Flash vendor, Pure Storage, has reshuffled its executive leadership team ahead of a major revamp of its global channel strategy.
The company has appointed Michael Sotnick as vice-president of global channels and alliances, while Alex Hesterberg, formerly of Riverbed and Symantec, joins as vice-president, customer and partner success and technology services.
In the new global role for Pure, Sotnick will focus on extending Pure’s velocity in the market with existing and new partners across the GSI, ISV, OEM, VAR and Distribution ecosystem while ensuring cross-functional business alignment within the company.
The team will establish global best practices and focus on strategic alliances that enable partner’s success, according to a company statement.
Sotnick was previously executive vice-president and channel chief at Moovweb and Quest Software, respectively, until the latter’s acquisition by Dell.
An industry veteran, Sotnick also held various leadership roles at SAP and VERITAS, where he led the integration and growth of the global partner network, including systems integrators, ISVs, OEM, VARs, and distributors for a company that grew to $US1.5 billion in revenues, before being acquired by Symantec.
Sotnick said Pure Storage had been laser-focused on building a high-performing and differentiated channel program since its inception.
"Pure is both a pioneer and market leader in this space,” he said.
“Pure Storage is the only top-to-bottom channel focused company in the storage industry creating enormous opportunity for partners to upgrade their customer’s existing Tier-1 disk environments to all flash.
"The team has built a world class program to help partners maximise value for their clients and I am excited to further strengthen and extend these important and strategic relationships.”
The company has also launched the Pure Customer and Partner Success Organisation, which under Alex Hesterberg’s leadership, will develop and scale the advisory, enablement and education functions of Pure to help partners accelerate the adoption and integration of the company's products into more complex environments.
The new functions make services offerings, tools and methodologies available to partners, enabling them to serve as even greater strategic advisors to customers migrating to a 100 per cent solid-state data centre.
The Pure Customer and Partner Success Organisation will house a network of technologists and trained experts who will define and share architectural recommendations, advanced implementation guidance, templates and third party integration methodologies, which partners can deploy and monetise within their own services organisations.
These experts and technologists include Application and Database Solution Architects, Technical Account Managers, Program Managers, Designated Support Engineers, Certified Technical Trainers, Project Managers, Integration Consultants and other functions as the program expands.
Hesterberg said simplicity and ease of use were the foundation of the company we’re building and the products we deliver.
"It is not in our DNA to offer solutions so complex that customers would need to pay experts exorbitant sums of money to simply install and configure,” he said.
“That said, and similar to the transition from on premise software to the Cloud/SaaS delivery model, our customers expect Pure and its partners to offer high-value services to maximise the benefits of solid state.
He said the company had gathered key learnings from customer engagements and woven them into strategies the team would use to drive velocity and facilitate the sharing of best practices with our partners.
"Our enablement, advisory, and education functions, combined with the experience of our technical experts, provide the backbone of a rich services ecosystem that partners can leverage to more effectively serve the market.”
The company will implement a dual distribution model in all international markets.
Composed of two distributors per country, one local based and one pan-regional distributor.
It is hoped adding regional distribution tier in international markets will broaden access to new markets for Pure and partners through the channel, at scale.
The scope of services provided by Pure Storage distributors will vary but include basic “broadline” distribution services, value-added services, and incremental services such as deal registration, and proof-of-concept management.
It will also bolster its technology alliance ecosystem by deepening partnerships with key application and infrastructure vendors such as Cisco, SAP, Citrix, Epic, Microsoft, Oracle, RedHat and VMware and extending our reach with best of breed emerging technology alliances such as VMTurbo, Unidesk, NVIDIA, Arista Networks, MongoDB, CommVault, Veeam, and others.
This will integrate their offerings with the Pure Storage platform and deliver a variety of application-specific and vertically optimised solutions.
Partners can deliver, support and build services practices on top of these solutions.
For example, FlashStack CI - built with combined technology from Pure Storage, VMware and Cisco - is a flexible, all-flash converged infrastructure solution that combines the latest in compute, network, storage hardware and virtualisation software, into a single, integrated architecture that speeds time to deployment, lowers overall IT costs and reduces deployment risk.
FlashStack CI solutions are delivered and supported exclusively by Pure Storage FlashStack Authorised Support Partners (ASP).
FlashStack ASPs are trained and fully certified to sell and support Cisco, VMware and Pure Storage technologies, ensuring they can offer unified Level 1 and Level 2 support, for a seamless and highly personalised customer experience. Customers benefit from customised turnkey solutions, services and support from their preferred providers.
Pure Storage will also seek to create more value-based partnerships with global systems integrators and systems integrators.
This will pave the way for Pure Storage and the broader channel ecosystem to tackle some of the most vexing infrastructure challenges facing the enterprise.
GSIs and SIs provide new avenues to market, which offer partners increased opportunities to design and deliver transformational end-to-end application and infrastructure projects for customers, according to a company statement.
