In the early part of this century, we're talking around the 2005-2007 timeframe, there was a lot of talk about so-called Green IT. At that time, there was some organizational friction. Like, for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care. That the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. There was kind of that split brain. Then the 07-08 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on IT spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. The second big trend, of course, was the cloud model. You know, it kind of became a benchmark for IT simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. The third was by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. You had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. Really, these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. As we progress through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of ESG, environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. Most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power, cooling, and footprint, it has a bottom-line impact on the income statement. You add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence, and you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello, welcome to The Path to Sustainable IT, made possible by Pure Storage in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm one of the hosts of the program, along with my colleague, Lisa Martin. Today, we're going to hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of social impact and sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around 1,000 sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. Next, Lisa will speak to Ajay Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had him on theCUBE before. Not only will he share some useful stats in the market, he'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is AI, which is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. We'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Bollaro of Elmec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoy the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started. At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage Architecture delivers 2 key environmental benefits to customers: the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the Pure difference. Making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of Pure arrays purchased 6 years ago are still in service. Tomorrow, our goal for the future is to reduce Scope 3 emissions. Pure is committing to further reducing our sold product emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple, and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future. Today, tomorrow, forever. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this special event, Pure Storage, The Path to Sustainable IT. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of social impact and sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me, Lisa. Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? Well, actually quite a few, really interesting nuggets, at least for us and I think probably for you and your viewers as well. We actually commissioned about 1,000 sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. You know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into EMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant, but we actually did not find that. We found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. Very interesting. At Pure, sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their own carbon footprints. You know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space, power and cooling costs, and their footprint. Really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80%. Wow. while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage system. It's really critical for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. Right. Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being a high priority for organizations. You have a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability folks together with IT. I'm wondering, why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you're seeing despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. Getting that out of the way. We also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? They're not even looped in. That being said, you know, we know that IT has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. We really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that IT of the 65%, IT significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that for those who did report the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection, they were 2 times as likely to be on track with their goals, and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program or process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. You know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. Definitely has to be cross-functional. Strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera. Those correlations, were they a surprise? Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. That, you know, that's now almost 3 years ago. Digital data only accelerates. By 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. We know that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for IT to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. You know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? Like, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate, your own department, it's a really interesting connection, that IT and sustainability, work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that, of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do. Over half of those respondents, expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. That's really a tip the hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do. For those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. It's great to see the data demonstrating that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I want to dig in a little bit to Pure's ESG goals. What can you share with us about that? Absolutely. As I mentioned, Pure's kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey but really has been working on the sustainability front for a long time. It's funny, as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past, that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. That's exciting. We did a baseline Scope 1, 2, and 3 analysis, and discovered, interestingly enough, that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products, so our customers, running our products in their data centers. We know that we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those. They only account for 6% of our emissions. We know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. We've also made a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030 in our products. Decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. We've also committed to a Science Based Targets initiative and are road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris Agreement. That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations there. Lofty goals that Pure set, knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to accomplish those goals in record time. I hope so. Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides IT sustainability team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? Yeah. I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both, and not just in storage, right? In your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges, and we have to approach business a little bit differently. Adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient, can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. I think that that's something that we need to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently, and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of energy and carbon. Everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. We need to get out of the mindset that data centers are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision-making. Shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention. The report shows and the successes that Pure's had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in where sustainability is concerned. How can Pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in, and they understand the value in it for them? Yeah. I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? Help the management to understand, first of all, the impact, right, on climate change. I think that's the kind of hearts piece. On the mind piece, I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of the equipment. You know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often, we see, you know, the, maybe the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the electricity bills, right? Sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. There's a great opportunity there, I think, to just, you know, look at it from a more high-level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. That's a great point, great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out. Really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. Ajay Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. Ajay, it's great to have you back on the program. Great to be back on, Lisa. Good morning. Good morning. Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, so we're going to really unpack what Pure is doing. We're going to get your viewpoints on what you're seeing, you're going to leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from Pure, Ajay, about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? Absolutely, Lisa. You can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding. There's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. The opportunity to go process this data, gain insights, is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. Data is super critical. Obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored. That means it's gonna consume a lot of resources. Therefore, data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated. You know, a recent study pointed to roughly by 2025, 175 zettabytes, which where each zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes. Just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. They also say that, you know, pretty soon, today in fact, in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with a data center literally every 18 seconds. Whether it's on Facebook or X or, you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. You can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored, and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact- Oh, go ahead, sorry. No, I was saying, in fact, you know, there's, some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes 1 to 2% of global energy consumption. If there's one place, we could really help climate change and all those aspects, if we can kind a really, you know, tamp down the data center energy consumption. Sorry, you were saying? I was just gonna say, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the stats on data that you provided. Also, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not. We think about the long-term implications, the fact that data is growing massively, as you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about, though, the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? Yes. The consumers expect it. We expect that you're gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences, whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. What requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? No, absolutely. If you kind of think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, "Sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them." That was big in the news. You know, all the hyperscalers scratching their head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some organizations and areas, jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center at all. You know, we just can't do it. As you said, companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that IT has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. At Pure, we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know? To really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low-end systems, medium-end systems, high-end systems. A lot of silos. You know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos because the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today, a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. There's a big opportunity there. Ajay, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing. As its Chief Product Officer, would love to get your thoughts. What steps is it implementing to help Pure's customers become more sustainable? No, absolutely. Essentially, we're all inherently motivated, like Pure and everybody else, to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation. You know, that's what we're all about. While we're doing that, the challenge is how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable, obviously, but more importantly, sustainable. You can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us, not only to do all the other things, but also to kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today, 80% of the companies, so companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event. You know, whether it's a fire in their place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you name it, right? Mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, skating, wanting to skate towards the puck, and it's good. It's good business too, to be sustainable and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting their sustainability initiatives and many take, you know, are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. Our view is that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards Green IT and not just gonna greenwash it, but actually, you know, make things more greener and really take the lead in ESG. It's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. I'm curious, Ajay, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus IT coming together? How does Pure help facilitate that? To your point, IT needs to be able to deliver this, but it's a board-level objective these days. Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, you know, unleashed, we definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board-level objective for a lot of companies, and we definitely see customers starting to do that. In particular, I do wanna touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to make IT sustainable. Obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and we're also helping them become smarter with data. The key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per watt with unmatched storage density. You can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. How efficient is that? You know, compared to other all-flash systems, we tend to be one-fifth. We tend to take one-fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning disks. You can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is, say, 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disks. You're at about, you know, 0.8% of global consumption. If you can cut that by four-fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. We feel we can do that. Also, we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. Imagine one-fifth the power, one-tenth the density. We take it a step further because, okay, you've got the storage system in the data center. What about the end-of-life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? We also have something called non-disruptive upgrades, where using our AI technology in Pure1, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail. Just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. Customer's data is not impacted. We recycle that. You get a full end-to-end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy, much lower power, much lower density. Also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. That's a great point that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own. The customer doesn't have to be involved in that? That's right. We do that. It's a part of our Evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for the service, in fact, they don't even... We tell them, "Hey, you know that part's about to go. We're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out," and then we actually recycle that part. The power of AI. Love that. What are some of the things that companies can do if they're early in this journey on sustainability? What are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a daily topic on the news? No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, there are four items that what I'm going to highlight. The first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment. A materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? You identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want. You know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. For example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two, companies could also think about taking an as a service approach. The beauty of the as a service approach is that your customers are buying outcomes with SLAs. When you're starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. That way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? That's the beauty of the as a service approach. For example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen//One, which is our as a service offer where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned on to as much as they're consuming. That reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end-to-end, right? Basically, by making sure you're moving recycling packaging and eliminating waste and that thing, so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. You can also choose a sustainable supplier network that's following sort of good practices, you know, across the globe. Such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the business benefit is you can also handle surges in demand. For example, for us during the pandemic with these global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks. Our lead time went from 3 to 6 weeks 'cause, you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. All of these things, you know, the 3 things are important, but the fourth thing I say is more cultural. The cultural thing is, how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos as a company, you know, across all the departments? You know, we're at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, around sustainability, starting with our product design, but all other areas as well. If you follow those four items, those are great place to start. That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity. We can have a whole conversation on that. Yes. I'm also glad, Ajay, that you brought up culture. That's huge for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's more on the top minds of folks. It's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as an organization, lives and breathes that. Yes. My last question for you is advice. You outlined the four steps organizations can take. I love how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? No, absolutely. Obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. You know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the product that you sell to your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. You know, the biggest generator of e-waste and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. It's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. It's not something that's, that you kind a handle at the very back end. You design it up front in the product. That sustainable design becomes very intentional. For us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. That non-disruptive approach has to be designed into the hardware, software systems to be able to pull that on. That intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail, and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. That, that's kind of the one thing I would say, that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, that type of work. I mean, it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end-to-end full life cycle standpoint. Absolutely. I love that you brought up intention. That is everything that Pure's doing is with such thought and intention and really for organizations in any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention and of course, that cultural adoption. Ajay, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what Pure is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable IT. