INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres and dispose of storage investments and is considered to be the thoughtleader in this market . Pure Storage has its strengths in providing solutions for structured and unstructured data storage ; its channel model which is built on long term , value partnership ; and its customer first approach .
“ Within Data Sciences rich history in the enterprise storage market , Data Sciences has not seen a technology change in the datacentre so radically within such a short period of time ,” stresses de Oliveira .
Michael Sotnick , Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances , Pure Storage .
CHANNEL PARTNER STRATEGY
• Best partners are creating blue print for other partners
• Helping customers identify workloads to be managed
• Speaking to business about cloud
• Helping them understand tipping point for flash is behind us
• Partners need to bring simplicity of management to forefront
• Pure Storage growth not linked to number of partners
• Looking at performance of each partner at granular level
• Evolving partners into application-aware and application-centric
competition with mainstream storage vendors . Another difference is channel partners here have extended relationships with end customers often even managing their IT infrastructure . Savage expects such channel partner to continue to lead the go to market both inside South Africa and into rest of Africa .
Across the Middle East region , Pure Storage works with distributor Global System Network for datacentre focused channel partners . Pure Storage works with distributor Spectrami for datacentre and cloud security focused channel partners . The third area where Pure Storage is looking at expanding its engagement with channel partners is in the analytics application ecosystem . About the penetration of flash based storage solutions , Savage remarks , “ I think in terms of the adoption in the region , it is clearly not as widely adopted as it is in the other regions .” Inside the Middle East region , education and insurance are important market segments .
With the arrival of flash storage , mainstream storage vendors have been on a path to redefine their storage strategies . Hybrid storage product offerings are helping their customer base to move towards flash storage and is less risky both for end users and channel partners . “ The growth for all vendors is in flash and for our competition their strategy is hybrid ,” summarises Savage .
Engaging with Data Sciences in South Africa Data Sciences Corporation aims to provide next generation solutions along with supporting customer service . Rui de Oliveira , Sales Director at Data Sciences , considers Pure Storage to be the catalyst of mainstream adoption of all-flash arrays . According to him , Pure Storage has revolutionised the way in which organisations purchase , manage
Pure Storage ’ s Evergreen and Forever Flash programmes are a significant shift in the acquisition , maintenance and total cost of ownership of storage in the industry . In order to build an understanding of these programmes , Data Sciences provides a consultative engagement including assessing challenges , requirements and future objectives of its customers .
To compete with converged infrastructure solutions making inroads as enabling platforms for digital transformation , Pure Storage has recently launched Flash Blade . This is an SSD based , scale-out , file and object storage with de-duplication and compression scaling to PetaBytes of capacity . Financial institutions , manufacturing , telecom , ISPs , mining sectors , are potential target segments that can benefit as they scale in terms of demand for converged data storage .
“ Due to the simplicity of how Pure Storage integrates with hypervisors such as Openstack , Hyper-V , VMWare , customers can enjoy the same levels of simplicity , but avoid being locked into a single platform vendor and hypervisor , while having the ability to leverage existing server investments ,” explains de Oliveira .
Synergies between Pure Storage and Data Sciences have helped to create their partnership . These include similar business philosophy and readiness to bring in market disruption . As a vendor , Pure Storage promotes Data Sciences as an extension of its business , culture and customer centric engagement model across South Africa .
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