We are seeing the emergence of hybrid multi-cloud world: NetApp

NetApp held a roundtable today, to update on the industry activities and the NetApp Blue XP.

Puneet Gupta, MD, NetApp India, said India's Internet usage has shot up to 14.1GB per month. India's data center market is expected to grow at CAGR 11-14% during 2022-27. Physical has now been replaced or complemented by digital. Work and IT architectures are now hybrid. They are resilient, agile, and digital. On-prem and public cloud will likely co-exist. There is the emergence of the hybrid multi-cloud world.

NetApp is today well-positioned for success. It has unique partnerships with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. It is accelerating momentum with 73% public cloud ARR, YoY. Gartner has ranked NetApp as the no. 1 platform for shared storage services. As the industry now pivots to the cloud, we need to ensure that they do not face any problems. The cloud story is changing, and is now going beyond data.

NetApp has built and acquired some of the best-of-breed solutions. These include Cloud Insights, Spot, StratCloud, Cloud Jumper, instaclustr, Fylamynt, Data Mechanics, etc. NetApp has now become a cloud-led, data-centric software company. NetApp has also had a record year. It expanded cloud partnerships, and has more all-Flash arrays. NetApp already has over 100 customers from Spot.

Today, market leaders are relying on NetApp. The top 10 financial institutes are prime customers. Some others include the top 3 telcos, governance bodies in 10 states, top 6 IT/ITeS companies, 10 cloud-native delivery aggregators, and startups.

We are now witnessing the evolved cloud, and the emergence of NetApp Blue XP. Blue XP is delivering the industry's leading approach. Sustainability is also built into the product portfolio. We are also focusing on storage efficiency. This includes deduplication, compression, and compaction, leading to 4:1 storage efficiency. Also, Spot by NetApp has suite of products for automating and optimizing the cloud infrastructure.

Hello hybrid multi-cloud
Shuja Mirza, Director, Solutions Engineering, NetApp India and SAARC, said that we have an evolved cloud state. Customers are now looking for vendors who can provide simplicity and consistency, security and protection, sustainability and savings, etc.

You can speed up the technology and business innovation by leveraging data of your hybrid, multi-cloud estate. NetApp is now making the hybrid multi-cloud work for customers. We also have solutions that throttle cyber threats.

NetApp Blue XP is delivering the industry's leading solutions for unified management of hybrid multi-cloud. We leverage a single, unified control plane for the simplicity of management of the data/services of the hybrid multi-cloud. Blue XP provides storage, health, protection, governance, observability, and mobility. Blue XP is now available for customers globally. They are using ONTAP on-prem and also sending data to the cloud.

He gave examples of Narayana Healthcare, where NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides the management of storage. Another customer, Sleepwell, has improved their data resiliency. NetApp storage delivers rock-solid uptime for critical ERP data. NetApp partnered with Sheela Foam to modernize their storage infrastructure and deliver 24/7 availability. Airtel Payments Bank has also chosen NetApp. With robust underlying infrastructure built on NetApp, Airtel Payments Bank can now support banking services.

Spot is also changing the game for the cloud. India is among the top 5 largest markets for Spot. It has substantial footprint in cloud-born companies. A case study is of Freshworks.

NetApp is now preparing organizations for the future. There are industry trends such as data lakes, metaverse, AI/ML, from edge to core to cloud, containers, app modernization, digital transformation, common data plane across data centers and cloud (ONTAP), enterprise social governance, cyber resilience, storage efficiencies, and cloud.

Accelerating growth
Ganesh Arumugam, India Partner Leader, NetApp, stated that NetApp is accelerating growth with shared portfolio using co-innovation. We help develop and promote highly specialized, and services-led partners. We are delivering successful customer value and successful business outcomes. NetApp is accelerating the partners' cloud solutions and customer adoption of cloud portfolio. We are also targeting net new customers.

NetApp's FY24 partner program offers transformative cloud-ready training, promotes partners differentiated by competencies and services, provides flexibility in a single framework, and accelerates growth via progressive tiers.

There are categories available, such as cloud, hybrid cloud, and AI/analytics, where they can provide predictable journeys. NetApp offers integration, that is project-based, keystone, that is subscription or contract-based, and lifecycle, that is project-based + subscription or contract-based.