“The vision was very aligned”: Everpure’s Gupta on the 1touch acquisition

“My take is the integration is going to be successful because it aligns on the vision. And that vision was something that was pre-built by the organization before we got included in enabling that vision as well,” says Ashish Gupta, General Manager of the Everpure Data Management.

When Everpure acquired 1touch in February 2026 to expand its enterprise data intelligence and AI capabilities, Ashish Gupta was more than surprised to see how well the solution had integrated into Everpure’s product roadmap as well as how customers were reacting to it.

Gupta, who is now General Manager of the Everpure Data Management business unit following the acquisition, shared that the acquisition not only opened doors for 1touch but also enhanced the existing relationships that the company already had with customers.

“We've been admittedly only working with strategic and enterprise sales segments because we just did not have the heft or the breadth of people to go out and support every salesperson. And we found that those relationships are very much in line with enabling the CISO and the CEO to come into the conversation. It was still Pure Storage when we were about to get acquired but since the change, it's been very positive.”

While Gupta acknowledges that there were a few overlapping customers from the acquisition, it’s all still been very positive as these customers now have “the ability to understand that Fusion and Pure1 information that can be utilized with data intelligence to give them a much stronger outcome.”

“Most of the other customers already have storage. But they see the need to have this kind of contextual layer that we have which is the different planes coming together. So, I think that's going to be positive from the perspective of selling more flash, blades and arrays to them as well,” Gupta added.

The vendor was also recently recognized by a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms for the second consecutive year. Everpure was positioned highest in execution and furthest in vision. The recognition follows 11 times Everpure has been named a Leader in other Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

As enterprises continue to invest heavily in AI models, applications, and compute, many discover that the true barrier scaling AI is fragmented data. To deploy AI successfully, organizations must shift to a Data Primacy architecture. Charles Giancarlo, Everpure CEO revealed data primacy as trusted, governed, and contextualized data, rather than proprietary application-centric data stores, serves as the foundation for agentic workflow.

By unifying policy and governance, semantics and context directly with operational data, Everpure transforms enterprise data into an intelligent, trusted, real-time asset.

Sharing the same vision

“Everybody is keeping the storage that they have. And not a single customer said that they're churning us off. Their take is only a richer relationship in terms of context that they can get,” said Gupta.

Gupta also believes that Everpure had done a lot of work prior to making the decision to acquire 1touch.

“So, I think that made things easier. My take is the integration is going to be successful because it aligns on the vision. And that vision was something that was pre-built by the organization before we got included in enabling that vision as well. Now, the good thing is that the vision was very aligned to begin with because we are a data-first company.”

“We decided architecturally to go to the data instead of just letting the application tell us what the policy is on the data. And that made a very big difference. If that would not be the focus of Everpure, it would have been a little bit more difficult to integrate. But that is the focus of Everpure and that's a vision,” Gupta explained.

At the same time, Gupta also pointed out that the solution, while integrated into Everpure, will still be able to work across any storage, any cloud or on-premises, including mainframe.

“That's going to be the case moving forward as well. But it's an opportunity for Everpure to come in and maybe try and squeeze in some of those customers who don't use them for storage at the moment and maybe can't work out a deal, I guess. Everpure's model is still very much customer first,” Gupta said.

As such, he believes the next phase will be focusing on going to market faster. Specifically, Gupta shared that customers could expect more from PureOne, either on-premises or on the cloud.

“We're putting a very focused ring-fenced team that's working on that between both teams, but the ring-fenced team is working on the integration. The next thing is, how do we enable the ecosystem of AI and specifically data management? Because the engine itself can be embedded in other organizations to give great discovery and classification so that they can do the right things for their end customer as well.”

“So, we'll see a fair amount of that happening in parallel with integrations with Fusion and Purity as well because that information from the file OS is super critical in giving context. And that's the three-year vision,” he concluded.