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25:24 Video

Uncomplicated Customer Experience with Professional Services

Tom and his co-presenter will dive deep on how Professional Services has evolved the way we deliver these services with quick starts, centers of excellence, workshops, and premium support to enable customers to get to value quickly.
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00:01
Mm Hi and welcome to modernizing I. T. And data services with professional services. In today's session we're going to discuss some of the typical challenges that we see in today's data and storage environments. More specifically, we're gonna show you how professional services from Pure and from our partners can help you
00:26
meet some of those challenges. I'm Sonya and I'm joined today here by my colleague Nick we both represent professional services. I support ps business globally while Nick here leads our delivery team in EMEA Hynek. Hi Cassina, glad to join you.
00:44
So nick, we know that Pure storage makes data storage uncomplicated and cost effective. Our technology is easy to buy, easy to implement and upgrade its simple but I do still hear a question if Pure is so simple, why do I need professional services? How would you address that? Yes. So that's the question. I definitely here too and it's a fair one. Pure is uncomplicated customers that have
01:14
implemented Pure say that we live up to our promise of simplicity and many of our customers take a do it yourself approach to deployment and management with great success. But the fact of the matter is whilst Pure and our products are simple and easy to operate real world. It environments are complex and this is where professional services can help by offering skills and resources to solve our customers
01:36
common problems and challenges. Alright, well this is a good way to explain it and our boss sometimes calls it the hairball problem he does and it can be a herbal problem, complicated, rigid and costly. I've seen it firsthand. So in a prior role, I managed operations for a large storage infrastructure and investment bank in europe.
02:01
When we evaluated pure as a technology, we were astonished at how easy it was to administer and deploy and it was clear right away the reduction of effort we were going to experience by replacing our previous provider with pure storage. In fact actually so impressed. Were we in the technology that five years on today, the lead storage engineer, lead application engineer and myself all sort
02:24
employment with Pure. So we could be part of the revolution. I think that's besides the point. The point here is that regardless how simple the product the process these companies have to go through to operationalize any new technology into a production data center is anything but simple. The best case, time to value in my previous role for a new asset into the production data
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center was six months, sometimes 12 months or more. We were weighed down with design testing, documentation, governance, security, cropped control and you know, a lack of resources due to our primary focus of keeping the lights on but I'm definitely getting ahead of myself here is this is something we're going to explore in more detail later.
03:07
Mm Well, nick, I'm excited to see how professional services would help with that. So what are so some of those common as we call hairball problems that we're talking about here. Okay so let's be honest, there are hair balls all over the place but we're going to focus on three core strategies that present themselves as hairballs to I. T. Managers out there in the industry today.
03:29
The first is modernizing infrastructure, the second is modernizing operations and the third will be modernizing applications. I'd like to take a deeper look at the challenges in each of these areas and explore the ways that professional services can help cut through the jargon. We've actually asked some of our colleagues to help us recreate some of the discussions that
03:50
they hear from typical I. T. And storage managers out there in their day to day jobs today. But first I'd like to welcome Nick Williams who joins me to reenact a discussion I'm regularly having with my customers about modernizing infrastructure. One of the biggest challenges we face is an enterprise organization with a large and ever
04:12
expanding technology. Landscape is the constant need to modernize and refresh legacy and aging infrastructure is still a huge burden on our resources which would be better used, focusing on innovation and growth. How can pure help us get out of this cycle next Well nick, I hope you've come to the right place. Pure. We understand that in today's fast moving and
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complicated technology landscape customers are constantly having to transform and modernize to keep up with their competition. Technology has become less about products and it's more about services and solutions with inbuilt mobility, flexibility and performance so to support this up your professional services, we built a comprehensive services portfolio focused on modernizing legacy
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infrastructure, accelerating your time to value and maximizing return on investment. Sounds good nick but I hear that from everything. What are you offering that your competitors are Well plenty Nick but most notably something called Evergreen which revolutionized the storage industry 10 years ago and still has our competitors scrambling to try and compete today for decades,
05:20
customers have been stuck in a constant technology refresh cycle. But pure put an end to that with Evergreen by you know, it was enabled by products that allow non disruptive upgrades between every generation of our product families. We call Evergreen our subscription to innovation as we have built in compatibility
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with future tech in our products and it doesn't just include hardware as every software update or feature Pure releases is included. That does sound good. Nick subscription to innovation is a cool strap line but I've still got to transform my current estate onto Pure haven't I? If people can't help us avoid that.
