Pure Storage’s success entices both partners and customers

Pure Storage has been recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms

When it comes to building and running GenAI use cases, having efficient data management is imperative for organizations. As the core foundation to successful GenAI applications, data management ensures that data used is reliable, secure and compliant with regulations.

Without proper data management, businesses will struggle to get the best outcome from their GenAI applications. As businesses look to scale and implement transparent AI solutions, data management also requires organizations to understand their data strategy, especially on what their data is capable of.

For enterprises, the cloud is the promised land for data management, thanks to its agility and scalability to fit desired workloads and applications. However, there is still a need to manage the data on the cloud and this is where data management companies come in.

While there are several vendors that are focused on data management, Pure Storage has been recognized as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Platforms. With the need for modernized data management capabilities, Pure Storage has been positioned highest for its capabilities in data management.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Andrew Fisher, VP of Partners for APJ at Pure Storage mentioned that they’ve been consistent in their delivery, and it’s proven as they have been topping consistently for eleven years.

“We’re seeing increasing interest from the world’s biggest players. We’re creating larger relevance for the market and are being pulled into larger opportunities. Our partners are responding well to this. Our value proposition of being 100% partner driven is really powerful with our existing and new partners,” said Fisher.

Known for its unified storage platform and flexible as-a-service experience, the Pure Storage Platform delivers unmatched agility and risk reduction. The Evergreen architecture, which is central to the platform, ensures continuous, non-disruptive upgrades, enabling enterprises to quickly adapt in today's dynamic business landscape.

“With the evolution of Evergreen One, which is our subscription-based product offering, we’re seeing great success in the market with our partners. We are seeing partners enjoy consuming Pure's platform in a way that their customers want to consume it from them, which is real value added for us.,” added Fisher.

Some of Pure Storage success in Asia Pacific has been its capabilities to help businesses improve operational efficiency and reliability. In Singapore, M1, a communications company, leveraged Pure Storage’s FlashArray to refocus its time into new digital transformation initiatives and identify opportunities for business value with 5G and IoT.

Pure Storage also recently announced new innovations to its platform. The Pure Storage Platform now offers an industry-first VM Assessment to help IT decision makers on modernizing their virtualization operations for critical workloads. The VM Assessment offers performance monitoring, enhanced scenario planning, and rightsizing recommendations through Pure1.

The partner opportunity

Fisher also mentioned that Pure’s dominance in the industry has attracted a lot of attention from their competitors. This has also led to Pure Storage being part of more opportunities in the industry as well.

“We are being asked to consult with our partners and our end user customers on opportunities that are significantly greater than they were a few years ago. That's the nature of our evolution as a company. Our technology leadership has been very well received by our partner community and they are leveraging that leadership position in their success. And that's fantastic for us. We go to all the trouble of ensuring we build amazing products. But to get external recognition of that, and have our partners use that in their growth is fantastic,” said Fisher.

Fisher pointed out that vendors would normally sell to a partner as CapEx (capital expenditure) and then have the partner go to the trouble of working out how to convert that into a consumption model.

“Pure Storage has solved this through Evergreen one and Evergreen Flex. We sell to the partner in exactly the same way the customer would like to buy from them so that we don't burden the partner with the financing. This includes the CapEx commitments, the depreciation schedules, the refresh cycles and all of those things that the partner is used to and was primarily responsible for because the customer was demanding it,” said Fisher.

At the same time, Fisher also highlighted that there's been huge investment from Pure Storage to create both partner integrated technologies and also end user customer management technologies that allow them to manage their whole platform at scale.

“Simplicity has always been part of Pure Storage's core around how we go about doing that. It's always been our founders' vision that simplicity was part of the vision. And that's where our effortless management and unified infrastructure come into play,” he said.

Moreover, with AI being on the agenda of organizations around the world, Fisher also explained that Pure Storage has actually been adopting internally AI-powered environments for some time. They have now made much of the power of that platform through the Pure One management suite.

“We have now opened up a number of AI-powered capabilities for our partners to allow them more visibility of their environment, recommendations on upgrades, expansions as well as security recommendations. We have a whole portfolio of AI-powered recommendations,” added Fisher.

The future of storage

Interestingly, despite Pure Storage being a market leader, Fisher pointed out that their main competition is still the market awareness of their competitiveness against Disk storage.

“Our competition today is how do we get to billions of dollars of annual spend that is being allocated for disk. Specifically, the people who don't believe today that flash storage can compete commercially against Disk,” he said.

Having said that, Fisher also believes that they are growing substantially faster than the competition. This also brings another challenge, especially when it comes to partner onboarding.

“When I make partner decisions today, I have to think about onboarding. By the time we onboard them, get them ready, they get up and going, we've almost got to decide, is the partner today going to still be enough in 36 months or 60 months? We have to make three to five-year decisions. Similarly, if you took everyone who came onboard who just read an analyst report and said they want to be our partner, we'd have too many,” Fisher explained.

As such, Fisher believes that Pure Storage will continue to build the world's best products so that the story can be shared with the partner community as well as with the end user customers.