Pure Storage Scales Business in Benelux to Fuel Rapid Growth

As the Dutch market embraces Pure for its all-flash storage technology, company achieves new distribution, channel, and support infrastructure milestones to support customer and partner demand

Amsterdam, Netherlands - Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage array company, today announced it is bolstering its presence in the Dutch market to accelerate the extreme growth and continued momentum the company has experienced since expanding into EMEA nearly one year ago. Pure Storage has expanded the Pure Storage Partner Program (P3) to include more than 40 companies across Europe, supporting its aggressive partner-focused go-to-market plans.  Further, the company has experienced more than 100 percent sales growth in the region.

In Amsterdam speaking at a private event today, CEO Scott Dietzen said: “Flash has already superseded mechanical disk for consumers---flash is what powers the experience they are used to in smartphones, tablets, and leading web properties today. Pure Storage is accelerating this same transformation for the enterprise, by removing the remaining hurdles of cost and compatibility. Ultimately, $15B in global yearly spend will shift from disk arrays to all-flash storage. Not since the advent of virtualization has IT seen such technology sea change: as a solution Flash is 10X faster, 10X greener, 10X more reliable, and 10X simpler than the legacy spindles it's replacing, and yet costs less. Flash unlocks business value while saving money, for example, delivering VDI that's faster than a laptop plus local SSD or enabling dramatically more data for analytic processing. For these reasons and many more, businesses in the Netherlands are turning to Pure's all-flash storage to be more innovative for less.

Dietzen adds that in in 2013, Pure Storage opened offices across EMEA to meet the growing demand for all-flash below the price of disk, but it has been Pure’s partners in the region that have led the charge. "We are the fastest growing company in storage industry history thanks to the efforts of those partners."

According to Jan Houwers, CIO Anteagroup, who selected Pure Storage: “ Pure Storage has helped us achieve our mission to develop and create sustainable and integrated solutions in our IT environment. Not only did we decide to implement Pure for sustainability reasons, with an all-flash solution we are 10 times faster in processing data, and are also seeing significant increases in efficiency as well. Because of Pure Storage we are able to achieve our sustainability and performance goals – it is a win, win solution.”

IT Services Leader RAM Infotechnology is also a Pure customer. Wouter Levenback, CTO, RAM Infotechnology said: “As an ICT-company we need to store our data in the most efficient way, both in terms of cost and accessibility. Pure has enabled us to leverage an all-flash enterprise solution with a great price/quality ratio, so we can optimally serve our customers. Pure offers us a distinctive character in the Dutch ICT-outsourcing market. In addition, Pure has excellent customer service. It makes our lives so much easier.”

Now in its third generation release, Pure Storage’s flagship product FlashArray continues to deliver a ground-breaking storage experience designed to meet the rigorous resiliency, scalability, efficiency and performance requirements of enterprise clients in diverse markets, and for a variety of high performance workloads and applications, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), cloud computing, and database and server virtualisation. FlashArray was the industry’s first all-flash enterprise storage array to successfully drive the cost of flash memory below that of legacy spinning disk, delivering the innumerable benefits of all-flash at a price point the mainstream could afford.

Pure Storage partners closely with the channel, with 100 percent of the company’s business being channel led and almost half originating from partners, the Dutch market is no exception. According to Ruud Mulder, Lead Architect at Unisys, and a worldwide System Integrator in business-critical environments: “We are honored to be Pure Storage’s partner in the Dutch market. We are already working with clients to help them realise the enormous business impacts of all-flash memory, including cost and performance, and are finding that Pure Storage’s solution is very much changing legacy perceptions that exist in the market today about storage in general. We are looking forward to working together to bring more innovation based on Pure Storage, to the Netherlands!”

Enterprise IT Solutions, storage specialist and storage innovation expert, is SVAR partner of Pure. Willem Manteno, CEO Enterprise IT Solutions (EIS) says: “Pure Storage combines needs and knowledge to deliver a unique enterprise storage solution that provides customers with a solution that answers the issues of today and the future. Traditional resistance against flash has been overcome by Pure by answering complicated ICT storage issues with their solution. It is not only cost-efficient (Implementation- Management-Maintenance-Capacity-Simplicity) but also decreases the energy requirement by more than 50 percent. We are not only pleased and proud that we are a Pure partner in the Benelux market, but we also see that we have the ingredients to work together to make a complete change in the data storage market. This is only the beginning of the innovations that we see together with Pure.”

Globally, Pure Storage has attracted the industry’s most recognised talent to its ranks and the Dutch market is no exception. Earlier this year, Pure Storage announced that former Data Domain CEO and revered veteran of the enterprise data storage and software industries, Frank Slootman, joined its board of directors. John Silva, appointed in March 2013 to lead Pure Storage’s EMEA operations, together with Antonius “Ton” Welling, Pure Storage Benelux Sales Director, will be responsible for driving the continued growth of Pure Storage in the Dutch market as customers continue to transition from legacy mechanical disk to all-flash storage.

In August of 2013, Pure Storage announced a US$150 million funding round with top tier public market investors, marking the single largest private financing event in the history of the storage industry. Pure has raised US$245 million in capital to date and is currently pursuing aggressive international expansion into strategic, geographic markets across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and Asia-Pacific.