NetApp Paves the Way for ‘Evolved’ Cloud with Next-Gen Storage & Data Services

Puneet Gupta, Vice President and Managing Director, NetApp India/SAARC 

Can you shed light on NetApp BlueXP and how is it leading the way to a more ‘evolved cloud’? 
NetApp BlueXP is a unified control plane that delivers a simple, hybrid multi-cloud experience for storage and data services across on-prem and cloud environments. It is designed to offer operational simplicity, with an intuitive interface and powerful automation capabilities that help decrease resource waste, complexity, and the risk of managing diverse environments.

Organisations have increasingly moved to hybrid multi-cloud environments to accelerate their digital transformation journeys and drive growth. However, many companies face challenges and inefficiencies in managing these environments, which is an impediment to innovation. BlueXP addresses these challenges and leads the way to a more “evolved cloud” by simplifying and automating critical operations across on-prem and public clouds. This helps organisations drive business impact and enhance their customer experience.

BlueXP adds value to organisations with the following specific benefits:
Unifying formerly disparate environments and frameworks – bringing them all under a single point of control.
Reducing risk and wasting fewer resources with integrated AI Ops automation, recommendations and anomaly detection with remediation. 
Aligning tech and business requirements through the BlueXP digital wallet, which provides FinOps the financial dynamics they need to support the business while enabling Ops teams to instantly activate resources.
Delivering powerful data and infrastructure protection by leveraging the combined capabilities of backup and restore, governance and ransomware detection. 

Ganesan Arumugam
Director, Channel Sales, NetApp

What are some of the salient features of the NetApp Partner Sphere programme? 

NetApp Partner Sphere is the evolution of NetApp’s industry-leading Unified Partner Program. This new cloud-focused and services-led program delivers a flexible path to advancement and growth for all partner sales motions – consolidating and simplifying multiple programs into one that includes all partner types, business models and routes to market.

Some of the salient features of the NetApp Partner Sphere program include:
A simple framework that supports each partner’s unique go-to-market strategy, provides flexibility and automation to ease partner processes, and offers consistency for all partners and sales motions from a single program with clear tiers and objectives.
Transformative training, tools and support to activate the partner’s work in the hybrid multi-cloud market, enabling and building partner services and solutions competencies.
Differentiation between partners, with each partner highlighted and endorsed by their Solution Competencies and services on NetApp Partner Connect to promote their go-to-market approach.
Accelerated cloud growth through leveraging NetApp’s in-demand portfolio to fuel opportunities for value-add partner-led services and co-innovation, thus improving profitability and maximizing partner ROI with progressive tiers.

How does the Partner Sphere programme reiterate NetApp’s commitment to growing the channel partner ecosystem in India? 

The Partner Sphere program offers robust training and support to help NetApp’s partners capture cloud market share. It brings new validation, recognition and rewards for partner’s investments in competencies and services. The accelerated growth structure empowers our partners to deliver transformational value to joint customers.

In addition, the program includes simplified, flexible and progressive tiering, with clear criteria that partners can follow across objective thresholds. The program’s tiers (ranging from Approved, to Preferred, to Prestige, to Prestige Plus) assess, validate and recognize partners based on value and competencies, in order to match the right partners with the right customer opportunities. Benefits and support will grow as partners ascend tiers, with the partners generating the most impact seeing the broadest and most customized benefits, including solution specific marketing campaigns and enablement, proposal-based market development funds, and preferred value-based incentives.

How has the storage market evolved in India, and how is the new NetApp AFF C-Series poised to bring in cost-efficiency? 

In a challenging economic environment, cost-effectiveness is increasingly becoming a key concern in the storage market. To address this, NetApp is bringing to customers and partners the most affordable and sustainable all-flash storage available in the market today. The new NetApp AFF C-Series provides capacity flash at a lower cost to entry, to better facilitate our customers’ transition from hybrid storage to all-flash within their budgets. The AFF C-Series offers guaranteed storage efficiency, to reduce an organisation’s storage footprint and energy costs, thus delivering a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

What are the various partner incentives offered by NetApp, and can you tell us more about this? 

NetApp offers a range of incentives to partners and distributors. Our incentive program is a tiered system in which partners who achieve certain milestones - such as closing high-value deals or achieving high revenue targets – receive incentives in the form of cash awards or domestic & foreign holiday packages. The program also offers incentives specifically aimed at driving deal closures for NetApp Cloud and NetApp Core solutions.

What is NetApp Keystone and how is this pay-as-you-go model a gamechanger for the industry?

NetApp Keystone is a storage-as-a-service platform that simplifies the acquisition of data storage & management technology, for on-prem data centers as well as for the cloud. Keystone offers maximum operational and financial flexibility. It enables customers to purchase on-prem and cloud-based storage capabilities by allowing data to be migrated as required across on-prem or private & public clouds. It also offers them the option of either purchasing storage outright, or on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ consumption model. 

By removing the IT burdens of managing storage infrastructures and going through a lengthy procurement cycle, Keystone empowers customers to better align storage costs to their business needs, accelerate time-to-value, and focus on core business operations by managing outcomes.

The sheer flexibility that NetApp’s Keystone’s ‘pay-as-you-go’ model offers makes it an industry gamechanger. For instance, an enterprise can start with on-prem services and later determine the timeline and the right workload to move to the cloud, based on business requirements. Moreover, Keystone offers commitment protection across deployment models. This means that customers can reallocate their on-prem spending to add cloud services (as opposed to paying more for added cloud services), essentially paying the same monthly bill based on the total capacity committed to before the reallocation.

Can you tell us more about the recently launched NetApp Advance?

NetApp Advance is a new portfolio of storage programs that enables customers to cost-effectively future-proof their on-prem environments. It offers simplified storage ownership and management, that helps organisations stay up to date with technological innovations while eliminating complex, time-consuming and expensive upgrade cycles. Organisations can choose on-prem or cloud storage options to future-proof their environments and scale securely, seamlessly and non-disruptively as they grow. Advance also brings to the fore sustainability and efficiency best practices and capabilities that continually improve energy efficiency and operational performance that helps reduce the carbon footprint.

With NetApp Advance, organisations can significantly reduce cost, complexity and disruption of tech refreshes by buying once and evolving continuously. It greatly reduces the risk previously associated with the journey to hybrid cloud by providing organisations with the flexibility to easily scale out to the cloud as and when required.