Michelle Graff, Pure Storage’s director of worldwide channel programs and marketing, has been named to CRN’s 2014 Women of the Channel and Power 100 lists for a second consecutive year.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – June 10, 2014 — Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage array company, today announced that Michelle Graff, the company’s director of worldwide channel programs and marketing, has been named to CRN’s 2014 Women of the Channel and Power 100 lists for a second consecutive year. The annual program highlights the accomplishments of female executives within vendor, distribution and solution provider organizations, and the impact they have on the advancement of the IT channel industry as a whole.
Since joining Pure Storage in 2012, Graff has restructured and expanded the company’s P3 partner program into a multi-tiered, value-add program that is designed to accelerate channel partner profitability and demand generation, while offering partners more robust business, service and support opportunities. Under Graff’s leadership, Pure Storage successfully tripled its strategic reseller partnerships in North America and grew the company’s partner-sourced business by more than 125 percent quarter-over-quarter in 2013.
“It’s an honor to again be recognized on CRN’s Power 100 list and be in the company of some the most accomplished leaders in the channel,” said Graff. “As a channel-devoted company, Pure Storage’s remarkable growth and success would not be possible without the support and contributions of our incredible team and our partners. We look forward to continuing to empower our partners and enable customers to make the move from mechanical disk-based storage solutions to all-flash storage.”
“This recognition is a testament to the efforts of the entire channels team and Michelle’s leadership, who consistently push Pure Storage to be more and more channel-centric,” stated David Hatfield, president, Pure Storage. “We remain firmly committed to channel-devoted go-to-market strategy and believe that a robust program that delivers sales and training assets, support tools and incentives is critical to ensuring the success of our partners. We will continue to strengthen our programs and expand our global network of channel partnerships in 2014 and beyond, to ensure our partners are well equipped to benefit from the massive market opportunity presented by the Pure Storage FlashArray family of products.”
Each year, the CRN Women of the Channel list recognizes women executives across technology channel organizations, distributors and solution providers for their successes over the preceding year and highlights the impact their accomplishments have had on their companies and the industry as a whole. The CRN Power 100 extends that honor, recognizing an elite group of women who have reached the highest levels of success in the IT channel industry, based on their achievements as executives and the influence they wield in the field.
Under Graff’s leadership, Pure Storage has:
- Quadrupled accredited partner sales and technical sales staff in the past six months alone;
- Dramatically increased market development fund (MDF) investments, driving Pure’s partner-sourced pipeline to more than 60 percent quarter-over-quarter;
- Bolstered strategic relationships in APAC and EMEA, expanding Pure’s global channel footprint to more than 200 authorized partners; and
- Built a world-class partner program PS with recent additions of a platinum program tier and new partner accreditation programs. To date, Pure partners have earned more than 700 accreditations, contributing to an explosion of new deal registrations for the company via its new Partner Portal.
“These female executives have risen in the ranks of their organizations and are leaving their indelible mark on the technology channel. We celebrate their many contributions and the varied ways in which they help solution providers grow and thrive every day,” said Robert Faletra, CEO at The Channel Company. “We congratulate the Women of the Channel, and look forward to their continued success.”
The 2014 Women of the Channel and Power 100 honorees will be featured in the June issue of CRN magazine and online atwww.crn.com.
About Pure Storage
Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage company, enables the broad deployment of flash in the data centre. When compared to traditional disk-centric arrays, Pure Storage all-flash enterprise arrays are 10x faster and 10x more space and power efficient at a price point that is less than performance disk per gigabyte stored. The Pure Storage FlashArray is ideal for high performance workloads, including server virtualisation, desktop virtualisation (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.
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The Pure Storage and “P” logo marks, Purity Operating Environment, and RAID-3D are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.
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Press Contact
Kerry Tescher
Bateman Group for Pure Storage
(415) 697-2562
pure@bateman-group.com