INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres and dispose of storage investments and is considered to be the thoughtleader in this market. Pure Storage has its strengths in providing solutions for structured and unstructured data storage; its channel model which is built on long term, value partnership; and its customer first approach.
“ Within Data Sciences rich history in the enterprise storage market, Data Sciences has not seen a technology change in the datacentre so radically within such a short period of time,” stresses de Oliveira.
Michael Sotnick, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances, Pure Storage.
CHANNEL PARTNER STRATEGY
• Best partners are creating blue print for other partners
• Helping customers identify workloads to be managed
• Speaking to business about cloud
• Helping them understand tipping point for flash is behind us
• Partners need to bring simplicity of management to forefront
• Pure Storage growth not linked to number of partners
• Looking at performance of each partner at granular level
• Evolving partners into application-aware and application-centric
competition with mainstream storage vendors. Another difference is channel partners here have extended relationships with end customers often even managing their IT infrastructure. Savage expects such channel partner to continue to lead the go to market both inside South Africa and into rest of Africa.
Across the Middle East region, Pure Storage works with distributor Global System Network for datacentre focused channel partners. Pure Storage works with distributor Spectrami for datacentre and cloud security focused channel partners. The third area where Pure Storage is looking at expanding its engagement with channel partners is in the analytics application ecosystem. About the penetration of flash based storage solutions, Savage remarks,“ I think in terms of the adoption in the region, it is clearly not as widely adopted as it is in the other regions.” Inside the Middle East region, education and insurance are important market segments.
With the arrival of flash storage, mainstream storage vendors have been on a path to redefine their storage strategies. Hybrid storage product offerings are helping their customer base to move towards flash storage and is less risky both for end users and channel partners.“ The growth for all vendors is in flash and for our competition their strategy is hybrid,” summarises Savage.
Engaging with Data Sciences in South Africa Data Sciences Corporation aims to provide next generation solutions along with supporting customer service. Rui de Oliveira, Sales Director at Data Sciences, considers Pure Storage to be the catalyst of mainstream adoption of all-flash arrays. According to him, Pure Storage has revolutionised the way in which organisations purchase, manage
Pure Storage’ s Evergreen and Forever Flash programmes are a significant shift in the acquisition, maintenance and total cost of ownership of storage in the industry. In order to build an understanding of these programmes, Data Sciences provides a consultative engagement including assessing challenges, requirements and future objectives of its customers.
To compete with converged infrastructure solutions making inroads as enabling platforms for digital transformation, Pure Storage has recently launched Flash Blade. This is an SSD based, scale-out, file and object storage with de-duplication and compression scaling to PetaBytes of capacity. Financial institutions, manufacturing, telecom, ISPs, mining sectors, are potential target segments that can benefit as they scale in terms of demand for converged data storage.
“ Due to the simplicity of how Pure Storage integrates with hypervisors such as Openstack, Hyper-V, VMWare, customers can enjoy the same levels of simplicity, but avoid being locked into a single platform vendor and hypervisor, while having the ability to leverage existing server investments,” explains de Oliveira.
Synergies between Pure Storage and Data Sciences have helped to create their partnership. These include similar business philosophy and readiness to bring in market disruption. As a vendor, Pure Storage promotes Data Sciences as an extension of its business, culture and customer centric engagement model across South Africa.
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