Collingwood Football Club deploys Pure Storage systems to give its team a competitive edge on and off the field

Sydney, Australia — 22nd August 2017  — Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG), the market’s leading independent all-flash data platform vendor for the cloud era, today announced that Australia’s largest Australian Football League (AFL) club, Collingwood Football Club (FC), has deployed its data platform to put the club’s data to work, on and off the field.

Collingwood FC is using Pure Storage’s FlashArray//M system, in a VMware vSphere environment, to deliver high-performance intelligence by analysing big data loads collected around player fitness and performance. Today, the club is able to analyse player information provided by its analytics partner, Champion Data, in real time to aid the coach’s decision making.

Using on field sensors, the team monitors everything from kick, marks and handballs, to scoring sources for each team on the field; analysing and mapping the best passage of play for a game win on the day. Additionally, after every match, Collingwood FC is able to quickly create custom reports for each area coach for player performance improvement and outlining the game plan for the next game.

“We needed a system that is both robust from a reliability standpoint and flexible, so that we can scale as we grow. Pure Storage ticked all our boxes, offering the best performance and capacity to enable greater productivity across every aspect of our business,” said Marcus Wagner, Football Operations Manager at Collingwood FC.

“More important is the fact that Pure’s solution is almost maintenance-free from a system administration perspective, allowing us to focus our time and efforts on the field.”

Before deploying FlashArray//M, Collingwood FC had to prune data it wished to keep online, due to the low capacity of its legacy system. Pure Storage eliminated this barrier thanks to its best in class data reduction capabilities, allowing the company’s databases and web applications to work more quickly and efficiently.

Mike Sakalas, Regional Vice President, Pure Storage Australia and New Zealand, said: “In the business of sport, speed is everything. As sensors tracking everything from player fitness to field quality become the norm, sporting clubs are challenged with processing large data sets in short timeframes. It’s great to see elite clubs like Collingwood FC recognising the need to adapt its technology to suit.

“Working with numerous sports brands including Collingwood FC and Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One, the team at Pure Storage is particularly passionate about providing clubs and sporting teams with a competitive advantage. We look forward to continuing to work closely with Collingwood FC here in Australia to deliver business success and help move them to the top of the ladder.”

Pure Storage partnered with Platinum Partner Harbour IT, a market leader in cloud and managed services, to deploy its data platform for Collingwood FC.

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG) helps companies push the boundaries of what’s possible. Pure's end-to-end data platform - including FlashArray, FlashBlade and our converged offering with Cisco, FlashStack – is powered by innovative software that’s cloud-connected for management from anywhere on a mobile device and supported by the Evergreen business model. The company’s all-flash based technology, combined with its customer-friendly business model, drives business and IT transformation with solutions that are effortless, efficient and evergreen. With Pure's industry leading Satmetrix-certified NPS score of 83.7, Pure customers are some of the happiest in the world, and include organisations of all sizes, across an ever-expanding range of industries.

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Media Contacts:

Xin Chai

Pure Storage

xchai@purestorage.com

Dom Koudisi

Sling & Stone

dom@slingstone.com