GITEX Global 2022: Pure Storage to Showcase How it Continues to Disrupt the Storage Industry

Omar Akar, the Regional Vice President for the Middle East and Emerging Africa at Pure Storage, says digitalisation has been underpinned by the flexibility and convenience of modern as-a-service offerings

Which products and solutions will you be showcasing at the event?
We will be participating at GITEX and visitors to the Pure Storage stand, located in Hall 7, Stand H7-G30, will have a chance to experience and interact with some of our latest solutions across three key themes:

1. As-a-service: In order to support regional enterprises as they embrace flexible, consumption-based operating models and invest in modern technologies and services that optimize for stronger value over time, Pure has advanced its unrivaled leadership in delivering Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) with updates to its Evergreen portfolio. This suite of products which includes Evergreen//Forever, Evergreen//Flex, and Evergreen//One prioritizes cost efficiencies, a longer, sustainable technology lifecycle, and modernization without disruption.
2. Infrastructure as code: As organizations modernize their infrastructure platforms and operations to support agility and accelerate innovation, there is a greater need to provide developers with the tools, interfaces, and APIs they need to control the infrastructure and services as well as the automation of operations, application and data management to maximize their productivity. By combining the simplicity of the cloud with on-demand consumption and back-end provisioning, Pure Fusion enables organizations to deliver a new scale-out storage model that unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly. Portworx Data Services (PDS), the industry’s first Database-as-a-Service platform for Kubernetes, enables developers to run heterogeneous data services from a single platform, on any cloud, and at a low cost.
3. Sustainability: Mitigating the environmental impact of data infrastructure is critical, as data workloads increase. Pure recognizes that building a sustainable model for the future now requires data storage that is engineered to require significantly lower power, lower cooling, and far less waste. With a portfolio that includes FlashArray, FlashBlade, and the Evergreen family, the company is leading the way in delivering solutions and services that allow customers to dramatically decrease their own environmental footprints. According to a recent product life cycle assessment (LCA) of its portfolio, specifically the FlashArray products, Pure Storage customers achieve up to 80% reduction in direct carbon usage by data systems compared to competitive products. In addition, the newly launched FlashBlade//S delivers double the density, performance, and power efficiency of the previous platform.

What are your expectations from the event this year?
As a mainstay at GITEX for the past seven years, Pure sees the exhibition as an unparalleled platform to engage with regional customers, prospects, and partners on two fronts. For one, it gives us an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of their challenges and growth opportunities. It also allows us to demonstrate how the innovations we have brought to market over the last 12 months can enable them to unleash innovation at scale.

Given the pivot, we are seeing in the region towards subscription-based consumption models, and a more sustainable approach to IT, we are particularly excited about the value proposition we are highlighting at this year’s edition of GITEX and we encourage visitors to stop by our stand.

What will be your theme of participation at GITEX?
The accelerated pace of digitalization in the Middle East has been underpinned by the flexibility and convenience of modern as-a-service offerings. The data storage industry, at large, however, has not matched this pace of innovation — legacy solutions remain complex, lack agility and flexibility, and aren’t innovative enough to meet the data requirements of modern businesses.

As such, our theme, or goal, for GITEX 2022 is to showcase how Pure Storage, with a design approach that is fundamentally rooted in simplicity and customer-centricity, continues to disrupt the storage industry with uncomplicated technology that enables business transformation in a sustainable and impactful manner.

How have your regional strategies changed in recent months?
We are constantly focused on improving our offerings for the benefit of our customers. In particular, we’ve looked at our go-to market strategy and our partner community. Our approach is 100% channel so partners are incredibly important to us. We are supporting customers as they enable digital transformation and embrace more energy-efficient infrastructure solutions.