Empowering Digital Growth By Integrating AI and Cloud in Business Transformation

INSIGHT Presentation 2024

As an IT leader, my experience running an IT shop has taught me one thing—NetApp has been the backbone of my storage infrastructure, offering reliability and peace of mind. This reliability was one of the key reasons I joined NetApp. My journey with the company has been transformative. I want to share a different perspective on NetApp's transformation—moving from a traditional data storage hardware company to a comprehensive data management platform provider. This shift has fundamentally changed how we do business and enable our customers.

Every company, including NetApp, is in the midst of a transformation, but it's essential to understand why before we dive into how we are evolving. The core of any transformation is driven by the need to meet new business challenges and tap into growth opportunities. ForNetApp, we've moved beyond selling just storage arrays or hardware. We now provide solutions that span secure, intelligent, and fast data management platforms.

This shift means our customers are changing too. We no longer only engage with storage administrators. Instead, we now work with digital officers, business transformation leaders, and business unit managers. Our focus has broadened beyond selling traditional hardware to include cloud services that our customers can purchase through hyper scalers, often without needing to engage directly with a NetApp representative.

This change brings unique challenges to how we do business. We've shifted from a CapEx-driven, high-touch sales model to a more hands-off, subscription-based approach enabled through cloud partnerships. This transition reflects the broader transformation occurring withinNetApp, as our product portfolio, customer base, and sales channels have evolved significantly.

As NetApp transforms, so does our internal IT organization. To keep pace with the rapid changes in our business model, we've undertaken our digital transformation journey, built on four fundamental building blocks:

1. CRM, CPQ, and ERP Platforms: Our customer engagement and backend systems, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Configure Price Quote (CPQ), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), are being reengineered to accommodate new business processes. These systems ensure that we can engage with customers in a modern, efficient way, track opportunities, and manage the end-to-end order lifecycle—from sale to fulfillment.
2. Cloud Data Warehouse: Consolidating our numerous data marts into a single cloud data warehouse has provided us with a single source of truth. By centralizing all operational and executive data, we can ensure consistency and accuracy in our reporting, whether for internal use or external stakeholders.
3. AI-Enabled Tools: AI is embedded in both our products and the internal tools we use. From ONTAP to Cloud Insights, we're incorporating AI to automate and enhance everything from data analysis to system performance. Additionally, we've built an internal AI platform to help our engineers and developers accelerate productivity, with over 80 use cases identified and many already in production.
4. Hybrid Multi-Cloud Ecosystem: Our IT infrastructure now spans public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem environments, creating a truly hybrid, multi-cloud ecosystem. This global, distributed model ensures that our data is accessible, secure, and performant, no matter where it resides.

One of the most exciting aspects of NetApp's transformation is how AI and cloud technologies reshape our operations. The AI platforms we've implemented allow us to streamline development and operations across various functions—sales, marketing, finance, or engineering.

Our hybrid multi-cloud architecture is at the heart of this transformation. We now operate with a distributed data center model where our developers and users interact seamlessly across different public, private, or on-premises clouds without knowing where the workloads are running. This flexibility has been a game-changer in enabling faster development cycles, improving performance, and ensuring security across our entire infrastructure.

It's important to highlight that this transformation would not have been possible without the strength of NetApp's technology portfolio. NetApp's ONTAP, Cloud Insights, andBlueXP have created a seamless multi-cloud environment. These tools enable us to manage, replicate, and secure data across a globally distributed ecosystem, whether for AI workloads, disaster recovery, or routine operations. Our data management capabilities ensure we can bring the correct data to the suitable AI model at the right time, all while maintaining security and performance standards.

Through this transformation, we've also significantly reduced our operational costs.We've gone from seven data centers to just two, with plans to consolidate further. By leveraging public cloud services for most of our applications—about 78% of our applications are now in the cloud—we're operating with increased efficiency and modern infrastructure, all while ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery.

Our transformation at NetApp has been extensive, and while it comes with its challenges, it's ultimately driving innovation and enabling growth. The combination of advancedAI tools, a flexible hybrid multi-cloud architecture, and streamlined customer engagement processes has empowered our teams to work more efficiently and deliver better solutions.

As we continue to evolve, our internal IT team remains committed to enabling NetApp's vision of becoming an intelligent data management platform company. Suppose you want to learn more about our journey or explore how NetApp's solutions can help your transformation. In that case, we encourage you to contact our NetApp on NetApp team for a practitioner's perspective on how these technologies can be applied to your business.