Summary

Pure Storage setup our entire go-to-market model around an assumption of being 100% channel-focused.

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Today we’re happy to announce an update and expansion of our Pure Partner Program (P3, the Pure Storage channel partner program).  When we started Pure Storage, we committed ourselves to building the company through partnership – we had a fundamental belief that if we invested aggressively in partners, that investment would pay dividends and help us scale our business faster and support our joint customers better than we could on our own.

Well, one year in, P3 is off to a fast start, and we’re continuing to double-down on the channel by dramatically expanding the investment and benefits of P3.  Read on for a recap of how the first year has gone, and what we have in store for the new P3!

P3 – Recapping an Incredible Year of Partner Channel Growth

Pure Storage setup our entire go-to-market model around an assumption of being 100% channel-focused.  We’ve built a large, aggressive, and highly-trained direct sales and SE force of technical evangelists for the Pure technology, but that sales force is instructed and incentivized to work all business jointly with channel partners.  In our very early days (alpha and beta program) we worked directly with customers, but as we launched our P3 channel program last year, our immediate call to arms was to transition all our customer relationships to be serviced jointly with channel partners.  What does that mean in numbers?  Here’s a look at our first 4 quarters with P3:

Partner

As you can see, in a short year we’ve transitioned our business from 50% through the channel to 95% through the channel, and more importantly, our “Channel Led” business (i.e. deals that were found by the Channel and brought to Pure) has increased 4X over that time.

We’ve also on-boarded a fantastic set of partners over the past year, achieving 30% consecutive QoQ growth in total:

Partner Onboarding

This last statistic we share a bit carefully, as our goal isn’t to have have a ton of partners – some of our competitors have signed over a thousand, but not us.  We are being careful not to over-distribute, and P3 is designed to reward a select set of experienced partners for leading with Pure Storage solutions and investing in sales and technical accreditations, marketing programs and for delivering value add services such as installation, configuration and deployment services to Pure Storage customers. In return for leading with Pure Storage solutions, partners are brought in to help deliver implementations on all deals sourced by Pure Storage.  We believe this reciprocal style relationship has generously contributed to the rapid growth in channel sourced business!

Launching a Global Partner Advisory Council

Part of being a great partner is listening.  We want to understand what makes our partners’ businesses tick, and make the right investments in P3 accelerate our businesses together.  In this spirit, we’ve created a global Partner Advisory Council (PAC), a group of leading WW partners who will meet regularly to advise us on how to accelerate our lead as the most channel-friendly storage company:

Partner

We’re excited to announce that the inaugural members of the Pure Storage PAC are Applied Computer Systems (ACS), Ahead, AntemetA, CloudGov Technologies, Corus360, Dewpoint, ePlus, Integrated Archive Systems, Integrated Data Storage, Iron Bow, and Softcat.  We appreciate the investment that all these partners have made in Pure Storage, and their coming investment in being active members of the PAC.  Thanks, and we’re listening!!!

The Next Generation of P3: More Investment, More Training, More Rewards

We’ve made substantial improvements to the P3 program which will help accelerate our joint success with partners.  First, we’ve implemented both Silver and Gold partner tiers, allowing partners to earn greater benefits as they achieve sales and technical accreditations,  participate in demand generation marketing programs and deliver pre and post sales customer value-add services.  Second, we’ve introduced the PureRewards program, enabling partners with rewards such as deeper discounts, competitive deal margin guarantees, MDF, and demo hardware.  Third, we’ve launched a completely online PureAcademy, a comprehensive partner on-boarding and learning system enabling partners to start quickly with Pure, and expand their Pure-trained personnel easily.  And finally, we’ve launched PureDemand, a suite of fully-funded online and offline demand generation tools, allowing partners to syndicate content, create co-branded emails and marketing campaigns, and drive cooperative call blitzes and appointment programs.  These enhancements are all geared towards shortening the time to success, and enabling partners to focus on building their business with Pure.

Are You Ready to Make the Transition?

To our existing partners – THANK YOU.  We could have never accomplished this incredible year of growth without you.  And to those partners out there who are stuck on disk and thinking about jumping into the world of flash – we’d love to have you on board.  Drop us a line, and we can explore if partnership makes sense!