Pure enables its customers to embrace the future of cloud and data flexibility with a true, as-a-service model that is simple to manage and always evergreen
[quote font=”tahoma” font_size=”13″ font_style=”italic” color=”#262626″ bgcolor=”#f9f9f9″]
New enhancements in the Pure Partner Program will help our channel partners develop as-a-Service offerings as well as build new routes to market through Portworx.
Matthew Oostveen,
Vice President & Chief Technology Officer,
Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage
[/quote]
The Pandemic-driven massive shift to online operations and such high-scale adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning gave the cloud industry a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors.
Here, in a special interaction with SME Channels, Matthew Oostveen, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage, bares his organization’s strategy for growing the cloud business, his predictions for the industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
Over the past two years, the need to accommodate remote work has led businesses to the cloud. But the requirement for business continuity was soon followed by the evaluation of other technologies that would allow greater innovation both during the crisis and in preparation for a post-Covid future. Running everything using a cloud operating model enables enterprises to automate their operations, creating a flexible infrastructure that, in turn, provides their organizations with on-demand access to data services. As a result, we expect to see more automation and orchestration tools to enable businesses to deploy cloud operating models seamlessly.
The fastest-growing category this year will continue to be cloud storage. The realization that the cloud is the destination and going to be the way of working, has led to an increase in the scale of adoption of cloud storage technology. Enterprises today are collaborating using the cloud, making it easier for their teams to access data, manage complexities, bring data closer, or process where the data has been created. We at Pure understand the pain points and the needs of our customers. Many of the customers that we are talking to are moving their data from on-premises into the public cloud with technologies like Cloud Block Store that increases the efficiency of their cloud data infrastructure.
We are enabling our customers to move to the cloud with technologies and products like Cloud Block Store, Fusion and Portworx. Pure Fusion is the platform for provisioning, managing, and scaling enterprise storage, delivered as a service. Technology like Portworx enables them to address not only the edge in their organizations, but it is also the simplest and easiest way to curate and manage an enterprise-grade cloud-native platform. Pure is heavily investing in the cloud so that customers can simplify the complexity of the environment.
As a major cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022?
Organizations are accelerating their digital transformation processes for long-term growth and enhancing productivity. This year, organizations will increase focus on finding competitive differentiators that will allow them to stand out from their competitors and to be able to provide customized services to their customers. Cloud storage is and will continue to be the fastest-growing category.
There is a huge shift in the way the customers now are centralizing and storing their data. The market trend is building on the back of the fact that there is a lot of data that is created on the edge. More often than not edge data is evaporating directly into the cloud.
We are witnessing the rise of analytics and analytics tools in the public cloud. Companies are building some powerful analytics tools that customers are investing heavily in them. But there is a problem; customers need to get this data closer to these analytics engines. So, the movement of data from a data center into the public cloud purely for the purpose of being closer to analytical tools, and therefore to the distributed teams that are working on these data sets is going to be an important trend.
Please shed some light on your cloud offerings.
Pure offers state of the art technology and solutions suited for most cloud architectures:
- Pure1 is an enterprise’ monitoring and management framework. With Pure1, users can experience self-driving storage with full-stack, AI-powered data-storage management and monitoring.
- Pure Cloud Block Store is an enterprise-grade architecture that brings industry-leading primary storage and enterprise data services to the cloud. It leverages cloud-native resources to deliver an optimized cloud experience that is continuously improved over time.
- Pure Storage brings the cloud to the data center for its customers with two new products: Portworx Data Service (PDS) and Pure Fusion. Both are important components of Pure’s strategy to expand beyond all-flash storage with hybrid cloud-based storage and database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings. While Pure Fusion is a platform for provisioning, managing, and scaling enterprise storage, delivered as a service, PDS is a Kubernetes-based database-as-a-service platform that will let DevOps professionals provision managed data services.
- Portworx by Pure Storage provides a fully integrated solution for persistent storage, data protection, disaster recovery, data security, cross-cloud and data migrations, and automated capacity management for applications running on Kubernetes.
What is the USP of your offerings?
Pure Storage helps its customers embrace the future of cloud and data flexibility with a true, as-a-service model that is simple to manage and always evergreen. Pure offers everything-as-a-service for flexible consumption and cloud economics. Pure Storage is bringing the cloud operating model to its customers and providing them with the infrastructure experience that enables a single and seamless model across private and public clouds. We have a unified data management platform that interconnects the edge, the cloud, and the core so that customers can move their data, applications, and information across these boundaries seamlessly.
What major channel trends for cloud would you forecast for the year 2022?
What enterprises will need In 2022 are consulting services to help them transition to the public cloud. Channel partners should work on services and integrating technologies that simplify their customers’ data centers and allow them to take advantage of the cloud.
Now is a great opportunity for channel partners to address the important question their customers are asking: Should we build, or should we buy a particular technology solution? We advocate that they should be buying their solution and not try to build it themselves. It’s time for the channel to take a step forward here and start bundling together turnkey solutions that simplify this for their customers. And in this process, you will witness an evolution in the way the channels start to build. We will start moving towards outcome-based contracts where the channel partners become more of a business partner.
What does a channel partner need to adopt a cloud business and what are the steps to start a cloud practice?
Channel partners should understand their customers and focus on providing tailormade turn-key solutions for a particular segment. They should find their strengths and stay focused in that area.
Pure’s Partner Program also provides training and resources for partners whether they are reselling or offering managed services, as-a-service solutions, or cloud-native architectures.
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners? What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners?
New enhancements in the Pure Partner Program will help our channel partners develop as-a-Service offerings as well as build new routes to market through Portworx. They can take advantage of training, certifications and joint marketing resources and benefits depending on the partnership tier.
Since cloud is a tech-intensive product, it requires proper skilling. Please detail us on the training programs offered by you to upskill your partners.
Pure Storage’s channel partners can take advantage of a range of product and solutions training, technical resources as well as access to tools such as virtual EBCs and remote POCs. We also have remote installation services that have been very helpful during the pandemic.