05:59
Yes, nick So that's somewhat true companies that are in your predicament have one last stories transformation to do to harness the power of Pure and this is where pure professional services can really help our focus is on making that process as easy and as painless as possible for you. We have a suite of services that can help our customers transform onto a pure solution
06:19
quickly and efficiently. We accelerate the transformation process with proven skills and process and as a result reduce our customers technology spend come on nick. I need specifics please. Okay, okay. So primarily we can offer comprehensive discovery and assessment services of your
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current environment resulting in recommendations of how your environment can be optimized for efficiency, performance, mobility and stability. Our objective is to advise how your environment could be modernized, irrespective of the underlying technology. And then we show how pure technology could enable your modern architecture.
06:56
We could also then use this information to support comprehensive solution, designs and migration plants. Our team of experienced architects can help you design, engineer and production is your new solution efficiently as well as building rock solid business continuity solutions. However simple. The product bringing a new technology into a
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production data center is fraught with risk and uncertainty and we offered to take some of that pain on your behalf, ensure our engineering groups would appreciate that. But in reality we have our own processes for new technology deployment, so I'm not sure how much effort you to actually be able to save them. Well actually nick, we understand that every company is different and our services in this
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space are designed to fit into your internal processes. So we'll leverage your document templates, follow your testing policies and a dear to your operational readiness procedures. Each service is tailored to your exact approach. Okay, that's good to hear it.
07:57
We aim to please nick but once the arrays are operational, you'll always also be wanting to get value from those assets. And this is where our migration center of Excellence comes in which combines best in class tool in proven processes and industry leading delivery skills to create a one stop shop for all your migration needs.
08:18
Everyone offers migrations nick. What's different about your migration, offering a pure well, nick most of the vendors have migration practices focused on moving between different generations of their own hardware. Our migration practices dedicated to heterogeneous migrations.
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We are as skilled in our competitors technology as we are our own and all our processes and procedures are focused on migrating from their hardware onto pure As already mentioned, we boasted it would be the last disruptive data migration you'll ever need and we have many customers on that journey today. In fact we've migrated over 10,000. Host of pure in the last six months alone.
08:57
Interesting indeed. But we're not done yet. When the technology is returning value, you may need help running operations in your new environment and we have consultancy services to support this as well as a business critical services function for a differentiated customer support experience.
09:13
Now B C S is a large contributing factor towards our industry leading NPS score and it's a must for any customer that host critical infrastructure or applications. Yes, I have heard about your NPS score and we definitely fit into that bracket. So this is something we want to look at. Is there anything that people can help with to drive down our total cost of ownership? You're really tearing me up here nick.
09:37
Funny that it's almost like we planned it. Yeah. So key to any truly modern and efficient environment is integration and automation. And our aim in this space is to offer the tools and skills to allow full stack automation solutions that redefine and flatten the traditional siloed infrastructure management teams of yesteryear automation is going to be key to our future.
10:02
It's all my boss keeps going on about. So it's good to know that you're busy in this space. Nick. We're definitely busy in that space nick. And I'd love to discuss it more with you in the future. Let's do that. So nick it sounds like you can really help eliminate the tech refresh cycle for us and
10:18
it's something we will definitely want to explore. One more question though. I understand that you have a Pure as a service stars offering, how does P. S. Add value to that type of service model? It's a great question and I'm glad you asked. So regardless of the consumption model you select with Pure B.
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That a Capex purchase or a Pure as a service utility based offering. Our approach and service offerings remain consistent but an additional value we add here is in helping customers get the very best deal for their pure service. With Pure as a service. Right customers can get a discounted rate as published publicly on our website in return to data utilization commitments.
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So key to getting the very best deal is going to be having a plan of exactly how much capacity you will have written onto your new platform at every stage of your contract combining detailed discovery and migration plans. We can help customers plot their exact RAM put profile onto the new platform which allows you to secure the very best unit rates for your new environment.
11:22
It's an interesting point that I hadn't considered thanks for being for him. Super happy to help Nick and I hope that by combining our assessment and advisory services, deployment and enablement services and integration and automation services that you'll agree that Pure PS helped make the modern day to experience real. Thanks for your time today. Nick thank you wow.
11:46
Well that was very interesting. What I heard most was that Pure professional services has a portfolio that's aimed at accelerating our customers time to value. That's right, cassie Nia and I hope that we showed professional services can cut through that first hairball of modernizing infrastructure.
12:04
So let's move on and take a look at the second challenge I. T. And storage manager space every day as they modernize their operations. Yeah let's do that. And here we have Amanda and Cody to show us the typical challenges and how we can help with modernizing operations.
12:23
Thanks Nick as the manager of a systems team, we were given a big initiative from upper management to start automating our current processes in order to help cut costs, which sounds great but we were really struggling with where to begin Cody. What are some areas where we can utilize peer to help us accomplish our automation goals? Hey Amanda? Yeah. So so Pierre does a great job of providing
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nearly all of the functionality that you see through the front end through the restful api. In addition there's there's many resources available to help drive these calls against the A. P. I. To make things much easier such as the power shell sdk and the python sdk and many other resources that are available on code dot peer storage dot com awesome. Yeah, we were aware that these resources exist
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but we're still wondering how we can utilize them to modernize our operations. For example, what would an api driven solution look like for disaster recovery process using asynchronous snapshots? Yeah, so there's a lot of considerations when it comes to two R T O or recovery time objective in a in a D. R scenario.
