Continued investment in products, design and innovation would continue to help Pure Storage grow in the Asia Pacific region said Michael Alp, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan said during and interview on the sideline of Pure Accclerate 2017 in San Francisco.
Alp added that taking the Flash Storage company public in late 2015 has helped raise awareness among customers of the company the amount they invest in keeping the company moving forward. “While our first mover advantage may not be as large as before with increased competition, We are more transparent and this makes it easier for the market to see how much is spent on engineering and innovation,” Alp said.
And there is still room to grow in the region. According to Alp, while there are some markets like Australia and New Zealand where almost 25% of the market was already runnign all flash data centers, the region still had a lot growth in markets like Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
In fact the region is one of Pure Storage’s fastest growing regions Alp said. Though unable to give actual numbers, Alp said that in Q1FY18 the company’s total revenue was US$183M, up 31% year on year. Of that, 20% is from international (outside of North America) and APAC grew even faster than that, Alp added.
Driving growth has been a number of factors like the traditional infrasturcture where Alp said that despite a possible higher initial outlay, decreases in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) made the choice of all flash storage arrays the only real choice.
Alp said that another reason was the adoption of new technologies like Big Data, heavy database loads and technologies like SAP HANA where the effectiveness and speed of Flash made it the faster and more reliable option.
On whether the company was looking at hardware or software as a key driver for the company, Alp said that software had always played a part for Pure Storage and the importance would continue to grow, especially with the new announcements at Pure Acclerate 2017. “Software will always be more important but the hardware would always be there as well,” he said.
While the market was seeing some consolidation with the merger of Dell and EMC into Dell EMC and HPE’s acquisitions of Simplivity and Nimble Storage Alp said that there was little impact on Pure’s operations as there wasn’t as much overlap on markets and potential customers.
Regionally, customers include the likes of:
- KordaMentha (ANZ)
- Coventry (ANZ)
- Optus Business (ANZ)
- Samsung (Korea)
- SK Hynix (Korea)
- Fujitsu Cloud Technologies (Japan)
- Softbank (Japan)
- Compal (Taiwan)