Pure Storage’s new VM Assessment will provide a “high value add” to partners looking to help customers reeling from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
That’s according to Geoff Greenlaw, VP Channel, EMEA & LatAm at the flash storage vendor.
The NASDAQ-listed outfit today unveiled a raft of updates to its platform, including not only the VM Assessment but also new ‘Universal Credits’ designed to allow customers to buy in bulk but in a flexible manner.
Broadcom bruhaha
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen at today’s Pure//Accelerate 2024 event in London, Greenlaw characterised the former as “really valuable to our partner ecosystem”.
At the recent Channel Chat Live event, Computacenter CEO Mike Norris said he “wasn’t surprised” by how Broadcom had treated the VMware channel, but was surprised by how it had treated end-user customers, saying they “haven’t been particularly pleasant to them either”. Rigby Group Co-CEO Steve Rigby called out Broadcom for its “aggressive financial engineering approach”.
“When I think about the anarchy the Broadcom acquisition has caused, customers don’t know what the future holds for VMware,” Greenlaw said, referencing the partner and customer fall out following the $69bn takeover.
“They’re asking questions about ‘do I stick with VMware? Do I move to the cloud? Do I move to Kubernetes? Do I move to public cloud’? All of those have licensing cost implications from Broadcom to our customers.
“What the VM Assessment tool does is provides a software application layer that will go out to the whole environment – and we’re the only vendor that can do this because we see the whole storage environment – and literally do an assessment based on set criteria, set questions around their VMware infrastructure.
“This will enable them to then potentially save on licensing costs with Broadcom to re-architect, reconfigure their storage environment to help support virtual machines.
“That’s a high value add for our partners because they can leverage this tool rather than hitting customers with a big invoice from Broadcom.”
Credit where it’s due
Universal Credits is designed to allow businesses to purchase a pool of credits and use them across various services without being locked into specific subscriptions, meanwhile.
“Basically what it means is customers can buy in batch block discount a set of credits that can be applied to Evergreen//One, to Cloud Block Store and to Portworx,” Greenlaw explained.
“Why’s that important? Because typically procurement like to negotiate larger volume transactions, but they may not know the future of what the IT department wants to do in three, six, 12 months’ time.
“It’s just more leverage for our partners to go and win more business in their customer base.”
Distribution deliberation
Although Pure’s goal is to become more relevant to a smaller number of distributors and partners, a recently commenced EMEA distribution review is unlikely to see it reduce its UK line-up, Greenlaw said.
“I don’t want to peanut butter spread business across EMEA. I really want us to be far more relevant to a set number of partners,” Greenlaw said.
“In tier-one countries, we will more than likely maintain consistency in the current base. We’re looking to consolidate in emerging markets, where we’ve got a much more fragmented approach.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
