Customer Wins for Pure Storage in EMEA

Pure Storage, Inc. announced momentum across its EMEA customer base – including wins from Grant Thornton Ireland, UnternehmerTUM GmbH, Banca Popolare di Sondrio S.C.p.A., and Picard France.

Recently named a leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide All-Flash Array 2017 Vendor Assessment, growth has been driven by demand for Pure’s dynamic and forward looking strategies in NVMe, cloud-based predictive analytics, customer experience, and technology refresh. In an era where data is a critical asset, the technology behind Pure’s FlashBlade, which is purpose built for modern analytics, and its FlashArray, is enabling customers to use their data to generate actionable intelligence and improve their businesses.

Pure has helped enterprises across the region lay the groundwork for transformative innovation based on new data-driven technologies such as AI and machine learning. These technologies need to be supported by solid infrastructure, to ensure data agility, speed and efficiency, and ultimately, business success.

James Petter, VP EMEA, Pure, comments: “It’s been an amazing twelve months for Pure. We surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue just eight years after the founding of the company, as fast as any other enterprise technology company in history. We also recently reported our first-ever quarter of non-GAAP profitability. This has been driven by some incredible customer wins – from sport and healthcare to finance and government. We continue to be absolutely focused on helping those customers put their data to work in the most dynamic, innovative and effective ways possible.“

In addition to growing the EMEA customer base, Pure also continued to grow its partnership programme in 2017. Most notably it signed a pan-EMEA partnership with PNY Technologies, EMEA distributor of NVIDIA Enterprise Products, pushing the boundaries of data-driven AI further for customers and marking a shift in what’s possible in terms of speed, power and innovation.

“Our partnership with Pure got off to a great start last year. By combining Pure FlashBlade with NVIDIA’s AI super-computing platform it’s enabling us to provide customers with a best-in-class combination to power their AI, machine learning and modern-analytics workloads,” commented Jérôme Bélan, EMEA CEO, PNY.

“In the last 12 months, Pure has continued to cement its position as an innovator in storage. The developments it has made in its product portfolio highlights the company’s continued dedication to help customers to innovate and deliver competitive advantage. We’re looking forward to seeing next updates from the company, especially in emerging areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Roy Illsley, principal analyst, cloud computing, management and strategy, and virtualization, Ovum Ltd.

A selection of recent customer wins from across the region include those from finance, technology and retail:

Grant Thornton, Ireland’s growing professional services firm, uses FlashArray to support its business and financial services.

“After doing a market comparison we found that nothing could compare with Pure in terms of technical performance. We’re now finding that the simplicity of the arrays not only means reduced management time, but it enhances the user experience by making sure our IT operation is absolutely seamless,” said Sean Walsh, senior system administrator, Grant Thornton Ireland.

UnternehmerTUM is one of the largest innovation and entrepreneurship centres in Europe, supporting founders and start-ups from their initial idea all the way to IPO. The German non-profit has joined forces with a number of public sector, industry and tech players for the appliedAI initiative, which is supported by FlashBlade and NVIDIA.

“The applied AI initiative is all about accelerating start-ups and the adoption of AI in industry as well as society. Our aim is to democratise AI by helping people understand the challenges, opportunities and best practices involved. A huge part of this is having the right technical infrastructure in place, which is why we have chosen Pure and NVIDIA as technology partners. Pure stands out in terms of technical excellence, especially when it comes to fast access to big data. By implementing FlashBlade in combination with the NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning platform, we know we will have one of the leading innovative solutions on the market to experiment with real-life AI and machine learning use cases,” said Alexander Waldmann, operative director applied AI initiative, UnternehmerTUM Projekt.

Banca Popolare di Sondrio is the parent company of the Banca Popolare di Sondrio Banking Group and a credit institution in northern Italy. FlashArrays help the company to manage its complex IT infrastructure, freeing up vital time and resources.

“Pure has helped to simplify our technological infrastructure, making it easier for us to focus on maintaining business critical applications. The benefits have completely exceeded our expectations. Frankly, we don’t know of any other solutions on the market that can compete with those offered by Pure,” said Piergiorgio Spagnolatti, IT manager, Banca Popolare di Sondrio.

Picard, France’s frozen food retailer, chose FlashArray to accelerate business intelligence and improve the customer experience across its network of 920 stores.

“Thanks to Pure’s Evergreen Storage solution, we can completely upgrade our arrays without any disruption or downtime. In addition, we now benefit from a 4:1 reduction rate, which has eradicated the initial performance bottlenecks and boosted the performance of our applications by up to 80%. As a solution it is incredibly impressive,” said Ismaël Simoes, CTO, Picard.