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In recent years, South Africa has emerged as an important market for Pure Storage. We’ve seen how ambitious and forward-looking the technology market is, recently recognised as being the most innovative country in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, over the past year we have worked hard to make great strides in boosting our presence in the country, helping our customers thrive and leverage their most important asset, their data.

Pure as a first-mover and innovator 

But how did we get here? Pure was founded on the desire to disrupt the storage industry and challenge the status quo with new ideas, something that has resonated with the South African market. Our combination of innovative technology, a revolutionary business model and a laser focus on customer success has allowed us to grow at a fast pace. We have always benefited from being a first-mover, through our pioneering use of 100 percent all-flash solutions, the introduction of our unique Evergreen business model, or how we are leading the way in emerging technology such as analytics and cloud. Pure’s cloud vision and strategy is enabling customers to benefit from a hybrid infrastructure that enables them to move mission-critical applications to and from the cloud with ease and agility. All of this has contributed towards a robust growth in South Africa, and we’re just getting started.

Local investment, expansion and giving back

To continue building on our success in the region, we have been investing heavily in our local team, increasing headcount in crucial areas. It’s important for us to have the right people in place to help South African innovation to build a better world with data. In addition to the increased headcount, we have opened new offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Finally, regardless of geography, Pure remains committed to a 100 percent channel business model. This is something we’re really proud of and have worked hard to form strong relationships with  resellers in the region, helping them bring best-in-class technologies to the businesses in the country.

Pure Good

Pure has also been hard at work giving back to the local community. Over the past three years, Pure’s foundation, Pure Good, has supported three projects with LEAP in South Africa, collectively bringing over 30 employees to work with local schools over a two-week period to provide a better technology infrastructure, and training for teachers, donating over 2,800 hours of time in the process. Pure employees have built strong relationships with teachers and students in the country, and along with upgrading technology at each site, we have worked to train teachers on software that engages students in the classroom and improves the technical skills needed in the 21st century.

Over the course of the project, Pure has donated several servers and a dozen storage drives, along with a grant through Team4Tech for equipment including multiple TV screens, desktop computers, tablets, portable projectors, cameras, monitors and virtual reality devices.

Industry recognition

We are excited to continue bringing leading-edge solutions to the market, enabling our customers to solve everyday technology challenges and achieve their business objectives. Testament to our focus on innovation, we were recognised by Gartner as a Leader in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. Earlier this year, we were also included in the 2019 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: Solid-State Arrays, with the highest overall rating of 4.9 out of 5 across 250 verified peer reviews and of those with a Customers’ Choice distinction, as of 31 October 2018, and had the highest number of reviews listed for the market.

Our technology is important to us of course, but this must go hand-in-hand with a customer-centric approach, where our technical expertise comes together with our local knowledge of the market. The hurdles faced by businesses in different countries can be stark or nuanced, affected by regulations, economic conditions and culture. In order to support our customers and guide them towards the technology and business decisions that will make the biggest impact, we have adopted a local mindset and invested accordingly. Over the years, Pure’s dedication to an exceptional customer experience has enabled us to establish a certified NPS customer satisfaction among the top one percent of B2B companies. We can’t wait to bring this level of customer centricity to even more businesses in South Africa as we grow and move forwards together.

Customer success, winning together

Our laser focus on delivering the best customer experience has led to some terrific wins in South Africa. Pure was chosen by leading retailer TFG to modernise its infrastructure, with the goal of delivering a better quality of experience to its customer base of digital-native shoppers. Nothing makes us happier than hearing how we have helped to empower over 23,000 TFG employees to build meaningful and lasting relationships with customers, and better manage stock levels for a more efficient business.

In addition to the retail segment, we have also been making waves in financial services with Investec Asset Management. The organisation chose Pure to increase performance as it moved away from its outdated, disk-based storage, and needed a simple solution that would support its growing virtual environment. Now employees have consistent, rapid access to the data they need to do their jobs at peak efficiency, while IT staff can turn their attention away from managing storage to more strategic initiatives.

This year marked Pure’s 10th anniversary as a company. In that time we disrupted the storage industry by creating solutions that are intelligent, automated, and modern. We delivered improvements in performance, the cost of operation, and usability. We have set a bold path for Pure for our second decade. Our goal is to take fragmented and antiquated data storage and recreate it into a unified, automated, multi-cloud data utility. 2019 has been a superb year for us globally and in South Africa, and we can’t wait to see what next year brings as we continue to develop and grow, with customers at the heart of our success.

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Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.