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I’m thrilled to share that Pure Storage has been recognized as ‘Storage Vendor of the Year’ by Enterprise Channels MEA, one of the Middle East’s premier IT publications, at their annual GEC Awards gala held on October 03, 2017 in Dubai, UAE. This award validates our unwavering commitment to our growing customer base in the region which now includes several notable names, particularly in the insurance, banking, education and government sectors.  It also underscores our focus on innovation, demonstrated by the extension of our technology portfolio with FlashBlade™ – the company’s all-flash array built for high-performance unstructured data workloads, and FlashArray//X– the company’s first all-NVMe, enterprise-class, all-flash array for high performance structured data workloads. The award also highlights our strong support for the partner community through our recently revamped P3 program that focuses on building mutually beneficial relationships.

It isn’t surprising that Pure and the Middle East are a match made in storage heaven. According to data from our Evolution 2017 survey, 73 percent of businesses in the MEA region are committed to being information-based companies and as such are embracing flash storage. We see public, private and hybrid cloud, SaaS and traditional on-premises workloads are gaining momentum, and cloud confusion seems evident in workload fragmentation and cloud repatriation. In fact, 76 percent of businesses in the MEA region think that cloud and on-premise should complement one another rather than compete!

This is where I believe we have a competitive advantage – as businesses in the MEA region accelerate into the “cloud era”, we are committed to helping them gauge where they are in terms of balancing infrastructure and applications in their business and providing guidance on how they can future-proof their storage infrastructure to capitalize on opportunities offered by the cloud.

In fact, we will be using GITEX Technology Week as a platform to do just that! For those of you who are not familiar with GITEX, it is by far the largest technology focused tradeshow in the Middle East,  right up there with CeBIT and Mobile World Congress in terms of size as well as impact on its target audience. This year’s edition will be held at the Dubai World Trade Center from October 08-12 and we are extremely excited to showcase our all-flash data platform for the cloud era, powered by the combination of FlashArray//X, our first all-NVMe, enterprise-class, all-flash array for high performance structured data workloads and FlashBlade, our all-flash array built for high-performance unstructured data workloads. If you plan on attending the show, then be sure to stop by our booth (Hall 6, CLD-15) for a chat. You can even register for a meeting with one of our senior executives (including myself). All you have to do is register here.

Before I end, I would like to give a shout out to the Middle East team! We have made great strides in the region since we decided to enter the market in April 2015 with the opening of our regional headquarters in Dubai, UAE. In the past two and a half years, we have tripled our headcount, established a strong network of specialist distributors and partners across the region and have put our much larger and well-established legacy peers on notice that we are here to stay. These are extremely exciting times for us in the Middle East – the future is bright….ORANGE!