Everpure urges partners to look ‘beyond storage’

The vendor told partners at its Accelerate event its move beyond storage is enabling channel firms to get in front of CISOs, data leaders and other senior decision-makers, rather than being sent straight to the infrastructure team

Don’t call us a storage company.

That was one of the messages from Everpure at last week’s Accelerate event in London, where executives were keen to underline the company’s ambitions beyond its storage heritage.

Formerly known as Pure Storage, the company rebranded as Everpure earlier this year to reflect its expansion into broader data management.

When referred to as a storage company in a press Q&A, Everpure’s field CTO for EMEA, Patrick Smith, was quick to point out that the company was moving further up the data stack.

“We are still the leading storage company in the industry, but we are moving up to dealing with the data landscape,” he said, describing Everpure’s expansion into the data layer as “the beginning of the journey”.

For partners, moving beyond the storage label means getting a foot in the door with a much wider group of decision-makers.

Craig Robertson, head of partners in EMEA & LatAm at Everpure, said the company’s old Pure Storage identity could sometimes make it harder for partners to start conversations outside of the infrastructure team.

“If I try to talk to a chief data officer or a CISO, and I say, ‘I’m speaking to you on behalf of Pure Storage’, they immediately go ‘the storage teams down there’,” he said. “Even that little shift has been received quite well.”

The current Everpure positioning gives partners more confidence to engage different parts of a customer organisation, as conversations increasingly span infrastructure, cybersecurity, data management and AI, he said.

From storage sale to data conversation

Everpure used Accelerate to announce new capabilities designed to discover, classify and contextualise data across its own infrastructure, public cloud, SaaS and third-party storage.

Its new Data Intelligence capabilities include native Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, designed to let AI agents and security tools query data catalogues using natural language and understand factors such as data sensitivity.

For partners, however, the bigger change is how they bring together skills that may previously have sat in separate parts of the business. Robertson said partners are increasingly having conversations that touch “the cyber teams, that touch the data teams, the AI and automation teams”.

“It used to be, ‘I’m the infrastructure person.’ ‘I’m the software person.’ Now there’s a lot more crossover because if you want to answer sovereignty or you want to answer the challenges around resiliency, you do have to hit a lot of them.”

As a result, he added: “It’s less about retraining and more about knitting together the new personas.”

Rewarding expertise, not just volume

The vendor introduced its Ambassador tier this year, designed to create greater separation between partners and put more emphasis on technical expertise, practice building and outcome-based selling.

“The Ambassador status was introduced as something that we knew not a lot of partners would really get to or go for because it was meant to drive real separation within the model,” explained Robertson.

There’s currently only a handful of Ambassador partners globally, and none yet in the UK. Softcat is among those working towards the status, while SVA is doing the same in Germany.

Robertson said the model naturally lends itself to larger partners with multiple practices, although there are also routes for midmarket partners to gain specialisations.

Everpure is now designing the next iteration of its wider partner programme, due in its new financial year, which starts in February.

For now, any changes have deliberately been more “evolution than revolution”, said Robertson, with the company keen to give partners consistency and predictability around how they earn.

He pointed to the earlier move to Evergreen//One as a more fundamental change, requiring partners to move from traditional capex sales towards on-demand subscription billing.

“That probably was the biggest single moment in time we’ve had with the programme,” he said, adding that it had taken time to work through the change with partners but was now a core part of Everpure’s business.

A bigger conversation for partners

Everpure is also stepping up its focus on managed service providers (MSPs), with Robertson saying the company is investing “quite significantly” in its MSP practice.

Here, data sovereignty is increasingly shaping the conversations partners are having with customers.

“The biggest conversation that we’ve had with our MSPs so far has been how do they answer the questions that have been thrown at them, because they need support and help doing it,” said Robertson. “I don’t think anyone has the full picture yet.”

For Robertson, resilience, sovereignty and AI are increasingly converging. He described resilience as being driven largely by regulation, sovereignty increasingly becoming a board-level discussion, and AI being pushed by CIOs looking for better business outcomes.

Bringing those three conversations together is where he sees an opportunity for partners.

“That’s the big shift we’re asking our partners to kind of take with us,” he said. “How can we get them at the forefront, leading the conversation with things like AI readiness workshops or data sovereignty workshops?”

That means moving away from a traditional infrastructure pitch built around recovery metrics.

“[It’s] very much shifting away from, ‘We can deliver a better RPO and RTO.’ It’s evolved beyond that,” he said.