Pure Storage Establishes Latin America Operations

Pure Storage, Inc. has expanded its operations to Latin America, and appointed Wilson Grava, a 30-year veteran of the enterprise storage industry, as VP of the region.

 In his new position, he will be responsible for establishing operations in strategic LATAM markets, starting with its two largest economies, Brazil and Mexico. He will also forge new strategic channel partnerships to accelerate adoption of the Pure Storage FlashArray family of products by businesses, governments, hospitals and educational institutions across the region.

Grava brings more than 30 years of experience developing international sales and channel strategies in the LATAM and Caribbean regions to Pure Storage. He joins the company from NetApp, where he developed sales and channel strategies for its storage, virtualization and systems management technologies in LATAM. Prior to NetApp, he served as VP of Latin America at Symantec, where he helped to grow the company’s LATAM operations to more than 500 employees, and increased regional sales by more than 20% year-over-year. He has also served in various related leadership positions at McAfee and CA Technologies.

According to industry analysts, the LATAM region is among the fastest growing IT markets in the world. A key factor fueling the emerging market’s IT spending growth is an increased focus on data center centralization, as enterprise customers seek to implement higher performance storage systems that consume less power and space and can integrate with and optimize their existing IT infrastructure.

“The LATAM market represents a greenfield opportunity for Pure Storage, as customers in the region have few alternatives to traditional legacy storage, yet are hungry for the benefits of data consolidation, high-performance, efficiency and resilience that can be achieved by deploying all-flash storage,” said Grava. “As the third largest economy in the world and a high-growth region for enterprise technology consumption, Latin America represents a key milestone in the industry shift toward all-flash storage moving into the mainstream. I look forward to working closely with Pure’s existing channel partners, and to establishing new strategic reseller relationships that will help to grow our business in the region and finally deliver the innovation our mutual customers have been waiting for. We invite anyone that is interested in learning more about the advantages and opportunities of all-flash storage to get in touch.“

Pure Storage FlashArrays are purpose-built to deliver the benefits of flash memory in an enterprise storage array, and at a price point that makes it possible for enterprises of all sizes to join the all-flash revolution. The  family of products delivers a simpler, more efficient and higher performance alternative to legacy mechanical disk-based storage solutions, and is designed to meet the resiliency, scalability, efficiency and performance requirements of Tier 1 enterprise applications, including server virtualization, VDI, private cloud computing, and databases.

Pure Storage, which has raised more than $470 million dollars in capital from public and private market investors and is valued at more than $3 billion, is among the most highly valued private venture-backed enterprise technology companie, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move to establish operations in LATAM follows a period of growth and rapid international expansion for the company, which achieved 700% year-over-year growth in 2013. It has offices in every major US city and more than 15 countries across Europe, EMEA, Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), Japan and other AsiaPac (APJ) regions.

“With our outposts in EMEA, APJ and ANZ now reaching maturity, Latin America represents another important milestone in our international expansion plan, and we believe establishing ourselves in this high-growth market is another significant step toward achieving long-term independence,” said David Hatfield, president, Pure Storage. “We are exceedingly pleased to welcome Wilson Grava to our executive management team, and to having his considerable expertise guiding us in this effort. We are confident that he will help us to build a world-class operation that will fuel rapid adoption of our FlashArray family of products, and provide outstanding service and support to our future customers in the region.“