Speakers

George Kurian is CEO at NetApp and a member of the Board of Directors. George joined the company in 2011, bringing his passion and relentless focus on execution. He was named CEO in June 2015.

In his previous role as NetApp executive vice president of Product Operations, George was responsible for the strategy and development of NetApp’s product and solutions portfolio. Before that, George was senior vice president of the Data ONTAP Group, overseeing development of the Data ONTAP operating system.

George joined NetApp as senior vice president of the Storage Solutions Group, where he was responsible for the solutions portfolio and joint partner technology integration.

Prior to joining NetApp, George was vice president and general manager of the Application Networking and Switching Technology Group at Cisco Systems. George’s diverse background also includes the role of vice president at Akamai Technologies, management consulting at McKinsey & Company, and leading software engineering and product management teams at Oracle Corporation. He is also an independent director on the Board of global health services company Cigna Corporation.

César Cernuda is the global President of NetApp, where he helps customers worldwide accelerate innovation, resilience, and growth in the data-driven economy. As the leader of NetApp’s go-to-market organization, Cernuda drives excellence and agility across sales, marketing, services, and customer success. With 30 years of leadership experience in enterprise technology and a customer-obsessed mindset, he ensures that NetApp delivers value and accelerates business outcomes for customers around the world.

Cernuda brings proven success transforming and scaling companies in international markets at the helm of sales, marketing, and product development teams. He joined NetApp in 2020 following a long career at Microsoft, where he served as president of Microsoft Asia Pacific, president of Microsoft Latin America, and global corporate vice president of the brand. At Microsoft, Cernuda was instrumental in accelerating the company’s transformation for the cloud era. He brings this perspective to NetApp’s enterprise customers who are navigating change in the era of intelligent data and AI.

Cernuda is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Executive Leadership Program and the Program for Management Development at IESE Business School – University of Navarra. He also completed the Leading Sustainable Corporations Programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.

Cernuda holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from ESIC Business & Marketing School.

Syam Nair is Chief Product Officer at NetApp, where he leads the company’s product and engineering teams to accelerate innovation in hybrid cloud and AI offerings and advance NetApp’s strategic vision for data-driven business growth. Mr. Nair is renowned as a disruptive innovator in the industry, bringing over 25 years of experience in scaling cloud platforms and driving hyper-growth.

Mr. Nair has an exceptional track record in incubating new technologies from the ground up and leading large teams through transformations at scale. During his tenure at Microsoft, Mr. Nair was part of the leadership team that built and expanded globally distributed Azure data services. At Salesforce, his leadership pioneered industry-defining innovations including Salesforce Data Cloud, the next generation Agentic platform.

Prior to joining NetApp, Mr. Nair doubled the scale of the world’s largest inline security cloud as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research & Development at Zscaler.

Mr. Nair holds a master’s degree in computer science and applications engineering from Goa University in India and an MBA in strategy and leadership from Indiana University – Kelley School of Business.

Sandeep is a driven, passionate, and creative business leader with a proven track record of leading business and product strategy, building innovative products, managing high performance organizations, and delivering business results at startups and Fortune 500 technology companies.

Sandeep is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Enterprise Storage at NetApp. Sandeep is responsible for a multi-billion data infrastructure portfolio spanning flash, block, object, and storage as a service. Prior to joining NetApp, Sandeep spent four years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in multiple roles, including Vice President of Product Management for Data Infrastructure and Vice President of Product Marketing for HPE Storage. Sandeep joined HPE from Pure Storage, where he led product marketing for FlashArray, and helped the company scale from pre-IPO $100M run rate to a public company with greater than $1B in revenue. Prior to Pure, Sandeep led product management and strategy for 3PAR, an enterprise storage company, from pre-revenue to greater than $1B in revenue – including four-year tenure at HP post-3PAR acquisition. Sandeep holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from UC, San Diego and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Pravjit (Prav) Tiwana is a technology executive with over 23 years of experience in building highly scaled cloud powered products, services and businesses. He is senior vice president and general manager responsible for accelerating NetApp’s Cloud Storage business across the three hyperscalers Azure, AWS & GCP. He is responsible for product, engineering, and PnL of NetApp’s cloud business.

Before joining NetApp, Pravjit was the Global Chief Technology Officer and CEO of APAC for Gemini, a Web3 company. During his time at Gemini, he transformed Gemini’s technology organization into a world-class product and engineering organization. Prior to Gemini, Pravjit spent almost 7 years at Amazon Web Services where he was a senior executive leading AWS Edge Services, which included Amazon CloudFront, AWS Edge Computing, and AWS Data Transfer Operations. Earlier in his career, he held product and engineering leadership roles both at Microsoft and Disney spanning close to 10 years.

Pravjit holds a master’s in business and engineering degree from India. He resides in Seattle with his wife (Payal), two daughters (Malika & Sanya), and their family dog (Nemo). In his spare time, Pravjit enjoys running, hiking, golfing and traveling the world.

Priyadarshi (PD) Prasad is the Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Storage Business Unit at NetApp. A seasoned technology executive, PD operates at the convergence of AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity, helping global organizations fortify their competitive moats and elevate customer experiences.

Prior to NetApp, he was the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at LightBeam.ai, where he pioneered identity-centric data security and automated privacy governance. PD also previously headed the core storage portfolio at Nutanix as VP/GM, driving massive product transformations across core data paths, business continuity, and disaster recovery. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, and an MBA from the S. P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai.