The storage specialist is going to look beyond its traditional hunting ground of IT/ITES. By Prashant L Rao
For many years now, NetApp has been a popular choice in the IT/ITES/MNC space and it has sold lots of storage boxes built around its Data OnTap OS that just work. A decade back when other vendors were talking about SAN, NetApp was talking Unified Storage. Today, that technology has come of age and with 10/40 GbE enabling IP storage, the company’s IP-SAN, DAS and NAS in a single box approach is looking good. As Anil Valluri the newly appointed President – India & SAARC Operations at NetApp India put it, “Data OnTap is a bulletproof, mission-critical OS. The box is incidental.”
Go to market strategy
“We offer intelligent, immortal and infinite storage. It’s intelligent insofar as we can do analytics on the basis of usage and provide automation and so on. It’s immortal in the sense of being able to ensure that your data outlives you. Lastly, it’s infinite in terms of providing up to 20 TB of storage,” he explained.
Valluri’s contention is that there’s heaps of demand for the kind of storage that NetApp sells in markets like the enterprise, mid-market and government that have hitherto been untapped by the vendor. “There are big opportunities in surveillance, Big Data, VDI, test & dev, shared virtual environments…,” he added.
Under Valluri’s leadership, NetApp will get its coverage in place. “We have covered the MNCs but we haven’t tapped sufficiently into the Indian companies be it enterprise, mid-market or the government space. We need to retrofit, add and create value with our customers’ existing investments,” he said outlining his strategy.
“We will surround our customers with virtualization (Flexpod), test & dev for SAP environments etc, surveillance (E series acquisition) and backup & archival (dedupe),” he added.
NetApp will continue to follow a 100% channel-based model. “We have over 80 partners. My challenge is to put together a great team and get them to work with Indian customers and show them the value of innovation with PoCs, demo equipment, events and CIO round tables et al. From branding to customer touch to adopting technology to working with ISVs like SAP and Microsoft—we will take advantage of our partner’s strengths,” he said.
Valluri’s clear that he’s not going to be happy with anything less than outpacing the overall storage market. He’s also clear that it’s not just storage for the sake of storage. “I don’t want to do a storage play, I want to do a data center play along with our partners. It has to be a full stack story,” he said.
For the channel, NetApp holds out the carrot of high-margin services. “We are very channel friendly from the services standpoint. We give a large part of our technology for our partners to build their services around it. Unlike other vendors who want all services to be given to them,” explained Valluri.
Earlier, NetApp was organized by region. Now it is targeting customers by enterprise, mid-market, government etc. The aim is to protect the existing IT/ITES business and go after fresh business outside those boundaries.
Proof of the pudding
When it comes to the Cloud, NetApp has a strong story with service providers being customers whether it’s TCS Ion or the Cloud plays of BSNL, HCL and Hexaware. “The virtualization story plays well for the Cloud service providers. Our play with Cisco is for the private Cloud. Globally, we have been very successful in this area and we will replicate that here,” said Valluri.
He signed off stating that India’s first metro cluster, spread across different locations, had been deployed by Volkswagen India, which was a NetApp customer.
Valluri’s clearly got big plans for NetApp. With his background, he used to run Sun India, it would be foolish to underestimate him.
