Everpure: “97% of AI Projects Stall at the Pilot Stage”... Data Readiness Is the Key

Everpure said 97% of companies adopting AI are stuck at the pilot stage. It said 97% of AI adopters are failing to move from pilot to production, with data management limitations identified as the bottleneck.

Everpure analyzed unattended Dark Data and fragmented infrastructure as factors hampering AI adoption. It pointed to data management problems as the reason AI deployments are not making it into production.

On the 17th, Everpure held a press briefing for "Pure Accelerate Seoul 2026" and released "The Enterprise Data Readiness Gap," a report it co-authored with Omdia. The report was released based on the data management limitations identified earlier.

At the briefing, participants discussed architectural shifts and ways to respond to data sovereignty in order to overcome the stagnation in AI adoption. Matthew Woostbin, Everpure APJ CTO, led the presentation at the event.

Matthew Woostbin explained that companies need to move away from application-centric infrastructure and shift to Data Primacy. The photo was credited to Reporter Kwon Young-seok.

Woostbin CTO compared data to "King," saying that data does not move by itself. He explained that physically moving large-scale data is inefficient in terms of cost and security. He said a structure is needed in which applications access data where it resides, rather than moving the data itself.

According to the report released that day, 97% of companies worldwide are having difficulty moving AI workloads into production. In addition, 68% of respondents identified "data management" as the biggest obstacle. More than half of the companies surveyed also said more than 50% of their data is "Dark Data."

Woostbin CTO said data that can be easily used in the cloud has already been exhausted. He added that key assets remain trapped in legacy systems and mainframes.

At the same time, the importance of data sovereignty was emphasized in response to tightening global regulations and geopolitical risks. There were also concerns that simple encryption and post hoc compliance alone make it difficult to avoid the risk of foreign jurisdiction and also difficult to avoid service disruption risk.

Woostbin CTO said "Sovereignty by Design," which incorporates sovereignty into the architecture and contracts from the outset, is essential. He explained that sovereignty should be included in the initial design and contract stages, just like security.

Based on this, Woostbin CTO said it is necessary to define a "Minimum Viable Company (MVC)" framework to maintain core operations during a crisis. He stressed the need to establish an operating structure that can sustain essential work even in a crisis.

At the event, Jeon In-ho, head of Everpure Korea, took the stage. Jeon shared Everpure's business performance.

Jeon said Everpure's global headquarters was recently added to the S&P 500 index. He also said the headquarters has acquired its second customer among the 5 major hyperscalers after Meta. However, he explained that the customer name is being withheld by mutual agreement between the two companies, and that the specific company has not been identified.

Jeon said the domestic all-flash market grew by about 130% year over year in the first half, driven by rising memory prices and expanding AI demand. He explained that adoption of the subscription model "Evergreen" is rising rapidly as a way to reduce cost risk and improve predictability amid price volatility.

Everpure declared that it is transforming from a storage innovation company into a data management company. In February, Everpure changed its company name from Pure Storage to Everpure.

Everpure's core strategy is the "Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC)" architecture based on "Fusion" software. EDC's function is to manage multiple storage resources together as if they were a single fleet. Everpure was named a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, with leadership determined by execution and completeness of vision.

In the Q&A session, the trends in domestic AI investment workloads and responses to rising memory prices were discussed. It was explained that domestic AI investment has been led since the start of the year by the government, large corporations, and GPU-based "neo cloud" companies. It was also said that general enterprises are still at the stage of verifying business outcomes. In addition, it was noted that interest is shifting away from storage connected simply to GPUs and toward the location of the actual source data, including DBs, files, and objects.

Strong memory prices were forecast to continue for some time. In response, Everpure presented the subscription-based "Evergreen" service as a countermeasure to hedge price volatility.

Regarding ransomware recovery measures, the company said the key factor determining recoverability is whether an uninfected backup exists. It then said it provides SafeMode snapshots, which are physically separated from servers and cannot be tampered with.

It also said abnormal signs are detected in real time, including sudden capacity drops and sharp declines in deduplication rates. It added that the EDC intelligent control layer allows violations of policy to be automatically corrected with a single click.

When asked why it does not disclose details of its cooperation with SK hynix, it said it is because of NDA. It added, however, that collaboration with SK hynix on next-generation flash technology and modules is progressing smoothly.

It also said expanding supply to major hyperscalers is evidence that the partnership is progressing.

Source: IT DAILY · Kwon Young-seok
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241693

References

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