This CEO just rebranded his B2B company. It’s a lesson in manifesting
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc.and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
During Charles Giancarlo’s first all-hands meeting after becoming CEO of Pure Storage in 2017, an employee asked: “How long are we going to keep the name Pure Storage?” The question suggested that having “storage” in the company’s name limited the range of products and services it could offer customers.
“My response at the time was, ‘We can think about a new name as soon as we start doing something other than storage,’” Giancarlo recalls.
Though the company may be best known for its data storage platform—including its all-flash hardware that uses ultraefficient flash memory modules instead of spinning hard drives—Giancarlo is pushing the Santa Clara, Calif.-based tech concern into data management. Today, he unveiled a new name, Everpure, reflecting his ambition to deliver a broader array of products and services to enterprises.
A brand by any other name
The Everpure moniker preserves the brand equity of “Pure” from the original company name. “Ever” nods to the company’s Evergreen storage-as-a-subscription program. A new logo retains the Pure Storage logomark, and the company’s ticker symbol, PSTG, remains unchanged.
Renaming a company isn’t cheap—brand management platform Frontify estimates that a complete brand overhaul can cost companies $1 million or more. And while consumer branding changes are often hotly debated (hello, Cracker Barrel), business-to-business (B2B) marketing moves rarely elicit more than a shrug. Giancarlo himself says it is unlikely that anyone will be talking about the name change a year from now.
But an enterprise rebranding can help reframe a company’s remit for employees, investors, and prospective customers. Indeed, Giancarlo believes the new name will help open doors with chief data officers and AI strategists. “The person who cares about data management inside our customers is different from the person that cares about data storage,” he explains. “And when they hear the name Pure Storage, they’re likely to say, ‘Oh, I don’t need to meet with them. They’re the storage people.’”
New name, new opportunities
The rebranding is also a manifestation of Giancarlo’s bet that enterprises will pay Everpure for more than data storage, aligning the company’s name and brand with the future it aspires to build. To take full advantage of the promise of AI—such as agents that can monitor a supply chain or automatically generate financial reporting—companies need to organize, tag, and unify information that often exists in different systems and databases. Everpure is ready to help them do that.
“Many customers who were furthest along in adopting AI—who were gung-ho—are saying, ‘my biggest challenge in being able to deploy AI is that my enterprise data is not ready,’” Giancarlo says. Everpure is seeking to address these challenges with its Enterprise Data Cloud architecture, which promises to simplify the process of cleaning, reshaping, and moving data so it can be useful to companies.
However, the company’s success is by no means assured. Its competitors include Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), heavy hitters who are also seeking to help customers with their data management needs.
Giancarlo says Everpure’s edge is its willingness to invest in innovation. When he arrived at the company, after 13 years at Cisco Systems and 8 years at private equity firm Silverlake, he committed to maintaining heavy investment in research and development. In its fiscal year that ended February 2, 2025, the company spent $804 million on R&D, 25% of its $3.2 billion in total revenue. Everpure reports 2026 revenue this week. While some “mature” companies might look to improve profitability by cutting that spending, Giancarlo says he still intends to maintain high levels of R&D investment, adding: “Maybe I’m perpetually immature.”
What investments do you prioritize?
What are the tools your company uses to help realize your ambitions? Send your responses to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’ll publish some of your manifestations in a future newsletter.
Read more: the business of rebranding
- 7 designers on the most influential rebrands of 2025
- The biggest branding trends you’ll see this year
- 6 situations that call for a rebrand