. I know this is Kevin and I'll start off and have Charlie add on any more commentary, but it's a good question. And again, we commented on the strength of our subscription ARR, which really has been driven and fueled by our evergreen one subscription offering. Now, obviously, with demand being a bit lower on the cap side, the attach of evergreen subscriptions, whether that's forever or foundation, is impacting somewhat our subscription ARR growth rate, which I've talked about a little bit earlier. Now, if we look at and really that's the only thing going on that I would highlight in particular, if you're looking specifically at our subscription revenue growth rate, do you want to let you know we've got professional services in that line item as well. And obviously, that's not growing at the same pace as our subscription offerings. And so that would be driving your difference that you might be noting.
Thank you, Tom. Thanks, Tom. Please. Good next now to you Simon Leopold at Raymond James.
谢谢你,汤姆。谢谢,汤姆。请。现在我们请雷蒙德詹姆斯的西蒙·利奥波尔德继续发言。
Great. Thanks for taking the question. I want to see if we could maybe step back and help us size the AI opportunity as to sort of where it is now and where it's going. I think in the past, you've talked about sort of where Flashblade is and that maybe AI use case. It's not just generative. We're probably more than half of those use cases. You've given us some customer metrics. Wonder if we could get some revenue metrics as well, even a ballpark. Thank you.
Yeah, we don't. You know, Simon, we don't generally like to break these things out. I would say, though, that you know, the AI is a significant contributor to our revenue. It's not a dominant one nor frankly, do I expect it to be. You know, it's a very exciting new area without a doubt. And we expect to see growth growth in that. But, you know, plain old plain old data storage, both for high performance databases, as well as for lower performance bulk data, will continue to dominate our market. What is exciting about the AI environment is, you know, the high performance systems generally, you know, are our high profit system environments, which is good. And we do hopefully anticipate, you know, like the meta RSC that we might see environments where the scale of it really starts to grow. But I would say still, you know, and I think this is true for everyone except for the GPU builders, you know, while it's an exciting new area, you know, it's probably going to be, you know, a small, let's say, you know, a low double digit portion of their overall revenues in general.
Thank you, Simon. Next question, please. We'll go next now to Nihal Chokshi at Northland Capital Markets. And Nihal, your line is open if you do have a question.
Oh, yes. Thank you. Hey, thank you for the question. And I really like the new presentation content format. It's really great. Thank you for that. So, Flashblade, it sounds like you've had better expected revenue and pipeline. With respect to pipeline, are you assuming a lower conversion rate of that pipeline for the remainder of the fiscal year that's more or less driving the, you know, no change in forward guidance here?
Yeah, Nihal, it's a great question. And the answer would be no. Our conversion rate, especially for Flashblade E, is quite healthy. And we've considered that in our overall annual revenue guide that we provided.
The other thing to highlight as well is, and we've highlighted that in my prepared remarks, is the strength of Evergreen 1, which needs to be considered as well. Because obviously, that takes more time to make its way to revenue. And that's been considered as well as we've looked at our overall annual guide for this year. So hopefully that's helpful for you. Thank you, Nihal.
Next question, please. The next now to Matt Sheeran at Eiffel. Yes, thanks. My question is on the recent Azure VM wear announcement. Could you help us understand the significance of that in terms of your position with Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem? How that positions you versus competitors in the cloud? And how we should think about the product roadmap going forward?
Yeah, we consider it to be, you know, very significant announcement. It is a combination of the VMware in the cloud Azure VM services, VMware services, as well as our cloud block store, providing a simpler methodology for customers to move their existing workloads into the cloud. And also, at the same time, dramatically reducing their overall cloud costs. So it's really a one-two punch that's hard to be.
You know, we consider the relationship with Microsoft very strong and continuing. You know, we're looking forward to doing more things with them as we go forward. And I think this is going to be a very competitive offering in the market.
Rob? Yeah, no, I mean, I just add onto that, you know, which Harley said, I think one of the things that really makes us unique is the integration that we've undertaken in partnership with the Azure team really over the last year plus to bring the service to market.
You know, we have had a number of cloud block store customers that have really been pushing both of us in this direction and have been a part of early previews and beta activities. And they're very excited now to be able to move into production. And look, overall, you know, we just see this as a continued validation of the benefit that customers are seeing from the cloud block store technology and reducing their cloud costs. And really giving them in much better environments on the cloud infrastructure to run their production workloads.
You know, as we mentioned last quarter, we had our largest individual sale in the quarter of cloud block store to a large healthcare organization. That organization is now moving into production and frankly is seeing even better than expected cost reductions and savings as a result of that. And so overall, we see this as just continued validation of, you know, the great technology, the ability to go drive meaningful savings for customers. And then now in partnership with Azure, tightly integrated to a very, very important use case for our customers.
It looks like we have time for one more question. And I'm happy to say we have a person who's rejoined the queue. So this will be second at bat. So our last question. We'll take that now from many who's dating. Yes. Thanks for opportunity. I want to go back to my original question. As you're engaged more of a C-level executives, obviously, opportunities are reflected in your subscription. Is there another metric that we could track and to better understand your longer term revenue growth? Because your spending your op X growth is much higher than this year's fiscal year revenue growth. But obviously it helps you sustainability of revenue growth. And I'm just wondering if there's any other metric that we can look at to better measure your longer term revenue growth.
Nothing specific, Mattie, that I'd point you to that other than the, you know, rich amount of in our portfolio and the opportunity associated with that portfolio across our entire data storage platform. So obviously navigating through this year provided a guide for this year. And as we navigate through the second half, we'll be looking at next year as well. Thank you, Mattie.
Before we conclude, I think Charlie has some final comments. Thank you. Customers appreciate our new capabilities in the positioning. As I'd mentioned, the only consistent consolidated data storage and management platform for all of their data storage needs. I want to thank our customers and partners, suppliers, employees, and investors, your collaboration, your innovation, your hard work, and your trust propel us forward. So we look forward to meeting you around the world. We have a number of accelerate road shows set up in various major cities around the world. We look forward to seeing you all there. Thank you.