Everpure channel boss: Partners can lead the data strategy debate

It has been five months since Ricardo Moreno stepped into the role of vice-president of global partner sales at Everpure, and looked to work more closely with the vendor’s channel.

Everpure has a strong existing channel base, and Moreno has been travelling the globe meeting partners to get a sense of where he can make a difference.

“I joined the company with a few things in mind, and what is exciting is seeing that now becoming true in many ways,” said Moreno. “So, the company is going through an exciting amount of transformation, and that transformation is happening in two primary fronts.

“One we’ve been on for some time, [which] is evolving how our clients consume our offers. We have a product called EG1 that is a gamechanger…it has provided customers with flexibility and helped partners increase recurring revenues.

“The other one is this evolution from a storage company to a data management company that brings an answer to an important business need right now, and it expands the possibilities of how partners can play with us and participate on this and benefit from the opportunity here.

“We care deeply about our partners across the company, so that creates an opportunity for us. Again, it was a big part of the motivation to really help enable partners to succeed.”

As Everpure has built on its storage heritage and added increased data management expertise, delivering flexible solutions that suit a channel sale, it has seen partners make a similar transition. Increasingly, the channel has moved to position itself as trusted advisers at a moment driven largely by AI and where managing data is critical.

“We believe we put partners in a position of strength because they themselves can go and advise their customers and help them choose,” said Moreno. “The other thing that we’re offering is a growth path [and] expanding that because now we’re bringing new things to the table. On the very centre of this, the data management idea is that customers want to build all their infrastructure around their data needs.”

He added that in all his meetings in the past few months, the firm had become abundantly clear that partners wanted to be in a position where they could support customers with developing and delivering a data strategy, which depended on their relationship with users.

“Every client out there has different data needs. Data is incredibly valuable to them, incredibly private and sensitive, and I believe a fundamental role that partners can have is to advise the customer on how to build their data strategy,” said Moreno.

“Success on that space requires a thought-out data strategy for the specific customer needs. I believe our partners are best positioned than anyone else to collaborate with their customers and understand their data extremely well, so they collaborate with them to build up these strategies that are going to be on the centre of everything,” he said.

Everpure views AI as a technology that relies on being delivered and supported by partners, and that now is the moment for those partners with data skills to step forward and meet that need.

“There are certain things that are crystal clear,” said Moreno. “One of them is that AI requires a lot of data. It is on the very essence of how AI operates, and it depends on data latency.”

Moreno added that users would not tolerate latency and that the firm had already developed robust flash technology that would counter those problems. He stated that there was a responsibility in his role to highlight where the opportunities were emerging for partners and to support them with enablement and smoother processes.

Moreno said his key priorities could be boiled down to three areas, including encouraging partners to sell more of the portfolio, expanding its market and ensuring it continued to improve enablement.

“The first area: we’re going to see our partners selling more of that portfolio,” said Moreno. “They’ve been very successful selling our core products, but now as we start to expand, partners are engaging more elements of the portfolio – that is fundamental.

“The second area is about elevating our value exchange. If you think about the overall value exchange we have with our partners, as we now go into new spaces and buying personas – and more of this advisory capability and leveraging of the practices – we’ll see partners and an elevation of what we exchange.

“As for the third one, it’s an internal but very critical one. It is a big part of what we must do as an organisation to enable partners to be successful in our joint business. As we bring new products, new offers, new consumption models, we need to make sure that partners are fully capable and fully prepared to win on that.”