Finally got round to posting this after the buzz of VMworld.  Since my last post where I announced I’m ‘challenging myself’ and joining Pure Storage, I thought I’d share with you some insights into the ‘on-boarding’ process…

Why New Hire Training / Sales Kick Off?

With most Silicon Valley based companies you all get together every 6 months or so as part of a Sales Kick Off.  This is to take stock on where you are as an organisation, celebrate the victories/analyse the losses, measure the progress, provide technical/sales enablement and generally rally the troops and set them on a course for success for the following 6 months (until the next SKO).

This constant inward assessment of company progress allows the leadership team to fine tune the company model and generally steer the ship in the right direction.  This is especially important when a company experiences the kind of growth Pure Storage are seeing right now.

So, I travelled to Santa Clara in Silicon Valley to complete the new hire training along with attending the sales kick-off.

My agenda for HNT consisted of the following (as you can see it’s jam packed and there’s not much time for anything else, to make matters worse you also have jet lag to deal with which doesn’t help especially when attending  several lectures throughout the day): –

Monday/Tuesday NHT

There were approx 70 people in the new hire class, this was the 7th NHT class and included attendees from Europe, APJ, US regions.  Several speakers commented about the number of international Puritans attending NHT.

There was some really strong/passionate presentations about Server & Desktop Virtualisation, SQL/Oracle/Mongodb, Microsoft/Citrix, VMware (including vVols/SRM integration that was announced at VMworld) along with lots more from: –

Cody Hoisterman (@codyhosterman) blog: http://codyhosterman.com

Ravi Venkat (@ravivenk)

Vaughn Stewart (@vStewed) blog: http://purestorageguy.com

Chad Kennedy (@PureFlashGeek) blog: http://pureflashgeek.com

Craig Chapman (@VirtualChappy) blog: http://chappychat.info

Aaron Skogsberg (@DweebiaK) blog: http://www.dweebiak.com

Joel Mckelvey (@joelmckelvey)

Rob Barker (@themsftdude) blog: http://www.themicrosoftdude.com/

If you want to learn more about Pure Storage, I really recommend you follow these guys on Twitter as each of them can provide their own unique perspective.

SKO highlights

A lot (I mean loads) was packed into the 3 days of SKO (so much in fact that I’ve had to just focus on a few of the highlights).

Customer Council

4 customer representatives were invited onstage to provide feedback to the whole sales team on what they were doing well, what the company did for them, how important support was, it was a real eye opener getting this kind of direct customer feedback on what their experience was of the product to date and how they felt their experiences were and what could be done better, kudos to the leadership team for organising this as it was a real insight into the mind of our customers and what makes them tick.

Wednesday Night Mayhem

A highlight for me was our trip to the mothership, each section of the business hosted cocktails and we basically travelled to each functional area, met with the team (who proceeded to feed us strong alcoholic cocktails and tell us what they do and what their department was responsible for in the business).  The best departments (well cocktails anyway!) for me included escalation, alliances, and Internal IT (who had the best cocktails by far!).  It was also a great opportunity to talk with one of the company founders John Hayes (as you’d expect, we discussed flash architecture and futures)!

Overall Thoughts

The key takeaway for me during this event was all about culture, culture, culture – from the cocktail night at HQ to the award ceremony back to the talented/passionate people I’ve met over the last week.  I’m really excited to be part of Pure Storage and to contribute to building the greatest storage company of all time, let’s go!

If  you haven’t given Pure Storage any consideration then I ask you to take a closer look, not all storage companies are created equal, and I think you’ll be quite surprised about how Pure does things a little differently – it’s time to shake up the storage industry!