Cloud will be the final Lay of the Land

While physical storage is fast disappearing and as Krithiwas Neelakantan, Director, Alliances and Channels, NetApp India Pvt Ltd, says, it will be all about the hyper- converged infrastructure, running on new technologies that will drive the storage market. Analytics calls the shot today, and NetApp offers the advantage of scale, speed and simplicity to support the brave new world of cloud technologies.

Please share your insights on the Generic trends in storage?

The storage industry is dynamic; we believe that it is a market that will continue to grow in leaps and bounds. W e have seen it evolve as a dedicated infrastructure, from shared to virtualised to cloud based infrastructure. And we find it very very exciting to be a part of helping our customers not only manage this growth of storage but also secure it and ensure that they have absolute control over the data they generate, how they will retain it and use it for analytics and other insights that this data can eventually give them.

What plans does NetApp have in this new virtualised storage environment?

NetApp have designed the products across three philosophies. It must have scale, it must have speed which is performance, and it must be a very simple model of managing the infrastructure. Essentially what we think will matter to customers is that today, with social media content with their own businesses adopting cloud technologies, moving fast on analytics as well as data that is getting generated on structured and unstructured sites, they will need enormous data that needs to be stored. So you will need scale, for storage of this data. The second part is the ability to deliver performance since these businesses are always alive, 24X7, and therefore they need performance that can help them scale up to the capacities required.

And when the scale as well as the performance is being met, it should be very simple for the customer to manage, that’s where simplicity comes in. So if you see how we offer our products, it’s all about speed, scale and simplicity, and therein lies the crux of how our customers would like to consume the storage, how we’d like to propose a solution to our customers and how our engineers are constantly striving hard for delivering on these standards.

What’s NetApp plan for channel partners? How does NetApp support the channel partners?

In our pathways eco system as we call it, we have partners of all types, cloud service partners, system integrators, global system integrators, resellers, and ISVs. All of them have a big play in how NetApp products and solutions are taken to the customers. The proof of the pudding is from the customer actually benefitting from what we have to offer, from an engineering stand point of view. If you see how we engage the marketplace, we are essentially focusing on coverage across all industries and workloads the customers are looking at. And yes, we are interested in the cloud market in a big way. Finally we are looking for partners with the right capabilities and certifications to be able to address the customers’ requirements.

So essentially we engage the partners in three fundamental ways. The first is, we actually go together and engage our customers to ensure we are jointly able to drive a certain level of consistency in the customers IT behaviour and its outcomes for his business. The second part is about helping the partners to create an identity for them to establish joint business values and behaviour. The third is ensure they are skilled and train to ensure that they have the ability to go and execute the IT strategy for the customer.

What future do you see for physical storage technologies?

That’s a questions we are being asked very often nowadays – whether physical storage is relevant at all today. Storage by itself first moved to virtualisation, then effectively on to the cloud. So in today’s context we see hyper converged infrastructure, soon shared and virtualised environments will be the norm. Customers will eventually graduate on a hybrid cloud environment, on- prem, off-prem or with hyper scalers. We are uniquely positioned to address this new world with our NetApp data fabric, whether the customer can actually retain control of his data, whether it sits on his data centre, friendly neighbourhood cloud service provider or any of the hyper scalers. That is where the final lay of the land is going to be, as far as storage is concerned.

How is NetApp strategy planning to meet this new demand? Do you have any new products that will be offered?

We are absolutely prepared. Premise of building all our products today is that they are flash ready and cloud enabled. So if all of us believe that cloud is the model of how IT will be consumed, then we are best positioned to address this market.

If we talk about a virtualised connected enterprise future, any specific products that NetApp offers?

In our new product line, our FASS product line, it is built ground up for the cloud. It’s about secure multi tenancy, which is one of the primary reasons why we are very popular among all cloud providers. I can proudly say that we are a leader in that space since security is a big ask in such environments. We have ensured there is enough engineering to ensure customers are very happy with what they can get from NetApp.

The other point, like I mentioned earlier, is the scale- the ability to manage storage and other important aspects. Certain aspects of our technology are something we have been delivering for a long time now. We are actually protocol agnostic, we can look at any protocol that the customer wants to run on, which is typically the case in a cloud environment and we are very well positioned there, we are probably far far ahead of any of our competitors on this journey. Many of our competitors are just catching up on this architecture that we have.

Aside this, there are other interesting aspects of a cloud and virtualisation for example, backup and disaster recovery of a cloud, is another big trend. If you look at FASS and our E series product line, they are perfectly positioned to address these requirements in that market.

How do you see the Indian market taking up the new technologies/ is the adaptation happening as much as to drive the industry towards it?

I guess it’s a matter of time; it’s not so much a matter of IF as it is a matter of WHEN. And while we see different customers at different levels of maturity to understand the cloud and go on that journey, I think it is the eventuality waiting to happen. All I can say is that we are ready for it today as we were ready for the virtualisation game several years back. This is one of the reasons why we are very successful in this market.

Any new products or geographies? Expansion?

I have certain things that will happen in the short term. On is, analytics is one big trend, where business outcomes on Big Data, the customers will start working in earnest towards.

The second part is the hybrid cloud will certainly become a norm for a lot of our customers. Lastly data privacy and security are a big concern for our customers and we work with our partners on our ecosystem to ensure that we are able to deliver that capability along with them to address that market requirement

We will continue to operate in a manner that ensures we cover the market well. There are some big investments that we are seeing from the government. We are seeing how customers are using IT to transform their business gain. There is a big convergence of source so to say, whether it is cloud, analytics or mobile devices. Many of our partners are gearing to address that big change that our customers are going through. We are also working with a new set of partners who, we believe will be able to write this whole change that is happening in the industry.

So we will continue to invest in the right set of partners, in the growth sectors that we are seeing in the marketplace and also ensure that we deliver all the services directly or through partners, to go and address the customer requirements.

Geographically we are well covered as far as this market is concerned today- across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. I think the intensity of engagement will go up, but coverage point we are well established in the marketplace,