Prague, Czech Republic – September 13, 2022 — Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technology and services, has today announced the expansion of its Research & Development (R&D) centre and capabilities in the Czech Republic. The company also announced the appointment of Paul Melmon (60) as the Head of its Czech R&D centre based in Prague. The announcements mark another milestone in Pure Storage’s continued commitment to innovation and investment in the Czech Republic and EMEA as part of its global growth plans.
Pure Storage was attracted to Prague’s tech hub due to its strategic location combined with a wide range of available talent and high quality education. Pure’s Prague R&D centre was established in the spring of 2020. Over the last two years, the centre has flourished and attracted top talent from the Czech Republic and internationally. Since the centre opened, Pure Storage has doubled the number of engineers it employs on-site each year, with plans to grow at a similar rate in FY23 and FY24.
Pure Storage believes that success is driven by innovation. Therefore its investment in R&D is far above the industry standard, with nearly 20% of revenue going back into R&D. Today, several hundred engineers at the R&D centre make a significant contribution to Pure’s global innovation engine, and further accelerate time-to-market for its solutions. FlashBlade//S, a recently introduced revolutionary platform that addresses the demands of unstructured data and modern application growth, was partly designed and tested at the R&D centre in Prague. In addition, the Prague site was directly responsible for engineering Portworx Data Services, the industry's first Database-as-a-Service platform for all Kubernetes services. These innovations underline the importance of the Czech Republic to Pure’s global business, firmly placing Prague at the heart of Pure’s innovation efforts.
The breakthroughs in Prague have contributed to Pure Storage witnessing significant global growth in recent years. FY23 Q2 revenue grew by 30% year-over-year and subscription services revenue by 31%.
Paul Melmon the new Head of Czech R&D Centre
To drive this expansion across the Czech Republic, Paul Melmon has been appointed as the Head of Czech R&D centre. Paul joined Pure Storage in 2020 as Vice President responsible for Engineering in the Digital Experience business unit. Prior to his time at Pure Storage, Paul was the CTO at Colibri Group, a leading online platform for professional education where he was responsible for development and operations of the SaaS solution serving over 1 million professionals. He has extensive experience of working in enterprise technology helping develop groundbreaking solutions that address customers’ most pressing challenges. Paul holds a Bachelor of Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of California.
“Two of Pure’s core values are innovation and a customer-first mind-set. Thanks to these ideals, Pure Storage has become one of the fastest growing enterprise IT companies in history. My vision is to ensure that the R&D centre in Prague is the leading contributor to Pure’s cutting edge innovations that delivers on the as-a service economy, leverages the growth of modern applications and addresses challenges thrown up by the unprecedented rise in unstructured data and security threats such as ransomware,” said Paul Melmon. “We have been delighted with the results at the Prague R&D centre since we opened our doors in 2020, and are planning to double down by growing the team here and taking on more strategic initiatives across multiple business units.”
