Michael Sotnick and Alex Hesterberg have joined the Pure Storage team, with the appointments announced in conjunction with the launch of the company’s new partner centric Customer Success organisation.
20-year channel veteran Michael Sotnick joins Pure Storage as Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances, moving from his previous role as EVP and Channel Chief at Moovweb and Quest Software, respectively, until the latter’s acquisition by Dell.
Alex Hesterberg, formerly of Riverbed and Symantec, joins as Vice President, Customer and Partner Success and Technology Services. He joins from Sailthru where he built and scaled Customer Success.
Sotnick’s new global role for Pure will focus on extending Pure’s velocity in the market with existing and new partners across the GSI, ISV, OEM, VAR and Distribution ecosystem. He will do this while ensuring cross-functional business alignment within the company.
Additional responsibilities include the establishment of a set of global best practices, in addition to focusing on strategic alliances that enable partner’s success.
"Since inception, Pure Storage has been laser-focused on building a high-performing and differentiated channel program, while enroute to becoming the next great storage company. Pure is both a pioneer and market leader in this space," said Michael Sotnick, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances, Pure Storage.
"Pure Storage is the only top-to-bottom channel focused company in the storage industry creating enormous opportunity for partners to upgrade their customer’s existing Tier-1 disk environments to all flash. The team has built a world class program to help partners maximise value for their clients and I am excited to further strengthen and extend these important and strategic relationships."
Pure Storage also announced the launch of the Pure Customer and Partner Success Organisation, which under Alex Hesterberg’s leadership, will develop and scale the Advisory, Enablement and Education functions of Pure.
This development aims to help partners accelerate the adoption and integration of Pure into larger and more complex environments worldwide.
Service offerings, tools and methodologies will be made available to partners, enabling them to serve as even greater strategic advisors to customers migrating to a 100 percent solid-state data centre.
The Pure Customer and Partner Success Organisation will house a network of technologists and trained experts who will define and share architectural recommendations, advanced implementation guidance, templates and third party integration methodologies, which partners can deploy and monetise within their own services organisations.
"Simplicity and ease of use are the foundation of the company we’re building and the products we deliver. It is not in our DNA to offer solutions so complex that customers would need to pay experts exorbitant sums of money to simply install and configure," said Hesterberg.
"That said, and similar to the transition from on premise software to the cloud/SaaS delivery model, our customers expect Pure and its partners to offer high-value services to maximise the benefits of solid state. We have gathered key learnings from customer engagements and woven them into strategies our team will use to drive velocity and facilitate the sharing of best practices with our partners.
"Our Enablement, Advisory, and Education functions, combined with the experience of our technical experts, provide the backbone of a rich services ecosystem that partners can leverage to more effectively serve the market."
