Playing warily with the colossal packages of Data Date:   Thursday , November 29, 2012 Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) is a publicly traded computer storage and data management company. Founded in 1992, the company has made major acquisitions since inception and plans for a rapid global extension. Current Technology trends: Huge chunk of data is engendered each second, and analysts estimate it is growing at an average of 50 percent per year. Such colossal packages of data have become a huge defy for the organizations to handle them efficiently. The major challenge for most of the organizations are not well equipped with infrastructures to manage such scale and are not agile enough to align to the business. This immediate challenge has created a need for the businesses to have new solutions that enables greater efficiency, leverages existing infrastructure, and supports scale, all without sacrificing growth. The answer to this devastating challenge is to have an agile data infrastructure that will help business go further and faster, and deliver impact faster with intelligent data management. The organization should be able to achieve non-disruptive operations with immortal data availability, scale without limits and without complexity with infinite data scaling. Strategies to combat Competition: The innovation and the technology advancement that we provide as against to our competition has made our ONTAP storage operating system the most widely deployed operating system in the world across the storage industry. Our strength is providing an agile data infrastructure which drives efficiently, is intelligent, massively scalable, is infinite and has the ability to store data for the longest time and is immortal. Our partners are also a key strength to our organization. Together with them we provide best of breed solutions to address key customer challenges and requirements. Partnering with NetApp: ‘Partnering is our strategy’. NetApp works closely with several other technology players and implementation partners to bring the best of the breed solutions which provide huge business benefits to the customers. Building its partner strength of three factors – competence, coverage and capacity, NetApp works with an idea of having partners who will complement each other. We are making huge investments to ensure our partners are trained and certified so they have to deliver the technology and solutions to customers across verticals and geographies. Major challenges: There is a need in the market to have an infrastructure that is not only 24x7 but serves business 24x7. Most of the organizations have infrastructure that are not agile enough to align with the needs of the business. We have the technology that enables this. Our challenge is to deliver this to our customers. NetApp finds a huge opportunity to grow in this space with its offerings and emphasizes on increasing its coverage to reach all the customers, verticals and tap newer geographies. Current priority: Even though majority of the Global 100 enterprises have NetApp as storage of choice, we still does not have our rightful market share in India. My focus is to ensure that we deliver the benefits which most of the top global customers derive from us to the Indian Enterprises. Our key differentiator is our technology which sets us apart and ahead of our competitors. It is our key differentiator as against the rest in the storage space and together with our strong partnerships, we are confident to replicate our success here. A massive charisma in India, NetApp has employee strength of over 2000 personnel and seven offices across India – Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune. The largest R&D center of NetApp which is the largest engineering centre globally is in Bangalore and lot of key engineering work is carried out from here. Over the years, this center has interacted with customers in India to help them deploy an efficient, scalable and reliable Data Infrastructure. Expansion has always been a part of the company and will further entail to it, be it employee or areas of operation, based on the need for it. This revered status within the IT customer, partner and influencer eco-system aligns well with NetApp’s vision in building businesses collaboratively. Roadmap ahead: We are a technology company and we partner to deliver best of breed solutions and implementations to customers. We want to be the preferred data management vendor for all organizations. NetApp promises to stand by its commitment of being an innovator be it for mission critical applications, virtualized environment or cloud. We were recently announced as the 51st Most Innovative Company by Forbes and we were the only storage company to feature in top 100 in two consecutive years. (As told to Anamika Sahu)