Pure Storage on its ‘sniper approach’ to partners

Vice president, EMEA & LATAM channel sales Geoff Greenlaw spoke to CRN about his priorities for 2025

Pure Storage has launched its partner intelligence dashboard in EMEA to give channel firms in the region more visibility into where they’re being successful.

Launched in the US in March, the partner intelligence dashboard gives partners visibility into their engagements with Pure Storage and customers from current business and pipeline, as well as guided proactive recommendations on upgrade/upsell/renewal opportunities.

According to Geoff Greenlaw, the vendor’s vice president, EMEA & LATAM channel sales, the dashboard has made close rates faster than in traditional pipeline generation.

And now Pure’s EMEA partners can get their hands on it.

“We're leveraging artificial intelligence within our CRM system to provide partners with intelligence around where they’re being successful in terms of which verticals they’re selling into,” Greenlaw tells CRN at the Pure//Accelerate 2024 event in London this week.

“What's the use case that they're selling, what type of storage arrays are they selling to those accounts? Which sales reps are successful and why?”

“We're being laser focused and have a sniper approach to our partners about where they can win, how we win together.”

Greenlaw says there’s three things he looks for in a channel partner before working with them: commitment, a growth mindset and loyalty.

“By commitment, what I mean is a partner that's willing to sign up to a partner plan. Not just doing one deal and moving on.

“Number two is they must have a growth mindset.

“That’s an overused term in my opinion, but we are growing exponentially across Europe and the UK, and we need partners with that similar mindset to us.

“And then the final area I look for is loyalty.

“A partner may not be 100 per cent Pure. They may have another vendor, but don’t switch sell. Don’t leverage other vendors to get a better price from Pure. And our partners love that openness and transparency that we operate in.”

On his second point, Greenlaw uses growing a partner class as an example of proving their growth mindset.

“Growing the number of partner-sourced deal registrations that they commit to us. Growing the number of net new logos they drive for us.

“There’s multiple ways you can measure it.”

Growth markets

On where he wants partners to spend more time and energy prioritising, Greenlaw says he has seen a rejuvenation in the retail space.

“I’ve seen a real renewed energy in the retail market, which is very different to where it was two years ago.

“I think we have a very strong play in healthcare.

“There's a real renewed energy around video surveillance, especially as video AI comes more into play, rather than just data-based AI.

“And then finance continues to be a major backbone of Pure Storage.”

And on which parts of the Pure business is contributing the most growth, again, Greenlaw highlights three key areas.

“Firstly the move from CapEx to OpEx.

“There’s a lot more customers reviewing how they’re spending, especially with the economic pressure that the UK is under with a new government and geo political pressures coming from other regions.

“I would put sustainability in the top three.

“Probably the most important thing is, as customers look at the storage infrastructure in this move to an AI world, they’re finding it difficult to have a single pane of glass to look at their total storage infrastructure.

“It’s been very siloed up until now.

“Whether you’re with any competitor, you buy different products for different workloads.

“Pure’s a very different value proposition. One operating system, one single pane of glass, irrespective of the performance or throughput or storage capacity you need.

“As customers think about service level agreements, how do they deliver a service to their IT users in their company that is also very important to a partner ecosystem as well.”