Pure Storage launches Bangalore R&D centre to tap Indian talent and expand APAC reach

Mumbai: US-based data center and storage solutions provider Pure Storage announced the launch of a new R&D site in Bangalore, India on Thursday. The India Research and Development Center in Bangalore will focus on innovations that transform storage and data management. The centre will boost the company’s talent base, go to market strategy for Asia Pacific and allow it to engage it with leading Indian system integrators, said company executives.

The centre joins global R&D centers in Mountain View, CA, Bellevue, WA, and Vancouver, Canada in North America; and Prague, Czech Republic in EMEA.

“ We expect to have a nice impact on the go to market (strategy) in the APAC region. Lot of the global system integrators like

, , , have core teams based out of India as well. We want to work and engage with them. We have an active program as we are getting more and more to the enterprise and end customers in India,” said Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, Pure Storage.

A new study conducted by Pure Storage with market research by Zinnov, a management consulting firm, indicated that there are over 700,000 professionals in India with the relevant data management skills. This is around 14% of the total technology workforce in the country and is poised to grow further. In relation to the rest of the world, India makes up more than 10% of the worldwide talent pool of data management professionals and more than a quarter of Asia Pacific. Even more encouraging is the fact that more than three-quarters of the existing Indian talent will reach an advanced level in their experience in 5 years, which puts India in a good place as a source for data management skills.

“We want to make sure we can tap into the global R&D talent of Bangalore to leverage a diverse talent pool. Also, this will allow us to have timezone continuity, it really helps a lot in supporting our customers, enabling us to also stay closer to them. So those are all the various reasons where we decided to open up a R&D center in Bangalore,” said Singh.

The India R&D Centre will contribute to the continued innovation in most of the company’s product lines. Last year, Pure Storage acquired Portworx, a startup that provides cloud native storage and data management platform for $370 million. The company had a significant team in India which is being integrated into the Pure Storage employee base.

“I want to be very clear that this is a talent play, and it’s not a cost play,” he added.

Company executives stated that it currently has 60% of its employee base comprising talent in the 0-7 year junior experience group and expects to double the senior headcount over the next 5 years.

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