hello everyone we are kicking off our the cubes live coverage here of NetApp converge I'm your host Rebecca Knight and I'm sitting alongside my co-host and analyst Rob stretche Rob thefloor is starting to fill up here you feel the energy you feel the excitement the momentum that net apppp has because they got they've got a focused plan yeah and I think this has always been a really great culture that net apppp has always had and it's carried forward and Ithink part of that is the people at net app and the partners and that's what we're surrounded by today youfeel the buzz well I'd like to introduce our first guest of the day George krian chief executive officer of netup thank you so much for coming on the cube George thanks for being here we're excited to have you so AI of course isthe buzz but now more than ever companies businesses are feeling this pressure toaccelerate Innovation and improve employee productivity um unlock new customer experiences can you talk a little bit about net apppp in the context of this and how intelligent data infrastructure and unified data storage play this play such an important role in empowering companies todo what they're feeling the pressure to do absolutely well thanks for being here we believe that data is the secret to unlock employee productivity engaging C customer experiences and sort of accelerate the pace of you know customer success in businesses around the world and data is already driving competitive Advantage for datadriven cooperations as opposed to those that cannot harness their data one of the keys to being able to harness and unify your data for competitive Advantage is an intelligent data infrastructure and it enables the two parallel requirements for business success you know transformational flexibility to be able to use any data with any application anywhere while being able to have Simplicity to drive efficiency and cost and resilience and security and to take advantage of your existing skills we do that in a combination of three capabilities one is Unified data storage which is the foundation of our platform where you can essentially unify any data across any application type and be able to integrate that into anywhere the data might live The Edge the cloud you know different types of your data center environments the second is to integrate a set of intelligent data services especially to deal with the new threat uh you know landscape and the third is operational capabilities to enhance team productivity optimize and improve sustainability and so we're really excited at what the offerings are and our messages hearing residents and customers which has driven our competitive advantage over the last year and our momentum heading into the new year yeah youdefinitely have that momentum and Ithink again having been at net app you know previously andseen it I've always loved the culture all the way back to the toasters and you know when ontap has been that common theme throughout I think some of the things that we see are you know really you're into your fy2 now and you're starting to lay out what your strategic priorities and initiatives are what are some of those strategic priorities and initiatives that you're going to be focused on in your fy2 I think there's a few of them that we talked about with our field teams that we've been working on for quite a while in the product organization the first is to modernize our customers data center environment we introduced today uh you know robust Suite of the world's highest performing flash storage that has a broad range of values to our clients across file and block and object storage and we're super excited at that portfolio the second is to integrate security capabilities and protection capabilities across all of our platforms not only the highest performance flash platforms with capacity flash our block storage object storage our Cloud portfolio and our software defined offerings and we do that with the industry's more Secure Storage environments where we can detect you know uh malicious threats protect against them and recover veryquickly and we are underwriting our confidence with the industry's only storage ransomware protection guarantee the third of course has been the work that we're doing with the hyperscalers where we have integrated the industry's best storage and data management platform in all the public clouds we've seen strong acceleration in the number of clients the workloads that we're engaging and of course the future is really around AI net apppp has strong offerings for geni uh for model training for inferencing and I think that what we see is you know two important things right one is we hold a lot of the world's most important unstructured data and so we're bringing AI to the data and allowing our clients to be able to use their data very simply and effectively for AI as well as gen AI is the most classic hybrid Cloud you know application because you might do training in one place but you'll be doing inferencing everywhere yeah and Ithink again that to me and what we see in the market as well when we doanalysis we have a partner ETR is exactly that people are bringing AI to the data not necessarily the data to Ai and being in the clouds maybe you want to do training up there but you want to do fine-tuning on some really delicate data that's down in there so thatmakes total sense yeah so we're super excited you know we've worked for many years to architect this super flexible very intelligent data infrastructure anduh we're seeing the payoff of that so as you said AI is the future and so many companies and organizations aretrying to figure out how they reap the benefits of AI so what kind of advice do you give thechief Executives that you're talking to day in day out about how to implement an intelligent data infrastructure and really unlock the benefits wetalk about three or four things there I think the first is you know understand where in your organization you can get most impact and value from AI uh that's really a business strategy question the second is to organize for Success which is to build an AI Center of Excellence where you can bring together all of the different roles and teams to work together data science data engineering your it infrastructure teams your security Architects and so on the third is to build the data Foundation that you need to serve those models so here what we talk about is unifying the data you know both structured and unstructured data segregating them from the systems you know most clients have had their data unlock you know locked up in systems but now unify it so that they really become an asset to the business and then the last is start to think about policy right for security for privacy for model versioning for model transparency and so we're really excited about the range of things we can do for clients and the hyperscalers for example are recognizing it with us and other partners like Nvidia and Lenovo are recognizing it with us where we're building joint solutions to enable our clients W who which we'll have on later on with sand deep actually so Ithink that shows the power of partnership Ithink to that point the Partnerships that you do have with Microsoft and Amazon and Google arepretty noteworthy Ithe way that you approach it how do you really look at that portfolio and the offerings in particular and how in terms of supporting cloud services and AI initiatives because they kind of like we were just chatting about a second