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board. At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage Architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers: the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns promoting recycled and reused in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the Pure difference. Making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage in their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of Pure arrays purchased 6 years ago are still in service. Tomorrow? Our goal for the future is to reduce Scope 3 emissions. Pure is committed to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple, and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future. Today, tomorrow, forever. We're back talking about the path to sustainable IT. Now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Bollaro, who is with Elmec Informatica, an IT services firm in the beautiful Lombardy region of Italy, north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. All right. Before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elmec Informatica. What's your focus? Talk about your unique value add to customers. Yeah. Basically, Elmec Informatica is a middle company from the north part of Italy and is a managed service provider in the IT area. The main focus area of Elmec is reach digital transformation and innovation to our clients with a focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. We try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and innovation through technology and sustainability. Yeah, obviously very hot topics right now, sustainability, environmental impact. They're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries, are particularly acute right now in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges. You've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? Yeah. You know, speak to, and what can others learn from it? Yeah. At Elmec our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and values. Also in customer territory, but also employee-centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care, relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are major factor for us to build a social responsibility strategy. Specifically, during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. Okay. You have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and understand what's achievable. What's your vision for sustainable business? You know that strategy. You know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cause hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. Is it a competitive advantage for you? Yeah. Yeah. For all intents and purposes, sustainability is a competitive advantage for Elmec. I mean, it's so because, at the time of profound transformation in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work-life balance are a strong retention factor. Regarding our business proposition, Elmec's attempt is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you say, is a prime example of this approach, as at the same time, is the reconditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental. I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to Elmec sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth, and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certifications such as EcoVadis or ISO 14001. Okay. Got it. In a previous life, I actually did some work with power companies, and there were two big factors in IT that affected the power consumption. Obviously, virtualization was a big one. If you could consolidate Yeah. servers, you know, that was huge. The other was the advent of flash storage. We used to actually go in with the engineers of the power company, put in alligator clips to measure of an all FlashArray versus, you know, the spinning disk, and it was a big impact. Y'all wanna talk about your experience with Pure Storage. You use FlashArray and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about your experience there? Why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? Yeah. It was basically an easy answer to our to our business needs, okay, because you said before that in Elmec, we manage a lot of data, okay? In the past, we see that the constraints of managing so many data was very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the space of storing the data. When Pure comes to us and share our their products, their vision to the data management journey for Elmec Informatica, it was very easy to choose Pure. Why? With values and numbers, we create a business case, and we said we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay? Of course, you have to manage a gradual deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. We have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the Pure technology bring to our to our IT systems and of course, the IT systems of our clients. This is one the first part, the first good part of our trip with Pure. After that, we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing Pure Storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure. Of course, this was a good challenge for us because it allow us to extend the lifecycle management of our data centers, but also It allowed us to improve the facility of the facilities of us using technology from our technical side. We are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure Storage technologies. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say, it allow us to bring this value to our to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. You talked about how you've seen, about 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always I don't wanna put you on the spot. Yeah. I was on Pure's website, I saw in their ESG report. You know, as a comparison with a generic competitor. Presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disk system, I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and Ajay earlier in the program. Do you think? Again, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? Yeah, of course, it's more competitive because basically it allows service provider to do a much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more that brings more values to the customers. Okay. The customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider. Trying to adopt the methodology and also the value that Pure has inside by design in the technology is for us very important and very strategic because like a glass we can ourselves transfer, try to transfer the values of Pure technologies to our service provider clients. Okay, Mattia, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term. It looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay, unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates. That just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for Elmec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have for sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment but also on the bottom line? Okay. Sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept, our role in this great game is to define a strategy aligned with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and particularities. Elmec sustainability goals in the near future, I say, I can say that will be basically three. One, define a sustainability plan. Okay. It, it's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. It's very important to monitor its emissions, and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay. Last but not least, produce a certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. I can say that these three targets will be our direction in the future. Okay? Yeah. I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure. You can't improve what you can't measure. You're gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yeah. you're gonna analyze the data, and you're gonna make continuous improvement. Yeah. Mattia, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your perspectives from the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for having me aboard. Thank you very much. It was really our pleasure. In a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus, bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability, you should. Many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Early Green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results, today, vendor R&D is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation, and machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results, thankfully. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net, so check them out at your convenience. Don't forget to go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out PureStorage.com. There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, Pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. Thank you for that, Pure Storage. I love that there's no squeeze page on that, no friction. It's kind of on brand there for Pure. Well, done. To the topic today, sustainability. There's some really good information on the site around ESG, Pure's environmental, social, and governance mission. There's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity. Of course, you'll see that Pure has some work to do there, but kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. There's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed The Path to Sustainable IT, made possible by Pure, produced with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.