Unprecedented change delivers unprecedented opportunity

We are living and doing business in a time of unprecedented change in every facet of our lives, and transformation is the key to staying ahead of the curve and meeting new challenges wherever they arise to ensure growth and success in the future. The pace of change has never been faster and with that comes a plethora of new challenges and opportunities.

According to a recent McKinsey Global Survey of executives, their companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years as a result of the pandemic. They have also accelerated the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios by seven years.^{www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever} McKinsey further reports that the changes made through these accelerated timeframes are here to stay.

At NetApp we understand this, and we are transforming our organization to align to the rapidly evolving needs of our customers and partners—and we know that transformation will be ongoing. Everything we are doing is positioning NetApp, our partners, and our customers to leverage the opportunities that transformation creates for all of us.

The accelerating pace of digital transformation is creating new opportunities for incredible growth in our industry, and we are seizing these opportunities. We are reshaping our solutions and how customers access them, including both Opex and Capex, wherever their data resides today, and more importantly, where they need it to reside tomorrow.

In the spring, our President, César Cernuda, announced changes to our go-to-market (GTM) model and global sales organization to enable us to move to an even more customer- and partner-centric engagement model. This model will enable us to support our customers wherever they are on their transformation journey, drive growth, and deliver success on-premises, in the world’s leading clouds, and in the hybrid cloud—wherever data resides.

At that time, César announced my newly established role as Chief Commercial Officer tasked with building a new, scalable GTM motion and strategy to help us achieve our strategic goals over the next few years and beyond, driving the transformation of our sales force and worldwide partnerships.

We are building on almost three decades of trust and success in the marketplace and our vision is to build on our strengths to create a robust, cloud-centric, solution-specific partner ecosystem that is capable of leading engagements with the customer line-of-business decision-makers. Equally important, we are actively seeking to work with customers who may not know our impressive track record—those organizations that are born in the cloud and have no legacy infrastructure to migrate.

We are centralizing our activities, increasing productivity, and simplifying how partners and customers do business with us. We are simplifying our processes and strengthening our teams to scale our delivery of global industry-leading solutions in both traditional and digital sales environments.

A great example of this is NetApp’s new digital selling platform, Explore, which streamlines the way partners engage with us by eliminating manual processes. Explore simplifies partner-selling, expands the customer base, elevates the customer experience, increases the customer lifetime value, and delivers growth. With Explore, NetApp partners can now attract, engage, and scale. Learn more about Explore here.

We are moving into the next phase of our journey, and it gives me great pleasure to introduce three new members of my leadership team who will be helping us to realize our vision as we transform for the future: Jenni Flinders, Karen Goodman, and Mark Hill.

Our new Senior Vice President of Channel and Partner Ecosystems, Jenni Flinders, is responsible for defining the worldwide strategy for our next-generation channels model and working with our partners to bring more solutions to our customers.

Jenni is leading the transformation of our Partner Strategy Globally, from Programs and investments to enablement and new specialization areas as we innovate with our Cloud team.

Jenni will work with our Business Units to design and execute the Partner GTM strategy for each of our solution areas and help our partners deliver more value to our customers.

Jenni brings a wealth of IT industry expertise from her more than 27-year career, and a track record of leadership success both nationally and globally so there is a good chance your paths have already crossed. With experience at both Microsoft and IBM, she comes to us from VMware Inc., where she held the position of Vice President and Global Channel Chief with the responsibility for leading the Global Partner Sales and Technology organization.

Our new Vice President, Commercial is Karen Goodman, who is responsible for defining the next-generation GTM strategy and vision for our important commercial segment. She will report directly to me while partnering closely across NetApp with our geo sales leaders and channel partners to expand our commercial customer base.

Karen spent the past 8 years at Microsoft, where she was most recently US Chief Transformation Officer, responsible for driving cultural transformation to support the digital transformation journey for customers and partners. At Microsoft, Karen also led national/regional sales, partner and customer-facing delivery organizations. She has also held leadership roles at Booz Allen Hamilton, Blackbaud and FoxNews.

Our new Vice President, Enterprise Strategy, Mark Hill, is responsible for designing and overseeing the optimal go-to-market strategy and blueprint for NetApp’s enterprise and global segments, which represents NetApp’s largest accounts. He will define our go-to-market strategy and vision to extend the value of NetApp technology within our existing customer base as well as design strategies to expand our customer base, identifying the most critical growth opportunities and building a model that focuses on the highest priority investment areas.  

Mark brings a robust background of industry and technology leadership where he has demonstrated his ability to tackle the largest of cross-company initiatives to drive transformational change. Mark joins us from Cisco where he spent the last five years as VP Monetization driving Cisco’s transformation to a software and cloud-centric business. Prior to Cisco, Mark spent 24 years at Microsoft where he held various leadership positions.

I am excited to welcome Jenni, Karen, and Mark because they represent significant steps forward in our reimagined strategy and the work, we are doing to strengthen our teams across the organization.

We will continue to transform our organization because our customers’ and partners’ needs are continually evolving, and their own transformations do not rest. We will work to grow, transform, build loyalty, and drive revenue and profitability for customers, partners, and ourselves.

Our experience will stand us in good stead. In fact, we were just honored by Microsoft with their prestigious global Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Customer Experience—recognizing our end-to-end capabilities for supporting customers from pre-sales through implementation to post-sales support. At NetApp we are particularly proud of what this says about our commitment to being a customer-centric, data-driven software company. It is indicative of the future we hold in our hands, and we are transforming to achieve that future.