A powerful customer by proxy

There is a little-known group within NetApp whose job is to be a real customer – buy products, call for support, make new feature requests, and yes, complain when something doesn’t work right. It’s called NetApp on NetApp, and the lessons learned help contribute to much better products and ways of doing business.

The team is small but its voice is large.

“When I was given the great privilege of running the NetApp-on-NetApp program, I think it's very important to … really help make our customers as successful as they can be,” said Matt Brown, Sr. Executive Director of the program.

Years ago, Brown was a NetApp customer who made his way to join the company. But he always retained that customer point of view, which has served him well.

“We're not a sales organization,” he said. “But what people don't know is we also have that same engagement with our product base as a customer. So then when I stand in front of a customer, I can share some of the challenges we've faced, how we solved them with our technology, and where the technology may have had shortfalls.

“People love that candidness and it builds trust and respect.”

Brown works closely with internal product teams to tackle both common challenges and emerging opportunities – strengthening cyber resilience, modernizing data infrastructure, transforming cloud strategies, and driving AI innovation.

And like most companies, there are multiple ongoing projects trying to capitalize on these initiatives.

For Dave Blodgett, NetApp VP of IT, Cloud Infrastructure Operations, he believes one of the first steps is to evaluate the risk.

“The very first thing that you tend to do as an infrastructure person who's concerned with managing systems at scale is you first look at your incumbent technology portfolio,” Blodgett said. “You abhor bringing in new technologies because every new technology becomes an extension of your attack surface.”

And risk is not an option.

“We remove risk to mitigate against the possibility of what is literally the most existential threat to companies today from a data resilience standpoint,” he said. “So you start thinking through all the different scenarios that you've got to solve for and have high levels of assurance that the data is going to be available when you need it.”

Simplification becomes key. And that’s a big reason Blodgett is a huge fan of universal storage.

“It is extremely compelling that you can have a common control plane across your entire global storage surface and take advantage of the ransomware mitigation technologies,” he said. “That is very powerful to somebody like me who manages infrastructure day-to-day for a living and who makes infrastructure buying decisions.”

Blodgett firmly believes that the job of infrastructure is rooted in proven confidence.

“It’s very, very powerful to simplify complex things,” he said. “If we can do that, it’s very compelling.”

Simplicity, scalability, visibility, integration … these are also critically important to Rajesh Shriyan, NetApp VP, Chief Architect and Data Analytics for Enterprise Architecture.

His team is on the leading edge of the company’s innovation, figuring out big technology shifts, and determining how to rationalize them into existing complex systems.

“What we do day in and day out is to figure out where – and I'm talking as an internal customer – is NetApp going in terms of strategy,” he said. “What kind of offerings needs to be created, what kind of integration needs to be created? What kind of master data needs to be sent back and forth? How do we ensure that we build the end-to-end reporting?

“Once that gets figured out and we break into projects and programs, then we start figuring out the next-level architecture. How will the systems talk to each other? How is the data getting passed? And so on.”

To keep these projects viable and profitable, Shriyan has to be methodical. System integration and business outcomes are paramount.

“Talking to people like me in the application context always resonates because we're always trying to figure it out,” he said. “If a hyperscaler needs my data, the language we speak is, ‘Hey? Do you have an API?’ If that's the case, I'm going to do a bulk API call and send all the data that you want.”

It’s clear that the cloud has redefined the enterprise equation.

“We talk about big technology shifts. I think the biggest change happened, in my books, when cloud became a reality,” he said.

With these enterprise projects – from security, infrastructure, and cloud – the latest impact has been AI.

Praveen Chitarie is a manager of IT, Enterprise Cloud Services, for NetApp.

Every day, he sees the enormous scale required for cloud and AI projects – not to mention the data integration and integrity.

“It is my responsibility to make sure our infrastructure is always available and secure, particularly for AI,” Chitarie said. “Automation is very important in order to fully leverage AI capabilities.”

For Chitarie, sometimes less is more when it comes to AI infrastructure. In other words, how do you consolidate and optimize in ways that make data availability more efficient?

“Let’s take cloud for example,” he said. “We are very global across the organization, and we have various applications where the teams are accessing the same data set from different parts of the globe. One challenge is how can I eliminate someone from Bangalore or APAC accessing a U.S. data center?”

Chitarie said that when we add AI workloads to the mix, the latency problems escalate.

“So basically, what we have done is integrate cloud technologies with the caching features of NetApp to improve read/write times,” he said. “This hybrid cloud model works really well to drastically reduce overall latency.”

Also, having good AI partners help.

“We constantly keep ourselves in a better position by introducing the right type of products in the market,” he said. “With NVIDIA, we are closely aligned, so we can test new developments quickly. Honestly, I think we are way ahead of the curve compared to any of our competitors.”

The NetApp-on-NetApp program epitomizes the company's commitment to understanding and solving real customer challenges. By acting as a genuine customer, the team helps refine and enhance NetApp's offerings. This unique approach has led to significant improvements in product quality and business practices.

The insights gained from this program are invaluable, driving advancements in areas like cyber resilience, data infrastructure modernization, cloud strategy transformation, and AI innovation.

Together, these efforts demonstrate NetApp's dedication to not only staying ahead of technological shifts but also ensuring its solutions are robust, efficient, and reliable for customers.