13:31
Pierre does a really great job natively with a sink to to keep up with our P. O demands which is the recovery point but um today with asynchronous snapshots are rto can definitely be improved upon using automation. So with automation you can take uh and quickly hydrate volumes from an existing snapshot or protection group. This could be hundreds of volumes and creating them and attaching them to host,
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which can all happen in less than just a couple of seconds. Whereas manually going through and and populating all these volumes from that snapshot would take a really long time. Yeah, it sure would. Um There's also other options where we can can help improve on our T.
14:15
O. Natively such as active or inactive cluster and and our professional services team can work with you guys to help ensure your D. R. Environment is part of a good validated design and can help ensure that your RTO is where it needs to be. Yeah, one of the major cost saving items we've looked at is savings on target environment for
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disaster recovery. We currently have a lot of equipment that sits idle for a majority of the year and have looked at recovery in the cloud. Is this something you guys can help with? Yeah, definitely. So utilizing cloud block store would allow you
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to still achieve your your R. P. O. Goals while having a D. R. Environment that is staged and on standby. Uh and maybe even power it off D. R recovery in the cloud is something we see a lot of customers moving towards um Mhm. Cloud block store is really helping to enable the hybrid model of providing the on demand
15:10
service consumption model. The ability to easily send data to and from the cloud. And a familiar interface for anybody who who currently manages the flash array and as a bonus, the cloud block store a P I. Is actually identical to the flash array. P I. So any automation that is built for your on
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prem is also consumable in the cloud. Awesome. Yeah. Reusability is always a good thing. What about other operations that the storage team doesn't typically handle? Yeah. So we've had a lot of success when it comes to the idea of data movement. And what I mean by that is we can very quickly take current sets of data or historical sets of data via snapshot and populate additional
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copies of volumes of them. And the practical use case of this. Aside from from ransomware recovery. D our recovery would be the refreshed, lower database environments and this could be epic. Oracle Microsoft sequel or really anything that has a database back and sitting on and on pure. And the idea is is to refresh your reporting test dev instances,
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support instances using pure snapshots versus some native backup or copy operation. Well, this is definitely something that we see, we have a Microsoft sequel database that we refresh slightly. It's a multi terabyte database and the job takes several hours to run. So I'm curious how fast would you expect that to become using automation and pure snaps.
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Yeah, it would be much quicker. So, um if the refresh copy is is pulled from a scheduled protected group snapshot, I wouldn't expect a job even for a really large database to take more than just a few minutes. Well that is a big improvement. Our nightly batch jobs will definitely finish a lot sooner. If I did want to engage Pierre ps to create
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something like this for us. What is the first step? Yeah, so so get in touch with your accounting and let them know you're interested in professional services for automation. Uh from there we'll be in touch with you on, on defining your requirements, um place them inside of a statement of work and once we're engaged we'll go through the entire process in the end of Discovery Design,
17:18
development testing until, until you have a solution that's fully operational and validated in your environment. Well, thanks Cody, I'll definitely follow up with my account team. Yeah, no worries. Well that was a really good example of a challenge that some of our customers may face. And what really stood out to me was that pure
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is invested in driving simplicity, not just in products but also into operations and professional services is key here to that journey. Absolutely. Professional services is key and it can be hard but we are here to make that easier and you know, talking of making things easier, let's have a look at the third challenge that is commonplace today and possibly the most
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complex challenge of all modernizing applications here is Heidi and Michael to talk about the typical challenges that crop up as organizations tackle modernization of applications. Good morning Michael, how are you today? Hi, I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you.
18:22
I'm really looking forward to talking to you about a challenge that our company has been facing my team and I have noticed that as technology is moving towards microservices and cloud native applications that large enterprises such as ours are really struggling to keep up. Uh, we have some large monolithic legacy applications that are really tying us
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down and they are serving business critical functions. So you can imagine that the thought of transforming them seems like a really big mountain decline uh based on your experience is our situation unique. Yeah, sure. So I guess the applications are often difficult to update scale and costly and complex to manage.
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Modernizing these applications is an eventuality for most of our customers. However, the reality is usually not so simple, especially when and which is in your case, the application is business critical to large enterprise as pure as proud to call most of the world's largest enterprises our customers. It's a problem. We do know all too well.
