Pure Storage becomes Everpure, acquires 1touch

Pure Storage has changed its name to Everpure and bought data classification company 1touch, the company announced on Monday. It’s moving to become not just a storage company but also a data management company that aims to help its enterprise customers make data usable for AI.

The vendor now known as Everpure is a significant player in the enterprise storage market and has racked up acknowledgements from analyst firms. Gartner ranked it ahead of competitors in the “leader” section of its enterprise storage market analysis, and in GigaOm’s December report on primary storage, it received top rankings for key features and tied for second place on emerging features. According to IDC, it was the fastest-growing enterprise storage company last year, showing a 15.5% increase from 2024, which helped it pull ahead of HPE to become the fourth-largest company in the space after Dell, Huawei, and NetApp.

“We are not going to stop doing storage,” says Prakash Darji, general manager of the digital experience business unit at Everpure, in explaining the name change. “Make sure that comes across. But we’ve been introducing capabilities in data management.”

Yet customers still thought of it as a storage company. “The name was constraining,” Darji says. “We found it limiting in the category expansion where we were going.”

Everpure is meant to combine the brand-name recognition of “Pure” with the “Ever” from its Evergreen subscription storage product line.

Good data is key to good AI

According to a Boston Consulting Group survey released in September, 68% of 1,250 senior AI decision makers said the lack of access to high-quality data is a key challenge when it comes to adopting AI.

Other recent research confirms this. In an October Cisco survey of over 8,000 AI leaders, only 35% of companies have clean, centralized data with real-time integration for AI agents. And by 2027, according to IDC, companies that don’t prioritize high-quality, AI-ready data will struggle scaling gen AI and agentic solutions, resulting in a 15% productivity loss.

“Every enterprise is talking about AI, but most aren’t AI ready because their data is fragmented and poorly cataloged,” says Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, a supply chain consultancy. “If Everpure can help turn storage into a structured, intelligent data foundation, that could materially shorten the path from proof of concept to production AI.”

It’s not an easy process. It could take years to shift from being viewed primarily as a storage hardware company to a data platform company, Gastwirth says. “There is product integration to get right, but there is also a commercial shift. Sales teams need to sell differently, customers need to budget differently, and the market needs proof points.”

And there are many companies in the race to be the data platform for AI. “The difference is where it sits in the stack,” he says. “If Everpure can bake more intelligence directly into the core storage layer instead of layering tools on top, that can actually simplify things.”

Putting the control layer closer to the data can be helpful as companies deploy agentic AI. AI agents need to have good access to data to function well, whether as part of their training, in RAG embedding, or via MPC servers. But ensuring that agents only access the data they’re supposed to is a challenge.

“The shift to agentic AI is a big reason why you’d want to have your data intelligence tied to your data infrastructure,” says Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.

When Charles Giancarlo took over as Pure Storage CEO back in 2017, he already had a vision for how AI would cause data centers to evolve, Kerravala says. “He thought storage had a bigger role to play in AI, but that it had to change,” he says. “And so everything he’s done has been to evolve the company.”

The acquisition of 1touch is a big part of that, Kerravala says. “It brings a lot of intelligence to add to the storage footprint,” he says. That includes data discovery, data classification, and making sure that data is ready for AI. “Pure didn’t really have that capability before.”

Everpure’s Darji agrees that data management needs to be closer to the storage in the AI era—and that Everpure is now positioned well to offer just that.

Today, the security of a file or object is generally connected to that object and is handled by the security of the storage system, he says. “And if only these agents can see purchase orders, then it’s very relevant to understand that storage security is important for AI security,” Darji says.

Then, say, a company also needs to track information about what that file contains, such as the fact that it’s a purchase order for a particular amount—that information would reside in a separate database.

“If I store that information outside, agents have to go look at that, then look at the storage, which is highly inefficient,” Darji says. If the classification of the data and other enrichment and context can reside right next to the storage layer, it becomes much more accessible to AI.

And while some of 1touch’s competitors are highly specialized—for example, they might just look for personally identifiable information—1touch has a more flexible platform, so enterprises can adapt the classification to their own requirements.

There are ready-to-go models for privacy and security, but customers can use other classifiers, including their own large language models. “It’s model-agnostic and pluggable,” Darji says. “You can classify bone breaks in an X-ray, for example. It’s very open from an architectural standpoint.”