‘Driving Business agility & IT efficiency by thinking ‘Ahead of the Curve’

Rajeev Saxena,
Director Sales, India Public Sector,Commercial and SAARC,
NetApp

NetApp is recognized for its technology that its customers never have to choose between saving money and acquiring the capabilities they need to be successful. NetApp is a 100 percent channel partner led company, which boasts over 80 channel partners across the country and has more than 1,000 customers. VARINDIA caught up with Rajeev Saxena, Director Sales, India Public Sector, Commercial and SAARC, NetApp Marketing & Services Pvt. Ltd to explain more about NetApp’s current going in the market and some recent strides it has taken to deepen its partnerships.  
 

How do you position your products and solutions to be different from all other competing brands?

At NetApp, we strive to meet the changing needs of our customers over the world - right from launching the innovative platform Data ONTAP as early as 1992. Most of the internet companies that launched the consumer driven Cloud computing revolution built their business using ONTAP. 

NetApp’s flagship storage operating system – Clustered Data ONTAP cuts through the performance, availability, and efficiency limits of traditional hardware silos, empowering IT to non-disruptively align the storage infrastructure with changing business and application demands.

NetApp’s long term vision for the data center has driven the company’s roadmap and will continue to deliver new capabilities which enable the value of a shared virtual infrastructure and the company is relentlessly focused on delivering differentiated and innovative technologies and architectures that are future ready as well as industry leading. 

How were the last few Quarters for NetApp?  

Total revenues for the first quarter of fiscal year 2014 were $1.516 billion, an increase of 5% from the comparable period of the prior year. Despite an uneven macro environment, our branded business was strong, with 9% year-over-year growth, delivered solid results and innovation with the latest release to our clustered Data ONTAP operating system. We have acquired 90 customers in the last fiscal year. Additionally, NetApp continued to be a partner of choice for customers in their transition to the cloud. 

This is evidence of the tremendous value we are delivering to customers today and their confidence in our long-term strategy to enable them to navigate the future.

Brief us on your current channel policies and programs. Do you have any immediate plans of revamping your channel?

Today, partners are faced with solving new and complex customer IT challenges requiring them to evolve their business models to ensure continued business strength for the future. As a result of these changes in technology delivery models and customer needs, partners are “reinventing” themselves, sometimes in ways that put them at conflict with the vendors they work with or at the very least, the programs they are a part of. 

We have been focused on evolving for the benefit of our partners and the business opportunities they see for themselves and our mutual customers. We encourage our partners of many types to add new business capabilities and pursue new markets to grow their business.  We want to enable partners to go-to-market in the way that they want to, and to be able to choose the best blend of products and services that address the changing business needs that their customers have

The NetApp Partner Program encourages partners to add new business capabilities, pursue new markets to grow revenue and increase profits while enabling them to go-to-market in the way that they want to and choose the best blend of products/services that address the customer’s changing business needs. 

Could you throw some light on your partnership with Cisco?

We share a strong relationship with Cisco and have been continually expanding and upgrading the technologies and offerings that works best for customers and help them manage the heavy enterprise workloads. Together with Cisco, we provide a unified flexible architecture that is ready for virtualized environments today, yet is agile enough to let the enterprises grow at their own pace to a fully private cloud. NetApp and Cisco came together with a view to support the dynamic business environment, with desktop virtualization playing a prominent role, and created Flexpod data centre solution. 

Through a shared vision of a unified data center, NetApp and Cisco have rapidly grown FlexPod. Since its launch in 2010, FlexPod has grown to more than 2,400 customers and 900 channel partners across more than 35 countries.

What is your presence today in tier 2 & 3 markets of India? How do you plan to beef up your market presence in these cities?

NetApp has always laid immense emphasis on creating innovative programs that recognize and reward efforts of esteemed members of our channel community. The idea behind redefining this approach is to expand NetApp’s reach to all parts of the country. Our 'install base' today across India has increased and we believe this momentum will continue, we are extremely aggressive at this front now.

After expanding in Pune and Ahmedabad in July and more recently in Chandigarh, we see that the overall mood and outlook for the market is upbeat and the demand drivers for storage solutions range across large enterprises, service providers, IT services, retail, manufacturing, government, education, infrastructure, banking and finance, telecom and more.