SYDNEY, Australia - 25 July 2012
- In recognition of its work helping customers and
partners build private cloud solutions on the
Microsoft® platform, NetApp has won the 2012
Microsoft Private Cloud Partner of the Year award. The honour
reinforces NetApp's long-standing commitment to storage and storage
management solutions for Microsoft environments that enable
organisations to reduce costs, increase agility, improve
efficiency, and utilise proven platforms.
In its award entry, NetApp highlighted recent
work with ING DIRECT, the world's largest direct bank, on its 'Bank
in a Box' concept that enables the rapid provisioning of ING
DIRECT's complete operating environment. ING DIRECT is known for
its innovative online banking offerings; however, an antiquated
infrastructure for provisioning development and test environments
hindered ING DIRECT's ability to bring new products to market.
Despite a business goal of rapidly expanding service offerings,
provisioning could take over 12 weeks just to support creation of a
development environment.
"As a strategic priority, we needed to
deliver innovation faster, so we looked to NetApp and its partners
to help speed things up in a smart way," said Andrew Henderson,
CIO, ING DIRECT Australia. "With our Microsoft private cloud
solution built on FlexPod from NetApp and Cisco we reduced
environment provisioning from 12 weeks to 10 minutes, improving
developer productivity and business agility. Through the 'Bank in a
Box' private cloud solution, we're able to provide anyone in the
company with access to applications, services, configurations and
5.5 TB of data, with the assurances that they'll integrate
seamlessly with Microsoft standard technologies."
ING DIRECT also recently received the
Efficiency Innovation award at NetApp's eighth annual Innovation
Awards, which identify companies using smaller budgets for
equipment, people, power, space, and capacity - with the end
benefits of decreasing complexities and increasing operational
efficiency.
Mike Schutz, General Manager, Windows Server
and Management, Microsoft, said "Microsoft is pleased to recognise
NetApp as the Private Cloud Partner of the Year. Utilising their
comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft private cloud solutions,
NetApp aims to enable customers to reduce provisioning time,
increase productivity and improve business agility."
Peter O'Connor, Vice President and Managing
Director NetApp Australia and New Zealand, said "This award
highlights NetApp's commitment to our collaboration with our
partners and Microsoft in private cloud development. We are
dedicated to making the promise of cloud computing a reality for
businesses by helping them build flexible, efficient and agile
private cloud solutions."
About the Microsoft Private Cloud
Partner of the Year Award
The Private Cloud Partner of the Year Award
recognises the partner that excelled in offering innovative private
cloud solutions for their customers based on Windows Server 2008 R2
Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and related products. The winner
used the Microsoft platform for private cloud computing (for
dynamically pooling, allocating, provisioning, and managing cloud
resources) including, but not limited to:
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
- Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
- Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service
Portal 2.0
- Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager
- Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
- Microsoft System Center Service Manager
- Opalis
- Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions
that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business
breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and
consistently being recognised as a great place to work around the
world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well
as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Discover our
passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster
at www.netapp.com/au.
Press Contact:
Katy Berg
Weber Shandwick for NetApp
02 9994 4482
kberg@webershandwick.com
NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further,
faster, and FlexPod are trademarks or registered trademarks of
NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft
and Windows Server are registered trademarks and Hyper-V is a
trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other brands or products
are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders
and should be treated as such. Use of the word "partner" or
"partnership" does not imply a legal partnership between NetApp and
any other company.