"Flash is more than a technology, it's an agenda"

Santhosh D'Souza, director, Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services, India tells how NetApp's Flash-based storage solutions improve efficiency by up to 90%

What are the new innovations that you have introduced in the storage space (Flash and cloud) and how are they solving a pre-existing problem?

NetApp believes that flash is more than a technology, it's an agenda. The NetApp approach is to embed flash all across the data path, from the application to persistent storage, affording customers the luxury of applying precisely the flash technology that impacts most on business. Over the past quarter, NetApp's Flash Cache, Flash Pool and Flash Accel have had all new features and functionality. In fact, NetApp has led in flash innovation since our first introduction of Flash Cache in 2009. We continue to deliver on this vision, having introduced not one but two All Flash Arrays in 2013. The NetApp EF550 delivers unprecedented performance and latency characteristics in a dense form factor.

NetApp's cloud strategy is to provide enterprise customers with seamless data management and control in a multi-cloud environment and service providers a platform that is secure, scalable and agile. With the versatility of the world's number one storage operating system, Data ONTAP, customers can leverage a universal data platform across private and public cloud resources. Data ONTAP software enables dynamic data portability across all clouds and dedicated storage. With Data ONTAP, customers can employ consistent interfaces and technologies across the lifecycle of their information assets, wherever those assets might need to be located on non-virtualized storage, private cloud storage or public clouds.

Who are your target markets for these new products?
Regardless of an IT environment being mainstream or vertical, the new Flash arrays are best for the most demanding dedicated enterprise applications, where responsiveness drives time-to-market, customer satisfaction, productivity, revenue generation, or other core operations. While the new NetApp EF series delivers high performance and consistent low latency for business-critical applications for enterprise reliability and responsiveness; the E series caters to small remote or branch offices requiring optimal price and performance.

Please mention briefly about NetApp's Product Innovation strategy for next year?
The enormous success of Clustered Data ONTAP has been complemented by an ever-growing set of features and innovations through 2013, and we will continue to enhance the FAS Storage Arrays that employ the popular Storage OS. We will enhance our private cloud offerings and partner with industry-leading cloud service providers, including hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and others, to fulfill the rapidly growing hybrid cloud needs of our customers. We continue to concentrate on flash with the upcoming debut of our FlashRay in mid- 2014 as well as developing products and solutions that target the performance- and data-intensive requirements of todayâ??s Big Data applications in the high-performance computing, healthcare, media and entertainment and oil and gas vertical markets.

What methodology do you undertake to fulfill your commitment to customers and partners?
From a strategy point of view, we have been working on improving our market coverage. We have partnered with the right set of partners by geography, industry, and solution to get our products to every customer, irrespective of the company size. We are creating solution sets with our partners that are driven by local needs but underpinned by globally effective technology, practices and services.
We also focus relentlessly on developing the capabilities of our partner companies, in the areas of finance, ability to underwrite customer risks, and an ability to execute opex-based deals among a lot of other things. So, coverage, competency, and capability are the 3Cs as we call it to achieve high customer satisfaction across the country.

We don't penalize our customers either on capacity or performance. So, whether it's our smallest customer or a hyper-scale customer, they get the same architecture. This has helped us increase the number of customers in the last year. This year, 23 percent of our business came from new customers. This encouraging development has an equally encouraging parallel amongst our existing customers.

What is your mode/channel of selling your products?
NetApp is a 100 per cent channel driven company. While we are introducing the channel ecosystem to NetApp we are equally focused on equipping the partner ecosystem with the skills they require to integrate efficient data storage solutions into their existing portfolios, and up-sell and cross-sell those to their existing customers. The NetApp Partner Program encourages partners to add new business capabilities, pursue new markets to grow revenue and increase profits while enabling them to go-to-market in the way that they want to and choose the best blend of products/services that address the customer's changing business needs. We are continually strengthening the partner ecosystem, creating new alliances, service providers and adding more System Integrators and Value Added Resellers.

Anushri Mondal
(anushrim@cybermedia.co.in)