LAS VEGAS – The World Cup is here, and every fan has a rite of passage in how they choose to watch the tournament unfold. For some, a trip to the pub or fan zone with the smell of beer and like-minded rabble-rousers is essential. For others, the comfort of home, beside loved ones, is the ultimate way to watch. And for those lucky few, it’s a trip of a lifetime across the other side of the globe to soak in the scenes from the stadiums themselves.

But for the opening game of Group L, SDxCentral watched England take on Croatia in a slightly unconventional way: alongside Everpure staff, including Patrick Smith, their CTO for EMEA.

For the neutral, England's 4-2 victory over Croatia – sweet revenge for the heartbreak of Russia 2018 – was among the most exciting games of the tournament so far. For Smith and his Everpure colleagues watching alongside, it was akin to a therapy session: a reminder that under Thomas Tuchel, this England side is still learning what it means to win with conviction rather than survive by the skin of their teeth.

In a sense, though, the match was a perfect backdrop for the company formerly known as Pure Storage, with it undergoing a period of change that’s seen it reinvent itself as a data management powerhouse, supplementing its longstanding comforts in the storage space. While England is undergoing a similar transformation away from dependable but perennial nearlymen under Sir Gareth Southgate to wannabe World Cup winners, Everpure looks set to shrug off the jovial jibes in the wake of its recent rebrand to change the way we look at the data space.

Firmly forming the focal point of that push in Smith’s remit of EMEA is sovereignty, with the exec saying you can't talk to anybody in Europe without talking about data sovereignty.

He said that a lot of conversations on the continent – be they with customers, prospective or otherwise – see enterprises wanting to revisit their cloud strategies amidst a sudden awareness and desire for inclusion around data sovereignty and digital sovereignty.

“It's obviously driven by an increased awareness of data sensitivity, an increased awareness that many organizations and the EU itself have effectively sleepwalked into a significant dependency on hyperscalers that they're now revisiting, and then throw into all of that a certain amount of geopolitical tension, and it's a melting pot,” Smith said.

And while Europe is constantly positioned as the sovereignty-centric jurisdiction currently, the CTO said other regions under his belt are becoming increasingly conscious.

“The Middle East is acutely aware that it needs to control its data,” he said. “Our focus in Africa is South Africa, less so at the moment. They're still quite happy with the direction they're in, but I think that's only a matter of time.”

Regardless of region, though, Smith stated that prior to Everpure’s purchase of 1Touch, its related play was primarily around users wanting to repatriate workloads from the cloud if they've shrunk their IT environment.

But amidst a shift to what the company is labelling as “data primacy” and building secure, context-driven layers to get the utmost from disparate sources, Pure’s core messaging has shifted to one of simplicity.

When some enterprises have sought to start from scratch and let skilled staffers go as a result, Smith stated, “You don't need very highly skilled technologists to run our platform.”

“We keep evolving our platform and the management to make it even more efficient to run; it’s a very attractive capability,” he added. “And the other thing the EU cares about is sustainability and energy efficiency. We've had customers appear at events like [Accelerate] talking about switching from their legacy storage platform to Everpure and saving more than 90% in terms of energy utilization, which is a significant number.”

Upon mulling over the marrying of the two concepts of sovereignty and energy sustainability, Smith said the importance of each has evolved in a short period of time.

“If we rewind a year or two ago, it was all about energy, and the EU was looking at energy regulation, then it realized that would potentially make the EU companies within the EU less competitive on the global stage, so they switched the messaging a little from regulating energy to actually talking about energy security, because that became a very hot topic, so energy security is much more about doing more with less.

“But now the main topic is sovereignty. I spend a reasonable amount of time in Brussels, meeting with the European Parliament, the European Commission [officials]; it's all about sovereignty. I was in Brussels in the European Parliament recently, meeting with MEPs. They want to learn more about the technology landscape because they want to be able to have that conversation as part of the tech sovereignty package.”

Everpure's own transformation reflects a similar shift in ambition. And by way of soccer similarities, then, its ongoing journey is perfectly personified in the rise of Brentford FC, a team Smith himself supports.

When owner Matthew Benham purchased a majority stake in the West London club in June 2012, they were in League One – the third tier of English football – a long way from their current berth in the richest league in the world, the Premier League.

“It's not so much revamping a football team as a team that's on an upward curve suddenly gets promoted from League One into the championship, and they can't stay the same,” he outlined. “They can't stay as they were when League One, because otherwise they'll just drop straight back down again. They have to innovate, invest, bring in new talent, new skills, and then they get promoted up to the Premier League, and they have to do the same thing again.”

Under Benham, the club progressively doubled down on a rigorous, data‑led model and paired it with targeted investment in infrastructure and recruitment. The combination of analytics‑driven decision-making backed by a modernised stadium, academy, and an increasingly sophisticated scouting network helped Brentford climb the divisions and establish themselves at the top table.

“That's exactly what we've done,” the CTO opined. “We started off with a focus on storing data, then, as Charlie [Giancarlo, CEO of Everpure] has talked about, we move that focus up to dataset management, and then the move up to the Premier League is not losing focus everything you’ve done already that’s got you there, but adding more capabilities. It's that team that drives, there are very few of them, that succeed in getting promoted year on year on year.”

Everpure began laying the groundwork for its reinvention more than a year ago, following the introduction of its Enterprise Data Cloud solution. Smith outlined that the product was part of a longer strategic arc – one not too dissimilar to Brentford’s investments on and off the pitch, which culminated in Keith Andrews’ side's highest ever finish last season.

Part of Pure’s strategy saw it drop the ‘Storage’ part of its name that’s been synonymous since its inception. But Smith suggested the change came as people “tended to pigeonhole” the brand as solely a storage company.

“Okay, our products are storage, but we play in so many different areas in our customers' landscapes, whether it's providing optionality on their virtualization strategy or cybersecurity,” he said. “You look at sovereignty, even before we had 1Touch, and now, obviously, with Data Intelligence, we have multiple angles where we help on sovereignty, energy efficiency, and sustainability, and that's before we even mention AI, and how we help our customers with their AI challenges in building solutions to drive efficiency, quality, understanding.

“Add all those aspects together, and the fact that we had ‘Storage’ in our name meant that, okay, the people who really knew us knew how we could help, but those who didn't wouldn't understand the broad value we can bring to the IT landscape.”