Pure Storage makes its largest acquisition

Storage vendor pays $370m in cash for US start-up Portworx

Pure Storage has made its largest acquisition to date as the storage vendor looks to expand into the Kubernetes market.

The Mountain View firm has acquired Los Altos-based PortWorx, which claims to have built the market's leading Kubernetes data services platform for enterprises.

Portworx is the most used Kubernetes platform among the Global 2000 companies, claims Pure Storage, and counts firms such as Carrefour, Comcast, Lufthansa and T-Mobile as its customers.

The acquisition will bring new subscription-based data services for customers running Pure products including FlashArray, FlashBlade, and Pure as-a-service.

"As forward-thinking enterprises adopt cloud native strategies to advance their business, we are thrilled to have the Portworx team and their ground-breaking technology joining us at Pure to expand our success in delivering multi-cloud data services for Kubernetes," said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage.

"This acquisition marks a significant milestone in expanding our modern data experience to cover traditional and cloud native applications alike."

Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale will be taking on a new role as vice president and general manager of Pure Storage's cloud native business unit.

The start-up's other co-founders, CTO Goutham Rao and chief Architect Vinod Jayaraman will also stay on at Pure following the acquisition.

"I'm tremendously proud of what we've built at Portworx: an unparalleled data services platform for customers running mission-critical applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The traction and growth we see in our business daily shows that containers and Kubernetes are fundamental to the next-generation application architecture and thus competitiveness," said Murli Thirumale, CEO, Portworx.

"We are excited for the accelerated growth and customer impact we will be able to achieve as a part of Pure."

Pure Storage pointed to Gartner figures which show that 85 per cent of global businesses will be running containers in production by 2025, up from just 35 per cent in 2019.

Meanwhile, 451 research finds that 95 per cent of new applications today are developed in containers.

Several of Pure Storage's competitors have also been jumping into the Kubernetes market through acquisitions. IBM's huge deal for Red Hat in 2018 propelled it into the containerisation game.

Meanwhile, VMware has bought several businesses in the Kubernetes space over the last few years, including Octarine earlier this year, Pivotal in 2019 and Heptio in 2018. Lastly, cybersecurity vendor Venafi bought up London-based Kubernetes specialist Jetstack in May this year.