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Gartner just issued its third annual Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays. Pure is proud and honored to be positioned as a LEADER for a third year. The report is a great read to both understand the SSA vendors as well as the SSA/AFA market overall, which as flash replaces disk en masse, is quickly becoming synonymous with the overall enterprise storage market.

Gartner

Gartner Customers – The MQ’s North Star

What makes the Gartner Magic Quadrant impactful, and the “big daddy” of all analyst reports, is that it is derived both from a large amount of direct customer feedback – the North Star, as well as the analysis work of a team of analysts at Gartner. Gartner’s unique perspective on the market is derived from their many interactions with end users and the breadth and depth of these conversations. Every year when I read the report it just “feels” like a very accurate reflection of the state of the market as a whole – at least from my perspective as someone in the market at the street level every day.

State of Pure: Customers at the Center

Each year the Magic Quadrant gives a short summary of each vendor’s strengths and cautions.  It’s a great reality check as a vendor on market perceptions.

At Pure we’ve long focused on three core strategies for success:

  1. Invest in product innovation: dedicate ourselves to being the “best of breed” leader in storage
  2. Innovate the business model: strive to profoundly and positively impact the entire storage industry with programs like Evergreen Storage
  3. Deliver the best customer experience: from simplicity to amazing support and everything in between – put the customer at the center of everything we do

It was super-gratifying this year to read Gartner’s assessment of Pure’s strengths, which I think you’ll see aligns with these core Pure strategies perfectly. I’ve illustrated each of these with a few recent customer quotes to give you a sense for how these strengths impact customers directly:

“Pure Storage demonstrates that it understands customer pain points through successful pricing and guarantee programs for controller upgrades, SSD warranties and maintenance pricing.”

Evergreen Storage in action!  Here’s what customers have to say:

  • “The forklift replacement model is no longer required; Pure provides new controllers every three years, ensuring the hardware is modern and up to date. This happens seamlessly and while online with zero down time. If things remain status quo, we’ll never have to replace a SAN again. This is a significant change to the legacy storage model.” — KordaMentha
  • “(Evergreen Storage) was a key component in our decision to go with Pure. After being used to storage replacement cycles of 4 or 5 years, we’re now looking at a lifecycle of 9 or 10 years. That’s a huge benefit for a non-profit.” — North Texas Food Bank

“Pure has shown that it can develop new products and has maintained its cadence of gaining mind share in the market by expanding solid-state array use cases.”

From four generations of FlashArray and Purity operating environment to now introducing FlashBlade, we’re doubling-down on product innovation, which enables customers to truly consolidate into an all-flash data center:

  • “We have been able to put so much more on the Pure FlashArray than we ever thought possible.” — Bend Memorial Clinic

“The vendor [Pure] has gained customer trust by demonstrating it is reliable, stable and easy to work with, and thus enjoys high levels of customer satisfaction.”

Nothing is more important to Pure than customer trust and satisfaction, and we look to demonstrate it every day in every department at Pure.  A few examples:

  • “We set the system up more than a year ago, and haven’t had to touch it once — no failed drives, no trouble tickets. It works flawlessly.” — Davenport University
  • “With Pure, the proactive support has been just mind-blowing compared to what we had before. They tell me about issues they saw and already have fixed even before I knew there was a problem. This is in contrast to support calls with other vendors in the past where I had to describe the problem time after time.” — Ohio National Financial Services

THANK YOU Gartner – and let’s keep raising the bar together!

To all the thousands of Pure customers worldwide – Thank You.  We do this for you, and we obviously couldn’t have done it without your trust in us and your partnership to help us constantly build better products and a better company.

The storage market is fiercely competitive, and that competition is a great thing for everyone.  So help us raise the bar for next year!  Keep the feedback flowing, we’re listening, and we’ll never stop innovating.