SUNNYVALE, Calif.-June 21, 2012-A culture of innovation provides businesses with the technology, products, people, and services that allow them to outpace, out innovate, and outperform the competition to achieve remarkable results for business.

During this year's eighth annual Innovation Awards, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) honored a few of the exceptional visionaries who joined in the journey with NetApp to show that IT can be foundational to business success. The award winners have one thing in common: They had the vision to think differently to achieve results that are remarkable. NetApp announced the winners and finalists of the Innovation Awards program on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, during a distinguished awards ceremony at The Tech Museum in San Jose, California.

"Change is hard. The Innovation Awards are about recognizing people with the courage to think differently about how IT can drive business," said Dave Hitz, founder and executive vice president of NetApp. "These role models show what is possible, and hopefully they will inspire others to follow."

Dave Hitz discusses the business impact and game-changing innovations customers and partners achieved as well as the importance of having a culture of innovation. View Dave's video blog post.

NetApp thanks everyone who submitted achievements to the 2012 Innovation Awards program. The over 200 global nominations that were submitted by customers and partners validate the fact that an agile IT foundation can deliver great outcomes for business success. Customer submissions came from wide-ranging industries, including healthcare, financial services, entertainment, energy, and education, each highlighting new and innovative ways to impact business. The award categories address the business impact of IT: Efficiency Innovation, Flexibility Innovation, and Visionary Leadership. In addition to these categories, The Innovator of the Year category recognizes one winner from each of four global geographies: Americas, APAC, EMEA, and U.S. Public Sector.

2012 NetApp Innovation Award Winners and Finalists

Supporting Quotes

• Andrew Henderson, CIO, ING DIRECT
  "ING DIRECT Australia implemented an efficient storage capability that has given the business a competitive edge in the retail banking sector by enabling ING DIRECT's frontline developers and testers to bring new banking products to market faster. We were able to accelerate banking application testing and refreshes from six weeks to one day by leveraging NetApp's on-demand private cloud."
• Gary Bateman, CIO, Iowa Workforce Development
  "Iowa Workforce Development executed a cost-effective virtualization project leveraging NetApp storage, which saved our state government agency $6.5 million annually and accelerated the deployment of 1,500 virtual desktops across Iowa in less than six months. The scalability of our storage infrastructure is instrumental in reducing storage needs by nearly 50% while improving public services to Iowa's employers and workers."
• Joe Shields, President and Owner, IP Pathways
  "IP Pathways' focus has always been to partner with companies that consolidate and simplify data storage and management, while optimizing the user experience for business needs. In collaborating with NetApp we've created a relationship that supports innovative award-winning IT deployments for our customers."
• Jeff Bell, Former COO, Mercy Healthcare System
  "Mercy Healthcare built a state-of-the-art data center and implemented a flexible cloud infrastructure to effectively deploy an Electronic Medical Health Record for storing and protecting patient information and, in the future, to support smaller clinics and healthcare systems. With the help of the NetApp FlexPod® architecture, we have saved over 40% of storage space, reduced power consumption by 50%, and now provide rapid access to and data protection for 1,742K patients."
• Rahul Sharma, Assistant Vice President, IT Network Operations, Oxigen Services India Pvt. Ltd.
  "Oxigen was successful in achieving business goals to save costs and increase capabilities by implementing storage efficiency, deduplication, thin provisioning, and server virtualization features using NetApp's storage infrastructure. Since implementing our new data structure Oxigen has saved 40% on storage efficiency and 20% on cost savings."
• Scott Gnau, President, Teradata Labs
  "Teradata's storage foundation is a key part of our ability to handle challenging data warehousing and analytic workloads while improving performance and allowing for uninterrupted operations. The integration of NetApp E-Series storage solutions contributed to our growth in 2011 and helped our customers make the best decision possible, enabling them to outperform and outmaneuver their competition."
• Erwin Schuster, Sr. Consultant, Enterprise Architecture and Strategy, T-Systems
  "To better serve T-Systems' multinational corporations and public sector institutions, we are deploying a reference cloud infrastructure to deliver and operate cloud-enabled applications with rapid development and go-to-market cycles. With storage and management from NetApp, T-Systems offers virtualization across the entire stack for maximum scalability, availability, and efficiency while customers benefit from reduced risk and accelerated applications lifecycle management."
• Michael Blake, Director, Information Technology, Verizon Network Technology and Corporate Systems
  "Verizon successfully established a virtualized standard operating environment to merge multiple and dated IT infrastructures without disrupting service to 120,000 employee portal users. With NetApp Snapshot™ and SnapVault® technology, backups that previously took 12 to 20 hours and impacted overall performance now take just a few minutes. As a result, we are able to back up numerous databases every two hours, delivering more robust data protection."

The NetApp Innovation Awards program distinguishes itself by relying on a prestigious third-party panel of international judges for the four main categories. These judges determine the award winners based on their outside expertise and a critical, unbiased assessment of real-world deployments at customer sites.

NetApp 2012 Innovation Award Judges

• Deni Connor, Principal Analyst, Storage Strategies NOW; and Contributing Editor, InformationWeek
• Carsten Knop, Senior Business Editor, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
• Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media India Pvt. Ltd.
• Benjamin S. Woo, previously Program Vice President, Worldwide Storage Systems Research; and Lead Analyst, Big Data Infrastructure

Additional Resources

• See past award winners online.
• Read more about our distinguished panel of judges.
• Read more information on the Innovation Awards program.
• See innovations that have transformed the economics of IT.
• Transform your business with an agile data infrastructure.
• Connect with NetApp experts and data storage enthusiasts in the NetApp Community.
• Follow NetApp on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NetApp #InnovationAwards12 #AgileNetapp
• Join NetApp on Facebook: www.facebook.com/NetApp
• View NetApp videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/NetAppTV
• Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=111681

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

Press Contact:
NetApp PR
(408) 822-3287
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