Pure Storage is set to invest in more tools and support resources for its channel partners as it attempts to increase its European market share, the company told partners at its annual Accelerate conference in Austin, Texas.
The company, which is entirely channel-driven, is just over a year into its new channel partner programme after introducing it at Accelerate 2018. The programme is based on a two-tier model: the entry-level 'Preferred' partners, and the invite-only 'Elite' tier, which includes minimum criteria such as a certain number of customers, technical competencies and certifications.
According to IDC reports shared with reporters, Pure is ranked fourth in the enterprise storage market in regions including the UK, France, Germany and Italy. The company is looking to increase this market share, however, and has a number of key strategies for how to do so.
One of them is increasing Pure's brand awareness within EMEA - as Pure's VP of international James Petter said, "One of the things we do find across EMEA and other regions is [potential customers saying] 'Who are you?'". Another element that Pure hopes will draw in more customers is its growing support for multi-cloud deployments, but the biggest driver - according to Petter - is increasing the productivity of its channel.
"The third area is clearly, and probably most importantly, get partners to not just sell once but to do repeat purchases. So our partner class and those selling on our behalf, we've got to build them."
In the interests of this, Pure is investing in more technical support resources that partners can draw on when building solutions for customers, and Matthieu Brignone, Pure's area VP of partners for EMEA, explained how much progress the company has made in this regard.
"At the last Global Partner Forum, we had questions about partner support; we had no one dedicated to the channel in Europe. We were leveraging the system engineers organisation to basically support the partners. As the company grew, we created a team, a technical team, that we called CTM - channel technical managers - whose goal is only to look after partners and partners enablement," Brignone said, "and we are going to grow a bit more in the next few months."
Partners will also benefit from access to actual systems, allowing them to accurately gauge the suitability of various configurations for their customers, Pure's VP of partners and alliances Michael Sotnick revealed.
"So what we announced yesterday at the Global Partner Forum is the availability later this quarter - so for us that ends 31 October - of the performance sizing and capacity sizing configuration for the FlashArray X10 and X20 for the partners," Sotnick said. "We're going to put systems into the hands of the partner technical community, so that they can size for performance and capacity, the right solution for their customers. And then have the sales teams of the partners and the distributors be able to price and quote that independently."
One of the other announcements to come out of the Global Partner Forum was the news that over 700 members of Pure's partner community have achieved certification since the programme was launched last August. Not only that, but the programme requirements themselves have also been freshly updated.
Among the changes is the fact that Pure's Elite partners are now required to have two architects - although Shawn Rosemarin, VP of worldwide systems engineering has now mandated that all Pure systems engineers now have to achieve the same level of certification as partners.
For Computacentre chief technologist Bill McGloin, although Pure still has some work to do around communication and transparency, the company is moving in the right direction with its channel strategy.
"We had several asks of them," he said, "just to have more visibility of them and more visibility within our professional services and education. The same argument applies to several other vendors, however. NetApp has done it well, I think. Because Pure came to market as a real disruptive vendor, and they've become a mainstream vendor now and they're a target for disruption, I think there was an element of growing pains for them, because they grew really rapidly. I think they're coming through that now."
From Pure's channel chiefs, the outlook for the future is bullish too, and Sotnick took a firm stand on the potential of the company's channel as a pace-setter for the industry.
"What we announced last year, we're coming good on this year," he said, "and that is the ability for our Elite partners, on an invitation-only basis, to take the strong front-end margin and brand promise that Pure delivers, and also have a very structured back-end incentive. And we've deployed that across many partners in EMEA and globally."
"I think we can define enterprise multi-cloud infrastructure to the market. You look at Evergreen, when you look at the Cloud Block Store, unified subscription across Cloud Block Store and Pure as-a-service, there's really nothing matching it in the market. And I truly believe we have the opportunity with our partners to define enterprise-class multi-cloud."
