Omar Akar, Regional Vice President, Middle East & Emerging Africa, Pure Storage, talks about various innovative storage solutions being showcased at GITEX 2022 by the company across three key themes.
What products or solutions will be the highlight for you this year at the show?
Visitors to the Pure Storage stand will have a chance to experience and interact with the latest solutions across three key themes:
- As-a-service: In order to support regional enterprises as they embrace flexible, consumption-based operating models and invest in modern technologies and services that optimize for stronger value over time, Pure has advanced its unrivaled leadership in delivering Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) with updates to its Evergreen portfolio. This suite of products which includes Evergreen//Forever, Evergreen//Flex and Evergreen//One prioritizes cost efficiencies, a longer, sustainable technology lifecycle, and modernization without disruption.
- Infrastructure-as-code: As organizations modernize their infrastructure platforms and operations to support agility and accelerate innovation, there is a greater need to provide developers with the tools, interfaces and APIs they need to control the infrastructure and services as well as the automation of operations, application and data management to maximize their productivity. By combining the simplicity of the cloud with on-demand consumption and back-end provisioning, Pure Fusion enables organizations to deliver a new scale-out storage model that unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly. Portworx Data Services (PDS), the industry’s first Database-as-a-Service platform for Kubernetes, enables developers to run heterogeneous data services from a single platform, on any cloud, and at a low cost.
- Sustainability: Mitigating the environmental impact of data infrastructure is critical, as data workloads increase. Pure recognizes that building a sustainable model for the future now requires data storage that is engineered to require significantly lower power, lower cooling, and far less waste. With a portfolio that includes FlashArray, FlashBlade and Evergreen, the company is leading the way in delivering solutions and services that allow customers to dramatically decrease their own environmental footprints. According to a recent product life cycle assessment (LCA) of its portfolio, specifically the FlashArray products, Pure Storage customers achieve up to 80% reduction in direct carbon usage by data systems compared to competitive products. In addition, the newly launched FlashBlade//S delivers double the density, performance, and power efficiency of the previous platform.
How important is channel for you and how do you enable channel partners to work with you?
Pure is constantly evolving the partner programme to enable growth. As a 100% channel organisation, partner success is imperative. Earlier this year Pure announced a series of updates to empower partners with flexibility and support for multiple routes to market. Recently, Geoff Greenlaw joined as VP Channel, EMEA, based out of Dubai and his focus is on driving the four P’s in Pure’s channel programme:
1. Partner: ensuring profitability
2. Programme: ensuring partners have what they need to deliver Pure’s portfolio
3. Process: making it easy for partners to work with Pure
4. People: ensuring great collaboration and teamwork
What is the key message that you would like to pass on to your existing / prospective partners attending GITEX?
The accelerated pace of digitalization in the Middle East has been underpinned by the flexibility and convenience of modern as-a-service offerings. The data storage industry, at large, however has not matched this pace of innovation — legacy solutions remain complex, lack agility and flexibility and aren’t innovative enough to meet the data requirements of modern businesses.
As such, our key message, or goal, for GITEX 2022 is to showcase how Pure Storage, with a design approach that is fundamentally rooted in simplicity and customer-centricity, continues to disrupt the storage industry with uncomplicated technology that enables business transformation in a sustainable and impactful manner.
What does your company hope to achieve at the end of the show?
As a mainstay at GITEX for the past seven years, Pure sees the exhibition as an unparalleled platform to engage with regional customers, prospects and partners on two fronts. For one, it gives us an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of their challenges and growth opportunities. It also allows us to demonstrate how the innovations we have brought to market over the last 12 months can enable them to unleash innovation at scale.
Given the pivot we are seeing in region towards subscription-based consumption models, and a more sustainable approach to IT, we are particularly excited about the value proposition we are highlighting at this year’s edition of GITEX and we encourage visitors to stop by our stand located in Hall 7, Stand H7-G30.
Where can we find you at GITEX? (booth no and hall no)
At GITEX, Pure Storage can be found in Hall 7, Stand H7-G30.
