Pure Storage bolsters channel pitch with power and rack payments

The move by Pure Storage to pay for the space their hardware takes up in user racks is one that should benefit partners able to promote sustainability.

The firm’s paid power and rack commitment is part of its Evergreen portfolio, which is also being backed by efficiency guarantees and an enhanced trade-in for controllers and data packs.

Prakash Darji, general manager of the digital experience business unit at Pure Storage, said that its decision to pay for power was part of its efforts to help users improve endpoint management.

“How do we ensure those endpoints get better over time and that we can ensure that we can place things at the right endpoints. How do we ensure that we get to minimise the amount of work someone needs to do? Number of service visits, number of touches in the datacentre, number of touches on the software?” he asked.

He said that as Pure looked at solving those issues, it became clear that it needed to enable continual software updates that did not affect the customer, adding that there were steps it could take on the hardware side as well.

“We want to expand that in a way that the customer feels that we’re going to be continually optimising that journey going forward. So with EverGreen One and Evergreen Flex, we’re announcing a paid power and rack commitment,” he said.

“Since we’re running and operating and managing storage at a customer’s datacentre here, we’ll pay for the energy and the rack space we use. The customer can get it as an upfront payment or as a service credit,” he added.

As well as taking the power burden off the shoulders of customers, the vendor is piloting a Partner Intelligence initiative with around 35 members of its channel to share insights that will enable them to be more consultative with customers.

Geoff Greenlaw, vice-president channel sales EMEA & LATAM at Pure Storage, said the power and rack commitment would help partners differentiate from the competition.

“We always talk about trusted advisor, but this truly differentiates our partners when you think about the broader picture of sustainability,” he said.

He added that when he spoke to partners four key trends emerged – costs with the move to opex, subscription consumption models, containerisation, and climate change.

The power and rack commitment, he argued, fed into the last theme, but it was also continuing to increase the portion of business that came via the channel as subscription-based deals and it would be looking to recruit more partners that were able to add container expertise.

”Our goal is to get to more than 50% of our business subscription. We’ve already hit that landmark. We will continue that direction of travel,” he added. “That’s sometimes a challenge for our partners because they get fed commission, if you will, on the drip...You’ll see an evolution of our partner programme over the coming 12-18 months and we will look to address that by paying [out on] total contract value.”

“We’re looking to bring on specialised boutique-type partners who can sell the value of Kubernetes and containerisation, because it’s a different language, it’s a different persona that we’re actually engaging with in our accounts, in our engines or customs,” he added.

In terms of the plans for Partner intelligence, Greenlaw said that it made sense to share data that had been kept internally with its channel base to drive more sales.

“Why would we not extend that level of information to our partner ecosystem that they can be proactive with renewals, capacity upgrades, more data packs, changing systems in terms of performance?” he said.

“One of the key goals that certainly we have in EMEA and across the globe is around partner autonomy, partner independence, providing them with more capability so that we can scale and reach to new customers and existing customers,” he added.