Pure//Accelerate 2025 Reflections: Simplifying Data Storage is Pure Storage’s Calling Card, Say Analysts

PURE//ACCELERATE 2025, Las Vegas – Enterprise data storage may not have the cachet of booming tech categories like AI, cloud computing, or cybersecurity, but it remains a critical backbone for businesses of all sizes.

That quiet importance has long shaped the work of storage vendors like Pure Storage, said Henry Baltazar, a research director and analyst at 451 Research, speaking with ChannelE2E at Pure’s annual Pure//Accelerate 2025 conference.

“Chances are that [customers] are not going to be excited about storage,” said Baltazar. “They just want to get their stuff done. They do not really care how they get it done.”

But for MSPs and enterprise customers, that could be changing, according to Baltazar, who shared his insights after hearing Pure’s announcements at the conference about its all-new Enterprise Data Cloud and about its faster and more powerful Pure flash storage arrays for businesses.

For enterprises, even though storage is not very sexy, they must have a clear strategy to handle all the data that they produce every day, he said. And as these businesses look over the storage vendor landscape, there is a lot to process in choosing the right choices for their operations, he said.

“The thing is you are dealing with storage companies that have been around for decades … and unfortunately, they are all going to have baggage,” including storage offerings that came together through long lines of company acquisitions and mergers that then had to be squashed together to fit into their product lines, said Baltazar.

At Pure Storage, however, that is not the company’s approach, he said. “They did not build out that way, because they started out with flash array, and then even flash blade was built through internal development. And they were able to share some technologies like [relational database] Key-value stores and whatnot. They are making the point that it is easier for them to simplify the bottom layer.”

The Enterprise Data Cloud as a Foundation for the Future

The most important announcement by Pure at the conference to Baltazar was the launch of its new Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC), which he said will be the foundation for what the company does in the future to help MSPs and their customers with their storage needs. Pure’s EDC introduces a unified, intelligent control plane that spans on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments and moves enterprises away from balky and slow individual data silos toward centralized, policy-driven data governance and automation across a company’s global infrastructure.

Baltazar said that he likes Pure’s approach of storage made simpler. “They took some of the existing technologies and capabilities, and kind of wrapped it together with some of the newer things, like the Pure Co-pilot [AI-powered] stuff, to try to put it into a better context as to why this is important for customers.”

Ultimately, customers just want their data storage to work and serve a business well, he said. “I think that is what Pure is getting at here.”

Pure only sells through MSPs and the channel and does not offer its products and services directly to business customers.

Another analyst at the conference, Scott Sinclair, an infrastructure, cloud, DevOps, and networking analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, concurred that he likes Pure’s approach for MSPs and customers with its latest innovations.

“Pure Storage’s calling card continues to be its ability to radically simplify enterprise data storage environments,” Sinclair told ChannelE2E. “Given the added pressure to accelerate operations and for admins to assume new responsibilities, Pure’s efforts to automate storage tasks at scale, a key element of its enterprise data cloud strategy, provide significant advantages to IT operations.”

And for slammed enterprise IT departments, this is good news, he said. “At the end of the day it is about automating storage at scale. For larger data storage environments whether at enterprises or for MSPs, Pure’s integration of an intelligent control plane allows for storage decisions to be defined by policy and applied to a fleet of systems with automatic provisioning and load balancing. The result allows organizations to scale their environment while minimizing the administrative load.”

One of the big benefits for enterprise customers and MSPs is that Pure’s approach to storage can bring needed changes to their old ways of doing things, said Sinclair.

“Too often storage buyers stay rooted in their investment decisions of the past,” he said. “Pure’s innovations, which have greatly reduced the cost of flash storage, along with Pure Storage’s Evergreen//One on premises storage as-a-service, are delivering some impressive transformational benefits to users and are worth a look.”