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Pure harnesses AI to enhance partner processes
Vendor unveils range of enhancements to provide its channel with greater insights and growth opportunities
Pure Storage is using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to enhance the partner experience and arm its channel with greater insights to help them drive their businesses forward.
The firm has been engaging with partners over the past couple of days at its Pure//Partner Forum, outlining a number of announcements that will provide more real-time data about channel customers and staff.
The vendor will be offering AI-powered asset management, not only to track subscriptions but to recommend additional services the channel can pitch; expanded partner intelligence that shares account-specific KPIs, trends and performance analysis; simplified invoice management; plus the introduction of a digital master services agreement to provide partners with the chance to opt in to a self-service purchasing option to give customers the same feel as if buying through the cloud.
Geoff Greenlaw, vice-president for EMEA and LATAM channel sales at Pure Storage, said the vendor recognises that improving processes for partners and sharing insights would deliver tangible benefits and support growth.
“It all relates to driving partner autonomy and independence,” he said. “Enabling and empowering our channel with the tools and capabilities to be far more intuitive, far more proactive around how they are managing not only the Pure Storage arrays, but how they’re managing their customers at the end of the day, and how they’re managing their sales force.”
Greenlaw said it was using AI “to help enable our partners to become far more intuitive about how they go to market”.
He added that the firm is promoting a platform approach. “It’s a single operating tool, based on a cloud operating model, with one single layer of software to manage everything across your storage arrays as a service,” he added. “As we move to a service economy, we’re really seeing our partners embrace this whole notion of storage as a service.”
AI’s advantages
AI is at the heart of the latest announcements coming from Pure, and Greenlaw said it had seen the advantages of incorporating it into channel processes.
“AI is mission-critical to the way our partner landscape is changing,” he said. “I’m seeing an evolution in terms of those that are embracing AI – not at customer level, but actually within their own partner ecosystem – to leverage the data that’s available to them are becoming far more competitive.
“More importantly, they’re enabled,” said Greenlaw. “They’re then able to drive much more margin-rich business, whether that’s product or services, as a consequence of being laser-focused.”
Pure has been developing the systems over the past year that will share data, provide customers with a cloud-like buying experience and increase the insights available to partners.
“This has been highly intentional of us leveraging AI capabilities, to empower partners to deliver far more independence and autonomy to give them more capability to grow their margins and sales as a consequence,” he said.
Pure shared the reactions of Neil Dearman, chief technology officer for EMEA at Highpoint, who said the announcements provide the channel with “new incentives, billing automation and increased intelligence on customer deployments to support the generation of predictable recurring revenue streams, which is absolutely essential in today’s marketplace”.
