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Pure Storage Recognizes Customers Driving Innovation in Inaugural Breakthrough Awards Program

Six customers honored at annual Pure//Accelerate Digital event as leaders among Pure’s 8,000+ global customers.
Pure Recognizes Customers Driving Change

Mountain View, Calif. – May 14, 2021 — Pure Storage® (NYSE: PSTG),  the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, today announced at its annual Pure//Accelerate™ Digital event, the winners of its inaugural Pure Storage Breakthrough Awards. The Awards recognize Pure customers displaying extraordinary innovation, creativity, business breakthroughs, and overarching success using the Pure’s portfolio of offerings.  

Customers including ServiceNow, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), The National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), Smart Digital Sales & Holding GmbH (SDC), Options Technology, and Roblox were selected among more than 8,000 of Pure’s global customers as leaders across six categories: Pure Good, Visionary, Cloud Champion, Change-Maker of the Year, Data Warrior of the Year, and The G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time).

“The innovations our customers drive using Pure’s solutions never cease to amaze us. They understand the importance of embracing a modern data experience to help support their business objectives. We’re extremely proud and congratulate this year’s winners on their successes.”

Joe Pinto
Chief Customer Experience Officer, Pure Storage

This year’s award recipients include:

  • G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) - ServiceNow: G.O.A.T.s use Pure’s portfolio of offerings in innovative ways to help customers thrive. With a rapidly expanding customer base, the Cloud Infrastructure team at ServiceNow modernised the company’s storage environment using Pure’s FlashBlade® and FlashArray™ systems and, in the process, became the first major cloud provider to move to an all-flash data centre.
  • Cloud Champion - Roblox: Cloud champions support their organisation’s cloud strategy with Pure’s Pure as-a-Service™, Pure Cloud Block Store™, and Portworx® offerings. More than 8 million passionate game developers have invested countless hours into building unique digital worlds on Roblox and every day, tens of millions of people descend on the platform to play, socialize, and connect. With Portworx delivering scalability and agility, Roblox demonstrated the ability to handle any influx of traffic - including record-breaking growth in the last year. 
  • Change Maker - SDC: Change makers are leaders displaying excellence in driving digital transformation. SDC’s innovative, state-of-the-art drone solution, designed to evaluate danger, and detect and assess natural disaster damage, has the potential to transform many industries: agriculture, infrastructure, public safety, and more. Working with Pure, and with the leadership of CTO Wolfgang Kalny, SDC supports the big data and analytics that give customers a whole new perspective on their challenges.
  • Data Warrior - NTU: Data Warriors demonstrate creativity in using data and technology to open new opportunities, drive breakthroughs, and support innovation. NTU Singapore, one of the world’s top universities, augmented its High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) with Pure Storage FlashBlade to supercharge research workloads. For example, NTU scientists can now map the genomes of more than 1,000 plant species simultaneously in less than three years instead of two decades!
  • Visionary - Options Technology: Visionaries represent industry-leading organisations driving breakthroughs and innovations propelled by Pure. By using FlashArray and FlashBlade through Pure as-a-Service, Options Technology, a global provider of fintech managed services, hedge fund technology and IT infrastructure, can scale up or down with customers in real time, transcending the cycle of capacity planning, capital expenditures, and time-consuming deployments while providing the highest level of performance to its clients.
  • Pure Good - NCMEC: Pure Good recognizes companies using Pure in ways that demonstrate positive social, environmental, or economic impact. NCMEC is a non-profit supporting and educating families, training law enforcement, and keeping kids safe. In 2020 alone, the non-profit fielded 21.7 million reports of potential exploitation online, storing 65.4 million images, videos, and audio files on Pure in order to investigate tips and help keep kids safe in an efficient and secure fashion.

Hear from the Breakthrough Awards winners in their own words:

“Roblox connects millions of people around the world through shared experiences. By investing in our platform, we’re creating better player experiences for our users and our developers who create these immersive, imaginative worlds. Container-based services and Portworx keep us in perfect alignment with these goals.” - Rob Cameron, Senior Technical Director, Roblox

“All the work we do as an organisation has a single unifying purpose — to make work, work better for people. On the cloud infrastructure team, it’s our job to make it as easy as possible for our customers to modernise their business processes, and Pure helps us achieve that.” - Keith Martin, Senior Director, Cloud Capacity Engineering, ServiceNow

“Our goal is to offer solutions that add value for our customers and are as highly automated as possible. Pure enables us to spend less time managing infrastructure, and we can now spend more time working with our customers, whether we’re developing algorithms for analysing vegetation or training AI for new customers.” - Wolfgang Kalny, CTO, SDC

“With Pure we were able to check all of the boxes - increase our storage capacity while also encrypting our data at rest and adding disaster recovery capabilities – all to make sure that our analysts had the tools they needed to help keep kids safe.” - Russ Johnson, Executive Director, Technology Division, NCMEC

“Under the NTU 2025 strategic plan, technology is a key enabler of innovation and growth. This award reaffirms our efforts to continuously reimagine an advanced digital research infrastructure that empowers our NTU research community to accelerate their discoveries and turn big data into scientific breakthroughs, while upholding our commitment to energy efficiency and sustainability.” - Alvin Ong, Chief Information Officer, NTU Singapore

“We started urging our clients down the path of business continuity planning, offering virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to help people connect to critical systems from home. With Pure as-a-Service, we’ve been able to rise to the challenges and provide an outstanding, positive experience for our clients.” - Mike Russo, Vice President, Product Management, Options Technology

Learn more:

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) gives technologists their time back. Pure delivers a modern data experience that empowers organisations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. Pure helps customers put data to use while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are  among the happiest in the world. For more information, visit www.purestorage.com.

Pure Storage, the Pure P Logo, Portworx, and the marks on the Pure Trademark List at www.purestorage.com/legal/productenduserinfo.html are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. Other names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Press Contact
Kaylin Deutscher
Pure Storage
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