Why Pure storage is passing partner engagement to its disties

Flash vendor says it currently works with almost all of its partners directly, but will change this with new model

Flash vendor Pure Storage is to transfer more partner engagement responsibilities to its distributors.

Pure Storage today launched a distribution programme in EMEA which will see the firm offer business incentives to distributors to on-board and support new and existing channel partners across the region.

Speaking to CRN sister publication Channel Partner Insight, EMEA partner boss Matthieu Brignone said that today almost all of the vendor's channel partners engage directly with Pure Storage. But under the new programme, a larger portion of its partners will use distributors as their primary point of contact.

"If you take the UK, we have around 10 strategic partners we are engaged with on a daily basis," he said.

"The UK is the largest market for us in Europe, but we are following a similar strategy outside the UK in Germany and France and the rest of Europe with a very small set of partners. They are the ones we are engaging with every single day," he said.

"It means that we manage probably 90 per cent of the relationship with the partners, which leaves the distributors a bit on the side.

"They bring some value to us, but in terms of following up with partners, because we don't have so many, we tended to do the job by ourselves most of the time."

Brignone said that Pure Storage has hired dedicated distribution managers in the UK, France and Germany, as well as an EMEA-wide manager, to support the new programme. The flash vendor also opened up a new global distribution role, filled by ex-Cisco exec Scott Goree.

In all, Pure Storage has hired 20 new channel-facing employees in Europe this year, Brignone claims.

"We're talking purely about dedicated people to channel partners. That includes channel managers, but it doesn't include channel technical managers. The technical part of our job when it came to disties and channel partners was relying on our presales team, which is very significant at Pure in EMEA," he said.

"But actually, we thought it would be nice to have dedicated technical guys for our partners and disties, so we hired around 10 people just concentrating on that."

"We can still rely on the pre-sales team, which is much larger, but the goal is to manage the business from end to end with the same people and develop a better relationship with the partners."

Pure Storage's top-tier resellers will not be affected by the new distribution programme, claims Goree, who said that the vendor will divide its partner base into "Pure-led" and "distie-led" accounts.

"If we have a Pure channel manager aligned with a partner, that would be classified as a Pure-led account. We want our distributors to bring in partners that maybe have an MSP practice and can adopt some of the technologies we're coming out with. That might be a net new account that we haven't seen before. But the distributor will then incubate them into a top partner. Those top partners will still be distie-led partners, so we want to preserve and protect the distie-led investment as they build up those new partnerships."

Pure Storage's 2018 acquisition of US-based data backup vendor StorReduce also plays into its new distribution programme, claimed Brignone. He said he is encouraging distributors to recruit hybrid cloud and AI specialists that can leverage StorReduce's software-defined technology.

"In terms of addressable market numbers, with the expansion of the portfolio after the acquisition, that's taken our addressable market from $35bn (£26.6bn) to $50bn. So to go after that, we may need new access to that market - and we're looking at [distributors such as] Arrow ECS to bring in those partners."

Pure Storage will continue targeting large enterprise customers as it rolls out the distribution programme, said Brignone.

Tim Henneveld, COO of DACH datacentre distributor TIM, praised the move from Pure:

"We value Pure's commitment to a mutually beneficial channel ecosystem," he said.

"German organisations expect quality service and experience, and with Pure's 100 per cent channel model, we can fully rely on getting the best possible support as we grow and close new businesses."

The launch of Pure's distribution programme came in tandem with its acquisition of Sweden-based file software company Compuverde, which lends to Pure Storage's hybrid cloud strategy. The transaction is set to close in this month. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.