Everpure’s partners “got” its recent rebrand, its new EMEA channel boss claimed as he revealed the “very simple question” he wants all his team to be able to answer.
The newly renamed storage and data management vendor last month unveiled 10-year company veteran Craig Robertson as Head of Partners in EMEA & LatAm.
In his first two months in the hotseat, Robertson said he’d focused on bringing “that extra level of clarity and focus on execution” when it comes to Everpure’s partner strategy.
“There’s a very, very simple question I want all my team to be able to answer, which is why are we partnering with them,” he said.
“We should be doing it because we’ve all got limited time and resource – and that goes both ways.”
“It was like trying to sell an Audi and saying, ‘I’m calling from BMW'”
Everpure rebranded from Pure Storage in March as it announced its acquisition of New York-based data intelligence and orchestration vendor 1touch.
The Santa Clara-based outfit’s efforts to move beyond its flash storage roots meant that “the personas we were asking our partners to go and talk to on our behalf have changed”, Robertson said.
Despite this, partners targeting Chief Data Officers and CSOs were finding themselves being redirected back to infrastructure teams purely because of its ‘Pure Storage’ moniker2, Robertson claimed.
“It’s like trying to sell an Audi and saying, ‘I’m calling from BMW’,” he said.
“Partners understood – the overarching emotion was one of understanding.
“Yeah, of course you got the odd WhatsApp, which is always entertaining, but the main one was, ‘yeah, we get it’.”
Everpure was recently named a ‘Leader’ in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, with its dot positioned highest and furthest right of all the vendors.
Asked about Everpure’s USP, Robertson claimed it is “uniquely positioned” to help its partners answer the questions they are getting around data, and where it is stored.
“We’re seeing more regulations coming in, and more fear around sovereignty,” he said.
“Data’s been put in a cupboard; now it’s completely shifted on its head, and I think we’re at the forefront of having some of the answers to that conversation.”
Robertson said his “priority one” is to “be in region”.
“The thing we’ve asked our partners to go and do at Partner Forum is to lead that conversation with customers to solve the challenge of sovereignty and resiliency, and to do that by looking at the data layer,” he added.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
