Pure Storage has announced significant updates to its partner program, delivering heightened value and performance to partners, tailored to their unique business models. Geoff Greenlaw, VP EMEA and LATAM channels, Pure Storage, tells us more.
Pure Storage have announced some updates to its partner programme. Can you talk us through these please?
The end of February was when the official partner programme was launched. I would say that the updates are primarily designed to enhance our partners experience of working with Pure Storage and really the philosophy behind this is to enable them to develop full autonomy and effectively additional empowerment is what we’re trying to give to our channel partners. Historically, for a lot of the pricing partners to come to Pure for everything, even if they were skilled and had their own technical and sales capability, they still had to come to Pure for approval on certain things.
What we’re giving back to the channel is a lot more of that empowerment, through enhancements to our automation tools (the proposal and configuration tools that we give to them). And we’re also giving them the opportunity, and this is critical to our success with our partners, to help them drive more profitable growth in a predictable way. Historically, it was quite difficult to judge where our partner was going to come out from a margin perspective. They didn’t know if they were going to get a certain rebate for a certain opportunity. We’re taking away all that ambiguity and providing them with a more predictable framework to drive their profitability.
How do the updates to the partner program reflect the company’s strategy to support partners in the subscription-based economy?
If I reflect upon our growth in the Latin American market specifically, that’s a good place to start. IDC have just released their quarterly tracker. Pure had the highest revenue growth at 22.3% in a market that actually declined at minus 10%. Specifically, that growth came from countries like Brazil, where we grew at 51% in a market that declined.
In Mexico, we grew at 30% in a market that was flat. In terms of Brazil and Mexico specifically we are looking to drive our subscription business primarily. I think when you look at the rewards that are available in the partner programme, a lot of them are geared towards a subscription technology, specifically the Evergreen one, which is where we own the asset, but we’re providing an SLA to those customers. What we’re also going to be introducing is this concept of rewarding our partners upfront. So historically, when in any subscription model, the partner can only take their profitability when that customer is invoiced, we will ultimately move to a model where we will pay the partner for the total contract value all upfront in terms of their margin.
So that’s a big change at Pure and certainly for our industry where we’ve historically not done that. There’s been a reticence for many partners in general, not just Pure partners, to go down the subscription road because if I’m a sales rep or a partner, I want to get all my margin paid up front. I want to take the profitability as quickly as I can – so traditionally, they would push Capex, a traditional route to market model. I think this will take away that ambiguity and again, drive more profitable growth in a predictable way.
How does Pure’s programmatic pricing model benefit its partners in the updated partner program?
We will continue to focus on simplification of our programs and this is an evolution rather than a revolution. We will continue on this journey. We still have two tiers of partners with Elite Partners and our Preferred Partners – Elite being the top tier in terms of certification and accreditation that comes with additional benefits. We’ve differentiated more the delta between Elite and Preferred, it was quite a blurred line before. It’s now a very clear line between Elite and Preferred so you know exactly what you need to do in order to get x number of rewards.
We are continuing our successful Pure Rewards initiative where we reward the partner EE and SE. And again, we’re really helping to push that towards net new logos, which is our primary driver. We will continue to drive new business in order to take market share. But the big change this year is that we’re going to reward our partners for existing business customers.
We’ve never done that before. We’ve always pushed towards that new logo activity that remains. But what we found is that partners open doors for us to get us into new accounts and then there’s no real incentive for them to cross-sell, to upsell other technologies into that account, or even land and expand in those accounts, because there were no additional payments available to them to do so. We’re now rewarding partners for not only new business, but ‘land and expand’ opportunities in existing accounts, which is a big change.
Can you give us an overview of your company’s current focus and the Latin America IT landscape?
We are continuing to take market share as you can tell by the data points I’ve just given you from IDC. We will continue to push towards subscription but a key focus for our partner ecosystem across Latin America is pushing our ESP program – by that I mean our authorised support program because just like many other vendors, we don’t have the same support infrastructure as maybe we would in a tier one country.
We’re looking for our partners to be skilled and enabled in delivering the support vehicle to support Pure Arrays on our customer premises. That clearly comes with profitability. It comes with reward and recognition. So we’re always looking for partners to expand our ESP capability. One question I typically get asked is: ‘Are you looking to onboard new partners?’
The answer is absolutely ‘yes’ but we want to ensure that we are investing in partners who want to build a Pure Practice. Candidly, I’m not that interested in partners that come with one opportunity every 12 months. I want Pure Partners to invest and build a Pure Practice in order that they can take more market share themselves – we need to be relevant inside that partner. Two deals per annum is not relevant to a business when they might sell a competitive technology. So we’re really looking to focus and push business to those Pure Partners who want to build a Pure Practice. That’s a big change so they can drive more profitability for themselves as well.
How do you see the role of channel partners in Latin America evolving over the next few years?
I’m seeing a different type of partner evolving. With new technologies being introduced to the market (I’ll talk about Generative AI as a very simple example), we’re seeing partners coming to us who are not our ‘traditional’ storage partners. They’re not box shippers. They are boutique partners who are truly valued by their customers in terms of providing professional services consulting around this move to AI – specifically containers.
And when I think about containers Generative AI is clearly a solution that has sparked this new surge in container adoption as well. I don’t want your readers to think about Pure Storage just in the box shifting scenario. We are moving our business very much to Generative AI to support serious hyperscale in the public cloud with the opportunity to provide GPU and performance in the cloud. We also provide that on-premise for our customers.
We can also provide it where we are seeing significant growth in Latin America, in the MSP world, where partners are now delivering their own managed services built on Pure technology. But where we’re seeing the real focus is really around this move to Gen AI and the adoption of containers within that as well. So I think all in all, it’s a really good opportunity for our partners to think outside the box. It’s an opportunity for new boutique partners. Traditionally, they are small consulting practices. These are 20 to 50 people businesses that are really entrenched in containers that are starting to make a fundamental difference for Pure across the Latin region.
What strategies are you employing to maintain a competitive edge in the Latin American market?
I think using our Evergreen technologies is a game changer. It’s traditional for storage vendors to position a Storage-as-a-Service model that is actually a leasing framework. There’s no ambiguity there. Pure is a very different model, however, where the customer will invest in an SLA that Pure will actually underwrite so there’s never any issue with upgrades again.
There’s never the data migration ever again – once you’ve migrated to Pure, that’s the last data migration you will ever do. In any competitive landscape, you need to traditionally move data from one platform to another at the end of the lifecycle of that given storage array.
We are taking away all that ambiguity. So peace of mind is everything, not only for our customers, but specifically for our partners, and they can also help in that journey on that initial data migration as well for us. I want to stress how this whole SLA driven Storage-as-a-Service is a complete differentiator for Pure in the storage market. I would love for all of our partners to adopt this.
How does Pure approach training and upskilling of its channel partners?
We have a very defined framework around how we train and enable our Elite and Preferred Partners, and there’s about 30 hours of work required to become Elite for certain parts of our technology. From a technical perspective, there’s eight hours of work involved from a sales perspective. I want skilled people in our partner ecosystem who can help us drive scale and reach in the market. But I think most notably, one of the new certifications we’ve just launched, revolves around our sustainability message.
So we’ve now introduced a new beginning for partners to scale them up on what is sustainability, but more importantly ask what does it mean to a customer as they move to Scope Two and Scope Three emissions. And how can Pure help a customer on that journey to drive Net Zero emissions from a carbon footprint perspective? So again, we’re delivering more to our partners in training and development than the traditional storage vendors in order to try to differentiate ourselves in the storage market.