Pure//Accelerate 2024: Seven Customers Honored by 4th Annual Pure Breakthrough Awards

At Pure Storage//Accelerate, Pure Storage, Inc. announced the winners of its 4^th annual Pure Storage Breakthrough Awards.

The awards recognize customers displaying innovation, creativity, sustainability, business breakthroughs and overarching success using the Pure platform.

Customers including NTT DATA, THG, SoftBank Corp., Rivian, Fiserv, MediaZen, and the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) were selected among more than 12,500 of Pure’s global customers as leaders across 5 categories: G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time), Cloud Champion, Data Warrior, Visionary, and Pure Good Sustainability.

2024 Award Recipients:

• Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.) – North America – NTT DATA: NTT DATA uses the Pure platform in innovative ways to help customers thrive. As a global innovator of business and technology services, it works with more than 75% of the Fortune Global 100 and is committed to helping clients innovate, optimize, and transform for long-term success. The platform enables NTT DATA to bolster its cloud and AI infrastructure for customers, handling up to 400TB of data and 3 billion records daily, all while cutting energy costs by 50%.
• Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.) – EMEA – THG: THG (formerly the Hut Group) revolutionizes how brands and consumers connect. The Pure Storage platform, including Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service solution supports all of THG’s data needs, including 400 global websites, AI training models, and thousands of e-commerce databases, while reducing its power consumption by 80% and bolstering AI-powered, award-winning customer service.
• Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.) – APJ – SoftBank Corp.: SoftBank serves more than 40 million mobile subscribers in Japan. With its “Beyond Carrier” growth strategy, it has significantly expanded its business and services beyond telecom. Pure plays an important role in SoftBank’s multi-domain ICT platform, ensuring data integrity and availability. SoftBank is focusing on new innovations, including a project aimed at developing homegrown LLMs with 390 billion parameters in 2024.
• Cloud Champion – Rivian Automotive: Rivian is disrupting the electric vehicle industry with its lineup of electric SUVs, trucks, and commercial vehicles. Leveraging a Kubernetes strategy with Portworx by Pure Storage as its data services platform, it accelerates development, improves critical system performance, and drives innovation. Using the Portworx platform, it has reduced downtime for provisioning vehicle keys, while improving control engineers’ visibility into the status of shop machinery.
• Data Warrior – MediaZen: In voice recognition solutions for diverse markets, MediaZen built a high-powered and scalable R&D platform on Pure to supercharge AI research. In the past, it could take up to a year to complete AI modeling tasks. With the new research environment powered by Pure, it takes 2 weeks – a 96% improvement.
• Pure Good (Sustainability) – Fiserv: Fiserv powers a range of financial transactions, reliably handling up to 25,000 financial transactions per second for its 6 million global merchant locations and nearly 10,000 financial institution clients. Investing in enhanced data center storage technology, it has yielded a 75% reduction in overall block storage rack space and 73% lower power and cooling costs using the Pure platform.
• Visionary – Indiana Office of Technology: The Indiana Office of Technology empowers 92 state agencies, with 35,000 employees to deliver innovative, better-quality services for its 6.7 million citizens. With Pure’s single, consolidated storage platform supporting 90% of the state’s IT infrastructure, the team spends up to 70% less time on maintenance, allowing more time to focus on supporting new technology projects.

“Today’s award further demonstrates our commitment to helping our global customers accelerate and modernize their cloud transformation journeys to meet the demands of today’s data-driven environments. We are excited to continue building upon our decade-long partnership with Pure Storage to fuel customer innovation,” said Scott McIsaac, SVP, managed cloud, NTT DATA.

“Everything that’s mission critical runs on Pure Storage, and it’s so simple and easy to work with that we don’t even need a dedicated storage engineer. At THG, we’re not afraid to take risks. Having a solid technology infrastructure in place gives us the freedom to try new things, adopt early initiatives, and shift gears,” said Schalk Van Der Merwe, CTO, THG.

“We want to create a truly native Japanese LLM for our customers. With Pure Storage ensuring data integrity and high service availability in cloud storage domains, we are excited about what we can achieve in the future to create the next technology leap,” said Ashiq Khan, head of the unified cloud and platform division, SoftBank Corp.

“Portworx plays a key role in supporting the containerization efforts that are driving an increase in production across the board. It helps us achieve significant operational efficiency as we scale our business and serve more customers,” said Josh Crater, staff software engineer, Rivian Automotive.

“The Pure Storage platform gives us the agility to take our AI models to the next level, handling ever-increasing workload demands and exceeding our performance expectations. A flexible subscription model will also enable us to tailor to our specific business needs in the most cost-effective way,” said JongSung Yoon, deputy director of NAMZ AI R&D group, MediaZen.

“In our business, performance, reliability and security have long been considered table stakes, and now, so is sustainability. The unparallelled performance and reliability of Pure’s platform was convincing, and how it supported our sustainability initiatives really won over our team. Our purchasing decisions are driven by the potential impacts across the board,” said Steve Allgeier, VP of the distributed infrastructure group, Fiserv.

“Our citizens expect a certain level of digital savvy, and the performance and reliability that goes along with it. Pure gives us a future-proof platform that can evolve and scale alongside us,” said John Thatcher, deputy/assistant IT director – platform services, Indiana Office of Technology.

Learn more: Pure Storage Customer Breakthrough Awards