As CEO of NetApp, I have the privilege of speaking with thousands of technology leaders at the world's most innovative organizations. We recently asked one of our longtime enterprise customers why we continue to earn their trust year after year. He told us, I love that I can take on any workload, including AI, virtualized, containerized, on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge, and I already know it's gonna work because the data is on NetApp.

That feedback gets to the core of NetApp's mission. To deliver an Intelligent Data Infrastructure that empowers you to run any workload, with any data, anywhere. If you're an enterprise technology leader today, the challenges you face are monumental. You have to keep your most critical applications running on-premises and in multiple public clouds, keep all that data secure and do it all while controlling infrastructure costs. Then there's the challenge that defines this era: Adopting AI at scale to drive business results and competitive advantage.

As a community, we focus on models, silicon, power, and so much more when talking about AI. Yet, study after study confirms the same primary blocker: Enterprises don't have AI-ready data to feed their AI infrastructure, not consistently, not at scale. This decade of accelerating enterprise AI will be spent overcoming data gravity, breaking down silos, mapping metadata, and the context of data, and ensuring the safety and governance of your newly AI-ready data.

To do all this, you need a unified platform. One that handles your most demanding AI workloads, radically simplifies your data estate, and transforms disparate data into AI-Ready data in place, and at scale. That's why NetApp has built the NetApp Platform to help you build Intelligent Data Infrastructure for the AI era and beyond.

The NetApp Platform is an intelligent, governed infrastructure, built to turn distributed enterprise data into trusted AI-ready knowledge without requiring it to be moved, copied, or rearchitected. Whether on premises, or in the cloud, yourdata is always AI-ready and secure. So you can take on the most demanding tasks and solve the most complex problems. It's everything you need to future-proof your data infrastructure and your business for the road ahead.

To break down the technical architecture, I'll hand it over to our Chief Product Officer, Syam Nair.

Thanks, George. The NetApp Platform addresses the root cause directly. Data fragmentation and the inability to reliably serve enterprise AI with the right data in time to get the right business answers. NetApp has designed a strictly governed, 4-layer architecture that provides zero-copy, secure access to your heterogenous data anywhere it leaves. This is zero-copy data activation at scale. 

First, unified storage. NetApp literally invented modern unified storage over 2 decades ago. We have extended the NetApp Platform to support every modern workload, including tables, structured and unstructured data, built on this unified storage, serving block, file, an object at excess scale capacities, and massive performance. This exact same storage technology is natively embedded into the 3 largest public clouds as a 1st-party service, not simply marketplace offerings running as virtual machines, but actual services offered directly by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

With integrated replication, caching, and disaster recovery, you get simple but fully-featured data mobility and distribution that can directly feed AI models anywhere. Keep GPUs busy and support any major enterprise workload. And with our storage efficiency guarantee and automated data tiering, cold data is seamlessly offloaded to optimize flash costs. Whether deployed on premises in a public cloud, in dedicated sovereign clouds, or delivered as a service via NetApp Keystone with 99.999% of availability SLAs, you get one consistent operational model. From one console, data architects manage file, blocking object endpoints across hybrid clouds, with built-in data mobility and automated tiering, with no added operational friction.

Second, AI data services. Transforming dark, unstructured data into AI context traditionally means connecting multiple tools into fragile ETL data pipelines and copying data repeatedly. That slows everything down and delays time to results. The NetApp Platform can track all data, and metadata across your entire data estate without constant rediscovery or file systems scanning. And we are hard at work building AI data services directly into the NetApp Platform. Our vision is to take parameters from your data engineers and scientists, apply consistent governance, identify all relevant data sets, and transform data in place into vector embeddings, and open catalog formats like Apache Iceberg. This will preserve existing security permissions and data lineage, and dramatically simplify the time, space, and process as compared to traditional methods. 

As we complete our vision, the NetApp Platform will allow you to index your entire data estate, not just NetApp storage. This will allow you to autoderive a complete enterprise knowledge graph, paired with a decision fabric. While a knowledge graph maps connections, our decision fabric will capture the rationale behind business decisions. Flagging contradictions before automated actions ship. And all of this critical enterprise contextual data is now stored on the same trusted unified storage that's used for the underlying reference data. All on the most secure storage on the planet. The platform maximizes infrastructure value by leveraging accelerated computing and GPU acceleration to drive massive speed, and automatic cost savings across data analytics, AI model training, and real-time influencing workloads, with zero code changes.

At the developer level, we will provide an open cloud agnostic runtime where developers can build and deploy production AI agents using the model context protocol (MCP) and open APIs. All of which can natively leverage the AI-ready data made possible by the NetApp Platform. In just minutes, petaytes of dark, unstructured enterprise data are converted into governed zero-copy data sets, ready for any LLM, agent framework, or analytics engine. 

Third, the autonomous control plane, managing fragmented multicloud tools creates operational toil and security blind spots. NetApp Platform unifies fleet management into an API-first MCP native control plane. It aggregates AI OPS telemetry across your entire NetApp ecosystem, correlating logs, metrics, and alerts, and providing close loop remediation. Crucially, it will extend identity and access control to AI agents. By enforcing zero standing privilege, time bound credentials and multi-admin verification at query time, AI agents become tightly governed principles rather than security vulnerabilities. Built in operations agents continuously monitor health and security telemetry, so infrastructure can detect, respond, and recover on its own. 

Fourth, data resilience. This isn't so much an independent layer, but rather an inherent zero-trust mentality and set of capabilities built natively into the NetApp Platform, not bolted on. Storage is your last line of defense. NetApp integrates cyber resilience directly into the storage layer. Independently proven autonomous ransomware protection (ARP) uses real-time AI to detect 99% or more of malicious encryption attempts instantly. Combined with post-quantum ready encryption, immutable air gapped snapshots, and Zero RPO disaster recovery available in minutes. The NetApp Platform provides complete cyber resilience. And if an attack occurs, our automatic workflows enable clean-room recovery at petabyte scale. In minutes backed by our ransomware recovery guarantee. Upon threat detection, the platform autonomously blocks access. And locks immutable snapshots. Enabling malware free recovery in minutes. All of this is the NetApp Platform. It delivers AI-ready data built on unified storage with proactive protection and complete control. Everything works together so you can build an intelligent data infrastructure that accelerates your AI initiatives and your entire business.

Back to you, George.

What Syam just outlined is why the NetApp Platform stands alone. By unifying storage, AI data preparation, autonomous operations, and cyber resilience into a single cohesive architecture, the NetApp Platform removes the friction, holding back in a price innovation. You no longer have to compromise between cloud agility and enterprise control or between rapid AI adoption and rigorous data security. 

Whether you're accelerating generative AI models, optimizing core applications, or safeguarding your data against evolving cyber risks, The NetApp Platform ensures your data is ready for whatever comes next. So you can seize your AI advantage. 

Welcome to the era of AI ready data.

Welcome to the NetApp Platform.