All-flash provider Pure Storage is gaining revenue and channel partner momentum, CEO Charles Giancarlo and President Dave Hatfield asserted Tuesday. Without mentioning rivals by name, the executives also alleged that its largest competitors are taking business direct. Next up, Pure is acquiring StorReduce for cloud-first software-defined storage technology,
First, the big picture: Pure Storage's Q2 2019 revenue rose 37 percent to $308.9 million vs. Q2 2018, the company said. Despite a $60.1 million net loss, non-GAAP results beat Wall Street's expectations, according to SeekingAlpha.
Pure Storage Channel Strategy: Winning Deals
Throughout an earnings call on Tuesday, Giancarlo and Hatfield praised Pure Storage's new channel partner program and the resulting partner-generated revenues.
"Our channel centric go-to-market strategy to take unique capabilities to market is working, especially when we see our largest competitors taking more business direct," said Hatfield. "The new partner program that we unveiled at our Accelerate Conference last quarter has been well received and is showing quick results, particularly within our largest national partners."
Pure Storage added nearly 400 new customers during the quarter, and the company's total customer base now exceeds 5,100 organizations. "Win rates remain very strong across the board,"Hatfield said. "And along with our industry-leading gross margins, it showcases that our sales teams and partners are consistently able to quantify our unique value."
Meanwhile, Pure Storage's recent channel investments should pay even more dividends down the road, Giancarlo asserted. "A lot of the investments that we make upfront take some time to come through, " he said. "And so we’re seeing the benefits of some of that and candidly we’re doubling down. I think our competitors in the market are going to feel us in the second half as we invest in our channel partnerships, invest in market awareness and invest in additional capacity. So we're really excited and motivated about the second half."
Pure Storage Acquires StorReduce
Meanwhile, Pure Storage acquired StorReduce, a cloud-first software-defined storage solution for managing large scale unstructured data. Financial terms were not disclosed.
It sounds like StorReduce CEO Vanessa Wilson is joining Pure as part of the deal, though her new title was not revealed.
Describing the deal's potential benefits, Wilson said: "With the combination of StorReduce's data reduction capabilities and Pure's flash and object storage technologies, we can now optimize many modern cloud-native applications as well as many existing unstructured data workloads, in particular rapid recovery, at a faster rate."
Moreover, the acquisition "allows Pure Storage to add sophisticated deduplication technology to its object storage portfolio and expand its public cloud integrations to meet the growing demand to manage unstructured data in multi-cloud environments," the companies said.
