Michael Sotnick VP Global Channels and Alliances, Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. added two channel veterans to its leadership team, as well as the launch of the company’s new partner centric Customer Success organization.

A 20-year channel veteran, Michael Sotnick, joins Pure Storage as VP of global channels and alliances, while Alex Hesterberg, formerly of Riverbed and Symantec, joins as VP, customer and artner success and technology services.

 In his new role, Michael Sotnick will focus on extending Pure’s velocity in the market with existing and new partners across the GSI, ISV, OEM, VAR and distribution ecosystem while ensuring cross-functional business alignment within the company. Further, the team will establish global best practices and focus on strategic alliances that enable partner’s success. Prior to Pure Storage, he was an EVP and channel chief at Moovweb and Quest Software, respectively, until the latter’s acquisition by Dell. An industry veteran, he also held various leadership roles at SAP and Veritas, where he led the integration and growth of the global partner network, including systems integrators, ISVs, OEM, VARs, and distributors for a company that grew to $1.5 billion in revenues, before being acquired by Symantec. He is a graduate of the University of Hartford in Connecticut.

“Since inception, Pure Storage has been laser-focused on building a high-performing and differentiated channel program, while enroute to becoming the next great storage company. Pure is both a pioneer and market leader in this space,” said Sotnick. “Pure Storage is the only top-to-bottom channel focused company in the storage industry creating enormous opportunity for partners to upgrade their customer’s existing tier-1 disk environments to all flash. The team has built a world class program to help partners maximize value for their clients and I am excited to further strengthen and extend these important and strategic relationships.“

New Investments in Customer and Partner Success
Pure Storage also announced the launch of the Pure Customer and Partner Success Organization, which under Hesterberg’s leadership, will develop and scale the advisory, enablement and education functions of Pure to help partners accelerate the adoption and integration of Pure into larger and more complex environments worldwide.

The functions make services offerings, tools and methodologies available to partners, enabling them to serve as greater strategic advisors to customers migrating to a 100% solid-state data center.

The Pure Customer and Partner Success Organization will house a network of technologists and trained experts who will define and share architectural recommendations, implementation guidance, templates and third party integration methodologies, which partners can deploy and monetize within their own services organizations. These experts and technologists include application and database solution architects, technical account managers, program managers, designated support engineers, certified technical trainers, project managers, integration consultants and other functions as the program expands. The program is an investment Pure Storage is making in its partners to ensure they are well positioned to help customers realize the benefits of IT and business transformation, as a result of deploying all-flash storage.

“Simplicity and ease of use are the foundation of the company we’re building and the products we deliver. It is not in our DNA to offer solutions so complex that customers would need to pay experts exorbitant sums of money to simply install and configure,” said Hesterberg. “That said: and similar to the transition from on premise software to the cloud/SaaS delivery model, our customers expect Pure and its partners to offer high-value services to maximize the benefits of solid state. We have gathered key learnings from customer engagements and woven them into strategies our team will use to drive velocity and facilitate the sharing of best practices with our partners. Our enablement, advisory, and education functions, combined with the experience of our technical experts, provide the backbone of a rich services ecosystem that partners can leverage to more effectively serve the market.”

Before joining Pure Storage, Alex Hesterberg built and scaled customer success at Sailthru, Inc. He also launched the Riverbed professional Services organization, the global enablement division of Riverbed Technology through the company’s seven years of growth to greater than $1 billion in revenues. He started his career as a project manager and database administrator at Computer Sciences.

Pure Storage Leans on Channel for Next Phase of Growth
In addition to the new channel leadership and partner enablement efforts Pure Storage announced, the company is also implementing:

• A Two Tier Pan-Regional Distribution Model: Pure will implement a dual distribution model in all international markets – composed of two distributors per country, one local based and one pan-regional distributor. Adding a regional distribution tier in international markets will broaden access to new markets for Pure and partners through the channel, at scale. The scope of services provided by Pure Storage distributors will vary but include basic ‘broadline’ distribution services, value-added services, and incremental services such as deal registration, and proof-of-concept management.
• An Expanded Technology Alliance Ecosystem for Increased Partner Enablement: Pure is bolstering its technology alliance ecosystem by deepening partnerships with key application and infrastructure vendors such as Cisco, SAP, Citrix, Epic, Microsoft, Oracle, RedHat and VMWare and extending our reach with best of breed emerging technology alliances such as VMTurbo, Unidesk, NVIDIA, Arista Networks, MongoDB, CommVault, Veeam, and others, in order to integrate their offerings with the Pure Storage platform and deliver a variety of application-specific and vertically optimized solutions. Partners can deliver, support and build services practices on top of these solutions. For example, FlashStack CI – built with combined technology from Pure Storage, VMware and Cisco – is a flexible, all-flash converged infrastructure solution that combines compute, network, storage hardware and virtualization software, into a single, integrated architecture that speeds time to deployment, lowers overall IT costs and reduces deployment risk flashStack CI solutions are delivered and supported by Pure Storage FlashStack Authorized Support Partners (ASP) flashStack ASPs are trained and fully certified to sell and support Cisco, VMware and Pure Storage technologies, ensuring they can offer unified Level 1 and Level 2 support, for a seamless and highly personalized customer experience. Customers benefit from customized turnkey solutions, services and support from their preferred providers.
• Investments in Global Systems Integrators to Accelerate Growth Into the Enterprise: Creating more value-based partnerships with global systems integrators (GSI) and systems integrators (SI) will pave the way for Pure Storage and the broader channel ecosystem to tackle some of the most vexing infrastructure challenges facing the enterprise. GSIs and SIs provide new avenues to market, which offer partners increased opportunities to design and deliver transformational end-to-end application and infrastructure projects for customers.