Pure Storage to divide and conquer with new distie plan

Pure Storage has revealed a new distributor program that will for the first time formally delegate which partners the vendor will manage itself, and which it will assign to distributors.

Pure’s director of global distribution Scott Goree told CRN that the partners the vendor manages itself will mostly be global system integrators and other similarly large resellers. Pure will appoint account managers for such partners. Pure’s managed partners will still transact through distributors.

Distributor-managed partners will probably be smaller, and may focus on fewer Pure products.

Migration between the two tiers is possible, but won’t happen often. Goree said assessments of which tier resellers belong in will happen annually and that moves “will not be a frequent occurrence.”  

Pure intends to build tools to help its distributors serve and enable distie-managed partners.

Those tools are currently a work in progress. Goree couldn’t specify what Pure will build or when it will arrive. He did say that Pure’s intention is to focus on capability-building tools, deal registration systems and systems that help distributors to hunt for business.

“We will co-design tools with distributors,” he said. “For now it starts with the co-investment and the definition of which partners we want them to manage.”

The storage vendor is also open to recruiting new resellers, especially those who already have relationships with key vendor partners like SAP, Cisco and NVIDIA.

This is new territory for Pure, but the company is not re-inventing the wheel. Goree filled a similar distribution role for Cisco and told CRN his remit at Pure is to be a champion for distribution within the company.

“Half of my time is in the field and the other half is at headquarters explaining distribution,” he said.

Vickie Madeleine, general manager of the Cisco and Pure Storage group at Dicker Data, welcomed the new program, saying they will "enable us to strengthen our operations and services. For example, as a Cisco distributor, there is a unique opportunity to build out FlashStack, in addition to cloud and AI solutions."