NetApp Helps Customer Create Value

When we talk about digital transformation, the major challenge is the gaps due to the already existing legacy infrastructure and storage solutions that companies have invested in. CIOs and CTOs are pushing boundaries to fill the gap and create a bridge to transform the IT infrastructure space.

We spoke to Wendy Koh, Vice President – Pathways, Alliances and Strategy, Asia Pacific, NetApp and Kaushal Veluri, Director of Channels & Alliances, NetApp India & SAARC to understand how they are helping businesses overcome such challenges.

Customers’ challenges and NetApp’s innovation to address them

Wendy Koh Vice President - Pathways Alliances and Strategy Asia Pacific NetApp

According to Wendy Koh, the world is fundamentally changing and customers are also being challenged amidst this digital transformation to create value. In order to create value, one must be able to innovate and offer different services to their customers. Organizations will expect their vendors to optimize operations while leveraging the digital transformation. Another very important aspect is to be able to reach out to new customers.

NetApp strategy is based on three key IT narratives – first is to inspire innovation on the cloud, second is to accelerate new service offerings and third is to modernize the IT infrastructure. With these three IT narratives, NetApp actually caters to the needs of different applications in the market.

“We are focused on, what we call the big three – Flash, HCI and the Hybrid Cloud solutions. And we are very well positioned in all three. We believe that our solutions help our customers to anchor their business requirements and any challenges that they have. In this endeavor, our partnerships are very important from a go-to-market perspective as they represent us in the marketplace to bring forth these solutions and help customers address their business needs”, said Wendy.

The modern digital infrastructure

Wendy Koh said, “Traditionally, you see that we are very much a storage company. We are now transforming to be more of a data management as well as a hybrid cloud organization. In fact, we are the leader in the hybrid cloud data services. Our position and solutions enable us to help our existing customers who have been using traditional storage solutions, to move into the application of flash arrays, hybrid cloud or hyper-converged infrastructure kind of environment to handle mixed workloads.”

Kaushal Veluri said, “When you think about a modern IT infrastructure, it is subjective to the needs of each Indian CIO. We at NetApp aim to address all those respective needs. Every Indian CIO or an Indian customer is constantly looking at how he can push the boundary of technology to go to the next level.” “Some of our customers are willing to innovate and try the next generation technologies that are coming in. For us, the modern perspective is more about Flash. We see a lot of our customers talking about how to modernize their data center to make it more efficient and agiler - more right in tune with the technological advances that are happening. And that’s the play that NetApp brings in, not just from a modernization perspective, but also from a cloud adoption perspective. CIOs are mainly concerned about where to store the data – private/ public/ hybrid cloud and how to ensure efficient data management so that data moves seamlessly across locations.

Kaushal Veluri, Director of Channels & Alliances, NetApp India & SAARC

And that’s where NetApp’s biggest play comes in because our entire data fabric strategy and story is about helping customers effectively manage their data across a hybrid environment. Whether you are on-premise, public cloud, hybrid environment or co-located. NetApp helps you manage that data more effectively and that’s what makes NetApp a data management company and not merely a storage company.”

Data-driven decisions

Kaushal also added that NetApp is helping customers manage their data. “We also partner with select companies to manage the analytics of their data. We help manage data and someone else helps them understand its value from a data analytics perspective. So, that’s a different segment. We are primarily into the art of helping the customers – help them know where their data is, be able to move their data seamlessly between environments, being able to manage it very effectively, being able to retrieve it, archive it, digitally store it and make sure that is available at any point in time.

So, anything to do with the data management is where NetApp operates - effectively and efficiently.”

Security against data breaches

Kaushal further talked about the entire aspect of data security and said it is critical. NetApp is helping its customers manage data. But customers are the ones who know where their data is. The entire foundation of data management is built on security aspects. Whether it is inline duplication or it is inline security the data is moving across these environments, in encrypted drives that NetApp provides to the customer. Talking about the data privacy issue, we are in the business of helping them manage their data effectively.

All our data management solutions are aligned with the data privacy policy that an organization wants and with the privacy standards across the globe. Wendy Koh added, “In fact, our data fabric strategy and solutions are about providing insights from the data. And at the same time making sure that it is secured and can be moved seamlessly across different environments.”