Pure Accelerate 2019 comes at a pivotal time in Pure Storage's evolution from a flash storage pioneer to a publicly traded company with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Flash vendors are grappling with uneven prices for NAND flash -- a scenario some analysts predict will linger for at least the next several years. Pure Storage all-flash storage is not out of the headwinds, although it appears to be weathering the storm for now. After back-to-back quarters of stalled flash sales, Pure all-flash revenue jumped last quarter. The company signed up more than 450 new enterprises, bringing its total customer base to around 6,600 paying customers.

Just as it stepped on the accelerator in the race to develop artificial intelligence for self-driving cars, Zenuity hit a traffic jam of sorts. The data-storage technology used by the joint venture to make autonomous vehicles couldn't pump out visual data fast enough to let its new Nvidia (NVDA) graphics processors work at anything approaching top speed. Enter Pure Storage (PSTG) and its FlashBlade technology. As one of 10 vendors brought in to clear the bottleneck, Pure Storage left the competition in the dust and a partnership was born, according to the website Next Platform. "The partnership with Nvidia started in the field, which I think is generally, at least in my experience, where the best partnerships begin," Pure Storage President David Hatfield said on a recent company earnings call.