Australia – March 11, 2014 — Pure Storage, the all-flash enterprise storage array company, today announced it has appointed industry veteran Michael Alp as Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). Alp will facilitate the continued progression of Pure Storage in the region, which has seen rapid growth since opening its Asia Pacific headquarters in October 2013.
"With our continued focus on accelerating growth in APJ, Pure Storage is excited to have an industry veteran with exceptional experience in the region and an extraordinary track record of success, join us,” said David Hatfield, President of Pure Storage. “Within APJ are some of the most virtualised enterprise markets in the world, presenting fertile environments for enterprise flash storage adoption. Alp will strengthen the foundation we’ve built since opening the office a few short months ago – further evangelizing the disruptive innovation that Pure Storage offers to the region, hiring world class people and establishing a growing partner ecosystem and customer base that will facilitate our next phase of growth.”
Alp’s key priorities will include growing Pure Storage’s established presence in Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand and ASEAN, as well as opening new markets across Asia. Fundamental to this will be acquiring new talent and channel partners, and creating awareness of the impact of flash on business, government, education and healthcare. This will also encompass working with governments and large solution providers to help drive green initiatives and deliver the next generation data centre. An Australian who has spent his career in roles located across the Asia Pacific region, Alp will bring strong local market knowledge to the position.
Alp joins Pure Storage from Polycom, where he served as the president of Polycom Asia Pacific and Japan, running all sales and marketing, service and support operations across the region. Previously he was the vice president of the EMC Backup and Recovery Solution and Data Computing Division in EMC APJ, after the Data Domain acquisition where he led the team across the region. Before this, Alp ran the Channels business at EMC and was well known as the architect and driver behind EMC’s aggressive move into emerging and commercial markets through the channel from 2006 to 2009. His 25 years of industry experience also includes positions at Teradata, Oracle Corporation Australia and NCR Corporation.
“The industry is seeing some of the most disruptive changes to enterprise storage technology in decades, and at the heart of this is Pure Storage with its innovative use of flash and de-duplication. Pure’s all-flash technology will fundamentally change the way customers run their applications, at the same time delivering a remarkable return on investment,” Alp said. “To be joining Pure Storage’s talented team is an honour and I look forward to extending its leadership and commitment to delivering transformative solutions to businesses and government across the APJ region.”
Michael Cornwell, who established Pure’s operations across Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand and ASEAN following the office opening in October, assumes a more strategic role focusing on technology leadership and market development in the region as the newly appointed Chief Technology Officer for APJ. Cornwell is one of Pure’s founding engineers who will work closely with Alp to continue to bolster the company’s business and deep technical leadership in the region.
Now in its third generation release, FlashArray continues to deliver a ground-breaking storage experience designed to meet the rigorous resiliency, scalability, efficiency and performance requirements of enterprise clients in diverse markets, and for a variety of high performance workloads and applications, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), cloud computing, and database and server virtualisation.