ago they go kind of hand inand absolutely you know we see more and more clients are hybrid and multicloud in their architecture at the application portfolio level and one of the really hard challenges that they have to dealwith is how do I you know have my data be managed and unified across these distributed Landscapes and we worked with the cloud providers for many years to enable a an integrated hybrid Cloud experience and what we mean by that is that you have the ability to deploy a workload and an application wherever you want and bring your data to it but the operational experience the security experience the you know performance resilience and you know customer experience is absolutely unified and that has played out more and more to our advantage we are doing a lot more with the cloud providers you know weare integrating our data management technology with their Cloud AI platform so for example we showed Integrations with vertex and with bedrock and you'll see it with others so that clients can have a hybrid experience they can use those Cloud platforms but protect and secure their data and so keep the customer at the center realize that everybody needs to partner for success and you know I think it's a powerful endorsement of our unique competitive technology portfolio and the fact that we are the specialist at scale in storage and data management yeah I was just going to ask aboutthis culture of innovation thatRob has talked about um that he knows so well and obviously you how are you continuing to drive it because Innovation is going to be what will separate thetrue competitors here I think it's sort of three of four elements to it right I think the first is to provide Focus to the class of problems we are trying to address and so what we are really good at is to be the specialist in data infrastructure and so that you know provides context and grounding for our Engineers the second is to keep a customer Centric mindset you know go and listen to our customers with humility and understanding and empathy so that we can really deeply understand their problems and the third is to encourage people to take risk right to you cannot succeed in trying out and building new things without having certain times you will make mistakes and so it's to make it okay to make mistakes because the most important thing from that is to actually learn from it and to celebrate success and I think that there are many people who have gone before me who have encouraged that culture and there are many people here today who build on it and make it the place it is and so we're really honored to be here yeah no Ithink that's a big thing and I mean obviously AI it thegrounding of AI is data and that's where net apppp has always lived and doing that and I think that as you see this you're bringing that to the partners as well and Ithink I think a lot of that is around the Partnerships not just the hyperscalers but we have many of the VAR community and Distributors here howhave they been receiving uh what you've been talking about today so far I think what they have seen is the fact that theirteams and our customer teams who have learned our technology have had enormously you know uh big benefits right so we had several customers that we talked that I've talked to whove said hey you are the only vendor that has taken my team into the cloud world and you took this you know the skills that my team had and you had them expand the operational capabilities that they apply the skills too and they see some of the same things in AI where because we are you know partnering well with other players in the ecosystem they have a multiplier effect on their investment in net apppp and so it's you know part of our DNA is to work with partners and to approach the market with partners and uh that's going to stay continue to be part of our core strategy so this is obviously a big event here for net apppp what are the and you're making lots of announcements as you said you're fresh from the main stage what are you hoping to talk about next year at next year's converge what are some of howdo you hope to have looked back on fiscal year 25 I think we first of all we always take a moment to look back on the year past and say what did we do really well and where can we improve upon and we have many things to be really proud of this past year we've had strong momentum clearly we have taken market share and we are pioneering things like data security and you know the being the platform for AI and expanding our you know Horizons and Cloud I think that what I'd really like to you know kind of witness next year is that our teams come back here and really celebrate success and you know I'm sure we'll build on the foundations that we set this year with even Expanding Horizons next year but it's really about making our employees know that they have the tools to build a plan for them to be the trusted advisers to our clients and for our clients to be able to accomplish their business imperatives with us and our partners Ithink again that's to me the key is bringing it all together and looking out and celebrating the successes and which means that your customers are being successful as well and I think a big piece of that is again Ilove the announcements with the all the AFF 1K and all of the other stuff that goes along with it and the software built in has always been do you see that as your kind of North Star is hey it's all on tap and we bring it all together withsupporting software around that cuz that's really even from when I was here it was one of the cores that I saw yeah I think you know from a technology strategy perspective we have been you know kind of the driver of having a single unified data platform that can support any data any application anywhere and I think most of the other players in the industry are now beginning to recognize the wisdom of that approach and we continue to evolve the capabilities of that platform Foundation we are adding into it you know more and more really compelling data services you know Protection security content aware you know management of data metadata catalog so that you can build capable AI pipelines you know and so you will see us enhancing that part of our portfolio more and then I think the third area is operational capability so you can manage this distributed data platform across all the clouds as a single unified entity and so we're excited I think the fact that we've architected this beautiful single unified platform now gives us pace and velocity that makes it really hard for somebody else to keep up with us because you can create observability and now you've got it everywhere you can create security and you've got it everywhere and for a client the consistency in the operations is profound they have the same tools the same you know Telemetry and observability capabilities a single Integrated Security model a single integrated recovery model and the cost structure of their operations with us is significantly better than with anybody else in the industry goes back tothe focus correct absolutely George curan thank you so much for coming on the cubao real pleasure having you thanks for being here I've enjoyed the conversation and I hope you have a wonderful time yes thank you I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob stretch stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of NetApp converge you're watching the cube the 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