Pure Storage arms partners with architecture approach

Pure Storage has gathered many of its partners together to urge them to talk about data architecture and resilience as the foundations for customers moves deeper into artificial intelligence (AI).

The firm has issued updates to its Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) architecture and is keen to talk about a sales approach that is operating at a higher level than simply pitching point products.

Geoff Greenlaw, vice-president of channel for EMEA and LatAm at Pure Storage, said the company would be talking to partners at an event in London on 7 October about the benefits of talking about storage architecture and the problems it would help customers solve.

“Some of the modern data challenges that our customers are facing demand more than ‘traditional’ storage. What’s driving that is the amount of manual and reactive work that customers and partners are having to do to deliver a service to the business, which means they have areas like fragmented visibility, so they can’t see all their data in one single pane of glass,” he said.

Greenlaw stated that the second issue facing users was the continued practice of storing data in silos that made it difficult to manage and to gain insights from.

“The majority of customers in the world today have very siloed infrastructure,” he said. “They maybe got one storage platform for one application or one-use case; they’ve then got another vendor storage system for additional use cases.

“The complexity comes from how you govern, secure and build compliance in a universal, unified way against all those siloed infrastructures. And that’s causing our customers not only a management problem, but the cost and performance management associated with that as well is a big, big problem.”

Finally, there is a clear need to add security into the mix to ensure that data is protected and resilient: “When you’ve got silos of data sitting on multiple hardware platforms, how do you build in a true cyber security framework into the scope of all your storage in terms of threat detection, data, immutability, storage, immutability and the integrity associated with that data as well?

“Those are the three primary business problems that we’re solving with this and, consequently, we have built and launched a platform. This is an architecture. This is not a product that we’ve launched. It’s an architectural framework platform that we’re calling the Enterprise Data Cloud.”

The message for partners is to get behind the EDC infrastructure with the focus on intelligent control, unified data and cyber resiliency.

“Customers don’t just go and buy this as a product out of the box. And that’s good for our partners because they can help build this with [customers]. This is more services, opportunity and consulting to work with their customers that will ultimately lead to more product sales in the back end as well,” said Greenlaw.

Given the number of industry players that have pointed out the need for a customer AI journey to start with AI, Greenlaw acknowledged it would be in a strong position in that area.

“It’s an outcome of having these conversations with a customer, and that’s where our partners need to be able to articulate our value proposition as a true differentiator on the journey to AI,” he said, adding that being able to talk about data strategies was giving partners the opportunity to sit in from of more senior executives.

“It’s definitely elevating their conversations to a more executive, boardroom level,” he said. “It’s changing how partners are perceived by their customers, because they can truly demonstrate value add and become trusted advisers to the boardroom of those customers around their data strategy.”