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Pure Storage arms UK channel with greater insights
Vendor extends scheme that has been running in the US to cover EMEA and share more intelligence
Pure Storage has extended enablement tools to its UK partners after a couple of months running the system in the US.
The firm launched its Pure Partner Intelligence (PPI) dashboard in the US earlier this year, providing its channel with insights into where they were winning deals so it could identify internal best practice and mimic that across a sales team.
The PPI offering was one of a handful of innovations launched by Pure to make life easier and processes smoother, looking to increase the intelligence that could be shared with the channel to identify opportunities and increase revenues.
As well as PPI, the vendor launched asset utilisation, which identifies where partners can help customers improve system management, and the Direct Partner Master Agreement, allowing the capability to transact directly in the online marketplace.
Geoff Greenlaw, vice-president of channel sales for EMEA and LATAM at Pure Storage, said the innovations had started to deliver results, and that Pure had chosen to extend it to more partners.
“The Pure Partner Intelligence dashboard was only aimed at direct partners, primarily in the US region, but we are launching that for all our partners in EMEA, so they now have access to all of that information about how to train, where to enable, where to get the best bang for our buck,” he said.
Greenlaw added that even in the few months the offering had been available in the US, the vendor had seen an impact from sharing intelligence with partners. “It really did unlock it, and we’ve started to see pipeline being uncovered where we didn’t know about it,” he said. “We’ve empowered them with the tools to go and drive the pipeline and we’ve seen exponential pipeline on the back of empowering them with those tools.”
Enterprise file services
Along with extending PPI, Pure also used an Accelerate event in London to unveil enterprise file services. Greenlaw said that with the focus on data rising due to the introduction of more AI systems, it was important partners could help customers get a grip on their information, regardless of where the data sits in the file infrastructure.
“Where we have really focused our R&D over the last few years is about natively building enterprise file systems, enterprise file services,” he said. “Why is that important? Because as customers build out a file server or file services, they typically have to buy a storage array for those file services that they want to monitor, manage, store, etc.
“That’s not the Pure philosophy,” said Greenlaw. “Our philosophy is that you can have any array across any infrastructure in the cloud, on-prem, in hybrid cloud, in public cloud, and we want you to be able to visualise all that data, irrespective of the storage that it sits on.”
Pure has also reacted to some of the confusion sown by the Broadcom and VMware tie-up with a VM Assessment service the channel can use to help users understand their current infrastructure and their options.
“Partners are having to understand from customers, and vice versa, what direction of travel the customer is going to take: stick with VMware, move to the cloud, public or private, move to Kubernetes?” he said. “There are so many options that are available to the customer. We’ve built this tool with a view that we can give empirical data to prove which is the best option for the customer.”
