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According to a recent report, the global NAND Flash Memory market is expected to grow from $56.43 billion in 2020 to $105.54 billion by the end of 2027 at a CAGR of 11%. Mountain View-based Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) recently reported its first-quarter results that surpassed market expectations. The company continues to add products to its portfolio to support the growth of hybrid cloud adoption.

Pure Storage’s Financials

Pure Storage’s first-quarter revenues grew 12% over the year to $412.7 million, ahead of the market’s estimates of $406.3 million. Adjusted EPS of $0.00 also beat analyst estimates of a loss of $0.07.

Subscription services revenue grew 35% over the year to $162.8 million. During the same period, product revenues fell 6.9% to $350.4 million.

Pure Storage estimates second-quarter revenues to be $470 million, versus the analyst forecast of $456.53 million.

Pure Storage’s Portworx Expansion

Last year, Pure Storage had acquired Portworx. I believe that this was a well-made match and recent results support the idea. Cloud-native databases, analytics applications, and AI frameworks, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Spark, and Tensorflow, are some of the tools upon which customers are building their data pipelines. Pure has been serving these applications through FlashBlade. Post the acquisition, it has integrated Portworx’s capabilities to expand the support for these applications on any infrastructure both on-premise or in cloud at any scale.

Pure Storage has been building on the acquisition during the quarter. It recently announced the release of Portworx Enterprise 2.8. During the quarter, Pure Storage announced the release of Portworx Enterprise 2.8. The release introduces new integrations throughout its selection of products and services. Customers now have the ability to use VMware Tanzu with Portworx, allowing them to scale Kubernetes usage to greater levels. The release also introduced new capabilities including dynamic storage provisioning on FlashArray and FlashBlade, as well as unified visibility and support through Pure1. Containerized workloads are able to run seamlessly across the cloud.

Pure disclosed during the earnings call that its customers are using Portworx to enable containerized workloads to run seamlessly across the cloud, including Pure Storage Arrays, Bare Metal infrastructure, and even third-party storage solutions. Portworx revenue has exceeded its pre-acquisition plan by 20% over the last couple of quarters, and the company expects good growth out of that product both on usage and a revenue base for years to come. Read my interview last year with the CEO of Portworx Murli Thirumale on what’s happening in the storage industry as a player like Pure Storage tries to move up the stack and acquire a startup like Portworx.

According to a Gartner report, by 2025, 40% of infrastructure and operations leaders will implement hybrid cloud storage architectures, compared with 15% in 2021. The increased adoption of hybrid cloud strategies will require a consistent environment for organizations to run their modern applications – including storage and data management capabilities. Portworx Enterprise 2.8 is aimed at addressing this need by providing customers with the same cloud-like experience for Kubernetes apps.

Additionally, Pure Storage also announced its enhanced Pure1 Digital Experience. Customers will be able to get additional control through the delivery of automated monitoring and AI-driven recommendation along with capabilities of self-service management and digital procurement. The Pure1 Digital Experience is aimed at improving the IT ownership experience by enabling IT teams to anticipate needs, simplify the acquisition of resources, reduce risks to the business around purchasing, data protection, and customer satisfaction.

In the second half of the year, Pure Storage is expecting to release more products and services, which allow customers to accelerate their approach to data services. It is working on adding capabilities focused on five key areas – Database as-a-service, messaging as-a-service, search as-a-service, streaming as-a-service, some machine learning, and AI as-a-service.

Pure Storage’s stock is trading at $19.09 with a market capitalization of $5.4 billion. It had touched a high of $29.53 in February. The stock fell to a 52-week low of $13.91 in September last year. Pure Storage had listed on the NYSE in 2015 by raising $425 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion and a stock price of $17.