Pure Storage CEO: Our biggest competitors are going direct
Pure hits out at storage rivals after seeing revenue jump 37 per cent and announcing its first acquisition
Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo has hit out at the flash player's competitors for going direct too often, after the vendor saw its Q2 revenue pass the $300m threshold.
For the three months ending 30 April 2017 Pure saw revenue jump 37 per cent to $308.9m, while operating losses shrunk by just under $6m to $55.2m.
The vendor also announced its first acquisition, snapping up California-based StorReduce for an undisclosed amount.
On an earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Giancarlo took a swipe at Pure's storage vendor competitors for starting to take more business direct.
"Our channel-centric go-to-market strategy to take these unique capabilities to market is working, especially when we see our largest competitors taking more business direct," he said.
"The new partner programme that we unveiled at our Accelerate Conference last quarter has been well received and is showing quick results, particularly within our largest national partners.
"A lot of the investments that we make upfront take some time to come through and so we're seeing the benefits of some of that, and candidly we're doubling down.
"I think our competitors in the market are going to feel us in the second half as we invest in our channel partnerships, invest in market awareness and invest in additional capacity. So we're really excited and motivated about the second half."
When asked by an analyst on the call if Pure was speaking specifically about Dell EMC, president David Hatfield said that a number of vendors were being referred to. However he singled out Dell out for having "changed the culture" of EMC since it acquired the storage giant.
"I wouldn't isolate it into one specific vendor; I think it's a trend that we're seeing across multiple [vendors]," he said.
"I think we've got [around] 10 to 15 points of gross margin advantage and a differentiated product line that we just extended our lead [with] even further. It's hard to compete with that.
"I think they're trying to do whatever they can do to win and our success in competing with them is measured in terms of the expansion of the gross margin and the win rates.
"Dell, I think has changed the culture of it, of EMC… It seems to me that the trend is they're more focused on top line and if they can get there with servers then they get there with servers versus focusing so much on storage. So I think it's a general competitive landscape that benefits our uniqueness and we're very confident in the second half of the year."
Pure saw its share price rise by over 11 per cent after its results and the acquisition of StorReduce were announced.
The vendor said the deal for StorReduce will see it bolster its cloud-first software-defined storage portfolio, specifically around managing "unstructured data in a multi-cloud environment".
StorReduce's CEO Vanessa Wilson said: "We are excited to be joining the Pure Storage team. StorReduce and Pure Storage share a common goal to empower customers to get the most out of their data in the increasingly hybrid cloud world.
"With the combination of StorReduce's data reduction capabilities and Pure's flash and object storage technologies, we can now optimise many modern cloud-native applications as well as many existing unstructured data workloads, in particular rapid recovery, at a faster rate."