Pure Storage Grew Bookings in EMEA by 300% Year to Date

Pure Storage, Inc. announced another year of growth in EMEA.

Among its achievements in 2014, Pure Storage grew bookings in EMEA by more than 300% year to date.

“We set and achieved extremely ambitious goals worldwide, and 2014 cemented our ambition for and commitment to accelerating growth through 2015 and beyond,” said David Hatfield, president, Pure Storage. “The transformative business benefits that the Pure FlashArray delivers in the enterprise are now crystal clear, and this, combined with an incredibly talented team worldwide, is at the heart of Pure Storage’s success this past year.”

In the past year, Pure Storage in EMEA business has:

Grown bookings by more than 300% year to date and increased its customer base in the region by 2.5x;
Expanded teams into 8+ countries with plans for further expansion, bringing the total number of countries Pure has presence in to 12;
Grown the number of employees in the EMEA organisation by more than 300%;
Increased the number of business partners in the Pure Storage P3 partner program to more than 150: a selection of these partners include Computacenter, Concat, Dimension Data, Kelway, SCC, Softcat, Data Sciences, Omega, Poland Global Distribution, Proact, Prolink, Ricoh, Quorum and Wise.

“The channel ecosystem is vital to our success and this year we have focused on building strong relationships with the best integrators and VARs across the region,” said Hatfield. “We’re incredibly excited by the response we’ve received from the channel. In our view it is a seal of approval for the transformational business benefits of enterprise flash; it also adds scope, reach and trusting relationships that are key to our success and the success of our customers.”

Pure Storage increased the number of its strategic customer relationships in EMEA in 2014, culminating in several 6 figure deals and at least one 8 figure deal, with the addition of companies in the following verticals to its customer portfolio:

Investment Banking and Financial Services
High Tech, Including Software and SaaS businesses
Oil and Gas
Government
Education, including leading Local Schools and Universities
Healthcare
Telecommunications and Internet Hosting
Retail

Leading European retailers in Europe such as Picard and fashion store Kiabi, are using Pure Storage to accelerate their business. In the UK, Pure Storage has enabled UK gaming marketplace Betfair, financial newswire MergerMarket and one of the largest investment banks to deliver lower TCO, better employee productivity and better customer service.

The applications for Pure’s arrays are widespread: small, medium and large multinational businesses; governments, hospitals, schools and nonprofits all benefit simplicity, reliability, performance and affordability. All-flash storage is applicable to nearly any use case (including databases, smaller VDI deployments, and remote and branch offices) and is accessible to organisations suffering from slow and expensive mechanical disk.

Doubling Down on Executive Leadership to Drive Growth
In an effort to continue building momentum for the business in EMEA, Pure Storage has hired EMEA VP James Petter and EMEA CTO, Alex McMullan.

James Petter joins Pure after over a decade at EMC, most recently as SVP, UK and Ireland and prior to that, he led the team that managed the most strategic global accounts across all of Europe. He will lead Pure Storage EMEA through its next phase of business growth. His experience includes four years of sales leadership at Cisco Systems, as well as stints at Telstra and Coca-Cola. A graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he also served as an officer in the 2nd Roy, Green Jackets for six years. He also holds a BSc from the University of Surrey and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management Studies from Bristol University and is fluent in both French and Spanish.

Alex McMullan took the reigns as EMEA CTO in July 2014, joining from Barclays Capital, where he was responsible for managing the bank’s distributed computing infrastructure. Before this, he worked at UBS Investment Bank, company-I, Computer Associates (where he helped write the RDBMS engine for Ingres) and British Aerospace. In his current role at Pure, he applies his end user executive perspective to serve as both an advisor and technology evangelist, helping companies along their journey to business transformation with all flash.

“We’ve met or exceeded every milestone we set out for ourselves in EMEA in 2014, helping to lay the groundwork for the exciting road ahead in 2015. We’ve scaled the team, built a venerable customer roster, and expanded our presence from Sweden to South Africa, both with our own employees and a steadily-growing roster of business partners,” said Hatfield. “We look forward to having more customers and partners across EMEA and around the world join us in leading the industry transition from legacy mechanical to 100% solid-state storage.“