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Yeah, well, I'm glad to know that we're not alone. So how do you think that pure professional services can help us tackle this issue that we're facing and help us on our journey to modernize our applications and also our data. Yeah. Modernizing can be tackled in many ways and in some cases the approach requires taking just outside the box.
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There are multiple approaches. one may take to modernize an application from full lift and shift to application reengineering. However, the key to all these solutions, including include the accessibility, portability and performance of the underlying data. Our continued industry leading flash blades and upcoming legend platform,
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unified block and file storage and flash array are cloud block store for consistent enterprise storage experience. In the cloud import works enterprise data services platform allow us to deliver these components required for the creation of a truly modern mobile and flexible hybrid cloud storage environment. Our team offers many services to help customers explore this landscape.
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Keep in mind your individual application lifecycle as well as your business objectives. And one step further how you consume data whether through traditional arrays or something like evergreen and evergreen plus programs does not impact what we can provide and how we can assist you. Well, that sounds that sounds great. We have a really great group of resources working alongside myself today.
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However, we may fall short in some of the technology adoption areas that you mentioned. Um is this another area that pure professional services can possibly assist us as we embark on our modernization journey. Absolutely pure. We have court works experts that can help customers understand the value of court works and then build future proof containerized
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solutions with true mobility at the storage layer, we offer quick start services for experienced kubernetes customers who need help getting off the ground with court works design and operational readiness services for customers looking for a little more help in deploying those complex sport works power solutions and have the skills and partner network to even help customers looking at a full digital transformation for flash blade,
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flash array and cloud block store platforms. We offer full design, operational readiness workshops, migration services as well as scalable and portable automation services to help our customers create true private and hybrid cloud solutions, needless to say we have a plethora of capabilities that can be tailored to your specific needs and objectives alongside your team's unique skill sets.
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Well this this has all been very encouraging and I really appreciate the time that you've taken today to speak to me, you've given me a lot to think about and um a lot to take back to my organization and I think once I've had some internal discussions, I will be reaching out to the pure account team to see how we can engage with pure professional services to start working towards some solutions.
22:27
Great, I'm happy to hear that and we look forward to working with you in the future. Look forward to working with you as well. Thank you. So there is Cassina three really typical hairballs that we see every day in I. T environments as our customers work to modernize. I was glad we could get into some depth and explore the questions that these folks are
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likely to have. Ah yes nick. I really like the way the professional services helps our customers tackled difficult and complex challenges so that we can introduce the simplicity of pure. And I also liked how a professional services team gave their best shot at being a bit of an actor. Yes. So one of my favorite parts of my job is
23:10
hearing from customers after professional services have helped drive positive results and I think it's key that the people who spoke today are key in delivering those results. Oh yeah, it's really satisfying. And one of the things we're proud of here at pure is that we're a customer focused. So it's good to hear that our customers like us too.
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And listen, we do more than just hear nice stories from satisfied customers. We actually ask a third party to survey our customers and report back to us using net promoter score. Nick, did you know that we have done this now for seven years? I did. That's right.
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And for 2021 we just got our net promoter score and it was 85.2 and that's good. Well actually that's really good. It means we're in the top 1% of B2B companies and like you said, we've been there for seven years. But cassini, it's more than just a number. The NPS survey also has opportunities for customers provide both positive and negative
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feedback and we take that feedback very seriously. In fact, we have teams that respond to all the feedback and resolve any concerns raised by our value Customs Alice and I have personally read some of the feedback and it does reflect the challenges we were talking about today. We take our NPS score very seriously and have a company wide process that reaches from our
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executives all the way down to the folks on the ground, like the ones we heard from today, They're the ones who are trying to solve the challenges we all face in this business. Yeah. And that's why we love sharing stories like we heard today, because it's all about working together on these challenges to modernize technology. Well, nick, listen, thank you so much for
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joining me today for this session and also a big shout out and thanks to our colleagues here for sharing what they heard from the customers and helping us recreate these scenarios. Thank you all of you for joining in and listening on our presentation. And if you want to learn more about pure professional services, be sure to click on the resources that accompany this session.
25:16
Thanks dan. Thanks
  • Professional Services
  • Evergreen//One
  • Video
  • Pure//Accelerate

Pure has one of the best Net Promoter Scores in the business at 85.2. Professional Services delivers the human touch that makes that experience possible for our partners and customers. Pure Professional Services has developed new ways of speeding up the time-to-value as our customers adopt new Pure technologies, including Pure as-a-Service, data migrations, and workshops to create tangible plans. Our customers provide feedback that these services are an important part of why they choose to work with Pure over the long term.

Tom and his co-presenter will dive deep on how Professional Services has evolved the way we deliver these services with quick starts, centers of excellence, workshops, and premium support to enable customers to get to value quickly. He will also show how utilizing professional services frees up customer team members to innovate and deliver on their business goals.

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