When does a hot-ticket company in a cooling market jump on the bandwagon of a new technology? @NetApp Inc. is transforming its healthy storage business into #datamanagement for #multicloud computing environments. Tuning out media hype and Wall Street analysts, the company instead let customers, empowered by interactive marketing, call the play. “Our customers aren’t talking to us about storage anymore; they’re talking to us about data and what their data challenges are,” said Jean English (pictured), chief marketing officer of NetApp. NetApp is helping existing customers, like storage admins and storage architects, move to cloud; it is also reaching out to new customers, like cloud enterprise architects. English and her colleague Annalisa Camarillo, head of global content strategy, development and operations at NetApp, explained the company’s new direction during the NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas. They spoke in exclusive interviews with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), guest host and principal at The CTO Advisor. (* Disclosure below.) This week, theCUBE spotlights Jean English and Annalisa Camarillo in our Women in Tech feature. Customers help NetApp help them Of all storage sellers, NetApp may have the least reason to hurry out of the market. Global enterprise storage technology factory revenue dipped down 0.5 percent year over year in the first fiscal quarter of 2017, according to IDC Research Inc. It rose a mere 2.9 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2017. NetApp placed third in Q217 storage revenue behind Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. in second and first place, respectively. However, with 16.7 percent year-over-year growth, NetApp is the only company in the top five to grow its storage profits in the past year; all others suffered losses. Nevertheless, NetApp has read the signs and understands that simple storage is not going to satisfy its customers going forward. Data monetization and multicloud have come up far too often in conversations with customers recently. And NetApp is heeding and branching into these areas, according to English. Years ago, the company faced a similar sink-or-swim challenge: “Virtualization, virtualized environments could have killed us; made us stronger,” English said. Today, the company is confident that it can turn cloud to its advantage in much the same way. “We embrace it holistically,” English added. Aside from technology to integrate data and drive insight from it, NetApp is also increasingly invested in compliance. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) is a growing concern. Here, again, customers’ opinions are informing NetApps’ approach. “We’ve been actually consulting and talking with customers about what they want to do with data compliance,” English said.
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