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'You'll start to see much more focus on our MSP business from us this year,' Pure Storage tells CRN

The vendor’s EMEA channel boss spoke with CRN about its foundations in sustainability and how its partner roster plays a vital role

Pure Storage claims it is ramping up its pivot to managed services, crediting its progress in this area to its channel partners.

Speaking with CRN, the vendor's EMEA channel VP Geoff Greenlaw claimed partners themselves are also maturing and developing more services in its market such as storage-as-a-service solutions.

"Our partners own the relationships in the vast majority of cases with our customers. It's our partners who enable us within those customers and prospects," he explained.

"We have a 100 per cent indirect go-to market model. Therefore, the roles or partners play in our go to market strategy are mission critical to us and we will never deviate from that. We will never take a direct transaction."

However, he added that Pure's resellers or traditional partner community that got the vendor to where it is today are "not necessarily the partners of the future" that will take Pure to where it needs to go in the current cloud-based, OpEx-based world.

"I'm starting to see an evolution of managed service providers fitting into this sustainability message story where they're delivering storage-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service," he said.

"I feel that there's an enablement role that Pure needs to play with our partner ecosystem to bring them up to speed and bring them on the journey with us to enable them to deliver training and enablement activities, both pre-sales, sales and post sales service delivery.

"The other key point here is that if a customer is in the enterprise, or the commercial space, it doesn't matter because this model applies to all customers in all segments of the market, whether you're in the public sector, whether you're in a large enterprise or even in the SMB space.

"And that's why I call to the importance of MSPs. You'll start to see much more focus from Pure this year on our MSP business."

Pure Storage ESG-focused since day one

The vendor recently announced a new energy efficiency service level agreement (SLA) for its storage as a service offering, Evergreen.

Greenlaw opened up to CRN about how the group has always held sustainability at the heart of the business.

"If you reflect upon Pure's heritage, sustainability has been at the core of everything that we've evolved the company from, right from our inception," Greenlaw said.

"And now we feel is the right time to be leveraging that message in line with global warming. We see the advent of new roles within companies, such as a sustainability officer as an example."

Greenlaw added the group is now selling to a different type of "persona", from CIOs and IT and datacentre managers to CFOs, as customers shift to OpEx from CapEx.

"I would also add that clearly sustainability is a global phenomenon that we're all trying to address but these sustainability officers, datacentre managers and CIOs, are really struggling with how do you truly quantify what the savings are. How do you meet the sustainability goals you're setting?

"And us being the very first to market with this SLA-type approach, with this energy savings approach, really plays into our partners hands.

"It's a real key differentiator for our partner ecosystem to go to market and keep the customers happy and meet the goals that they have.

"What's unique about the offering is we're giving energy efficiency SLAs to every customer based on a number of Watts per tebibyte - a unit of digital information storage.

"More importantly, if that SLA is not met, customers can then request credits from Pure Storage. We're the only vendor on the planet that has enabled this model where we're effectively giving customers a remediation at no additional cost."