So serving as a route to marketing, getting access to some of the largest global customers I think is great. Just want to make sure, are you guys seeing a change in pipeline or win rates or anything for the balance of the year versus how you were thinking about it 90 days ago or is this just about adding in more of an element of variability just given the unknowns around deal timing?It's absolutely the latter, Matt, in terms of how we think about the business.Got it.
How much is customer mix? The shape of our business is changing for the good, but it will have more variability.
They love the fact that we're doing software-only and embedding us natively inside of their environment. I think all three of those things could be said about each of your competitors. Our industry-leading gross margins continue to reflect the value we deliver to our customers through consistent differentiation, technological innovation and customer focus.Product gross margins were 68.7%, up 0.9 point sequentially, due primarily to benefits we are seeing in component costs. And then just thinking about Q1 specifically and some of the prices that we've seen in terms of NAND. I wanted to see if maybe you could build a gross margin bridge to us in terms of some of the dynamics affecting your gross margin outlook. And I'm wondering, if there is -- is there anything you can point to that maybe differentiates your relationship with the biggest player in cloud?This is Kix, I'll take that one. This will allow us to feather in the more scalable kind of lower part of the file market to really be able to have a solution and the right solution for every part of the market.Your next question comes from Andrew Nowinski from Piper Jaffray.Great.
So from a Q1 perspective, there was more disruption that we typically had and that absorption, I think, had an impact. Sales guys that you're recruiting want to finish out their year wherever they are, tends to be in -- either at the end of calendar Q4. Our research shows that stocks with this combination produce a positive surprise nearly 70% of the time, and a solid Zacks Rank actually increases the predictive power of Earnings ESP.Please note that a negative Earnings ESP reading is not indicative of an earnings miss. I'll have Hat ask the -- answer the second part of the question.
It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would crop up in a quarter and drive weakness. Before I dive into the specifics, I'll make my usual note that the gross margin, operatingmargin, OpEx, net income and free cash flow numbers I will use are non-GAAP, unless otherwise noted. Share. The best news is that it's behind us and we feel great about this quarter and the quarters ahead. This was yet another proof point for Pure beginning to disrupt the roughly $8 billion data protection market.Shifting to our go-to-market momentum.
So, it's worth taking a look at the surprise history for gauging its influence on the upcoming number.For the last reported quarter, it was expected that Pure Storage would post earnings of $0.22 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.23, delivering a surprise of +4.55%.Over the last four quarters, the company has beaten consensus EPS estimates three times.An earnings beat or miss may not be the sole basis for a stock moving higher or lower. We finished the quarter with approximately 6,200 total customers, greater than 350 new customers in Q1, equating to more than 5 new customer additions per day. Remember, those are going to be largely subscription businesses as well, so you probably aren't going to see as much on the revenue side, you'd see it more manifest itself in the continued build of the deferred revenue line item.And that was our last question.
So quite a few things in the pipeline. Record number and record percentage of new sellers in the field. And all of that gave us confidence in this new guide.
We continue to delight our customers, expanding in accounts once we are established.
Thank you.This is Kix, I'll take that one.
Total gross margins for the quarter were 68.1%, up 0.5 point sequentially. Pure Storage, Inc. PSTG is set to report first-quarter fiscal 2021 results on May 28.For the fiscal first quarter, the company expects revenues of approximately $365 million. Pure's partner ecosystem continues to broaden and deliver real impact to the business. We are enabling our core FlashArray software, Purity, to run natively in the public cloud. And with all the new product expansion, can you give us a sense of ES2 cloud data services? Zacks Equity Research. So I'm wondering, if you could just walk us through the puts and takes that give you confidence that your business can accelerate well above that normalized growth rate that you just delivered?Right. I can tell you that there are a number of internal projects on that and we do look external for some capabilities as well to be able to deliver whole stack compute in a hyperconverged or HyperScale environment. My name is Mike and I will be your conference operator today. Just want to take your temperature on the competitive environment. I think we did anticipate -- so every year, you've got -- you have transition of accounts and new capacity, et cetera.
Thanks.Yeah. We're proud of our progress and the opportunities ahead of us in FY '20.