Pure Storage looks to channel to take Fusion and DDaaS to market

Pure Storage is expecting its channel will run with its latest product release as it starts to extend its abilities to store more applications with its Portworx technology.

The firm is cutting the ribbon on its database as a service (DBaaS) offering, building on Portworx Data Services and Pure Fusion, which offer cloud-like consumption models for those using legacy applications.

The vendor has recognised that customers are facing different challenges, with a need to cover both traditional applications and modern ones that tapped into containers and Kubernetes environments.

It has been a year since Pure snapped up Portworx, and this is providing its channel with an opportunity to take the fruits of that investment out to market.

Patrick Smith, field chief technology officer (CTO) for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Pure Storage, said it was not an either/or decision and it translated into double the opportunities for the channel to aim for.

“As we look at enterprises today, they almost have two different technology stacks,” he added. “[They could have] traditional applications that we underpinned with our flash array products. Then, very much built on Portworx, we see a modern application stack where the underlying storage infrastructure technology could be flash array, could be flash blade, could even be Portworx software-defined storage itself.”

Smith said there had been a lot of attention from its established channel around Portworx and the prospect of being able to support modern applications was opening up more customer conversations.

“We have a lot of interest from our existing channel from the Portworx acquisition, who are very much coming to us and saying, ‘How do I engage with my customers around this new world of modern applications?’,” he said.

“We’ve got channel partners which have already embraced Portworx and are moving in that direction. Then others which are realising that this is the future and if they don’t move in this direction they are not going to be relevant to their customers anymore, because they’re heading in that direction,” he added.

“On the Fusion side, for the traditional apps, our existing channel partners, who’ve done a fantastic job in supporting the growth of Pure over the years, are central to everything we’ll be doing with Fusion and bringing that storage as a service cloud light management layer at scale to flash array environments.”

Matthieu Brignone, vice-president of the EMEA channel at Pure Storage, added his take on the product launches, emphasising that it gave partners a pitch that would chime with a lot of users.

“Pure’s vision of bringing simplicity and reliability to enterprise storage is evolving to delivering modern data services – as code,” he said. “Customers are looking for infrastructure which is invisible but delivers competitive advantage, is self-service so they can infinitely scale, has rock solid reliability and offers seamless automation. Partners have a huge opportunity to differentiate themselves and reassure customers that they have anticipated future challenges in their IT investment.”