NetApp on boosting the services game for partners

Helping partners achieve profitability in the services game is top of mind for NetApp as chief technology evangelist Matt Watts highlighted key trends in sustainability, cyber resilience, AI and multicloud models.

“Partners are now starting to see a rich set of capabilities in what we do, creating professional services, consulting and managed service capability. We all know services are where the profits are, and our partners want to make money. I think we put ourselves in a very good position to help partners achieve that,” Watts stated. 

Watts detailed to ARN three massive opportunities for partners, with the first being the continued flux around VMware and virtualisation in general.

“Companies are really assessing what their strategy is, do they remain on-premises? Do they look at cloud or multi cloud models? There’s a lot of consulting and engagement opportunities there,” he said.

This then leads into the huge growth opportunity in the cloud, particularly with NetApp Keystone, which provides users with the ability to consume storage as-a-service on-premises and leverage that to expand into the cloud.

“They can balance the way they purchase storage as-a-service on-premises and across the hyperscale providers as well,” he said. 

On the sustainability front, Watts said NetApp has been working towards being more efficient and reducing the amount of power consumption, which therefore reduces emissions.

Watts also pointed out the importance of security, sustainability and data governance, stating that 85 per cent of AI projects fail due to data access issues, as NetApp aims to help partners navigate these challenges through technology and services.

“We have our technology as a first party service in AWS, GCP and Azure. It opens up opportunities for our partners to be able to sell our technology in those clouds as well,” he said. 

Security continues to be top of mind for many customers with Watts saying it places a central focus on security such as autonomous ransomware protection.

NetApp’s core operating system, ONTAP, has also continuously built upon its security capabilities, which are provided as a “no cost option” for organisations to upgrade to the latest version of the system.

Watts said ONTAP marked the point for partners to consider stepping into managed security services. NetApp recently released new data security capabilities including embedding post-quantum cryptography into its storage portfolio, updates to BlueXP ransomware protection as well as backup and recovery and security assessment and hardening professional services.

In a commissioned report conducted by Canalys, for every $1 of product NetApp partners sold, they made $4.30 in services.

Watts said there was a huge amount of stored data that is unused with research indicating about 68 per cent of the data the companies are storing is never used again after it’s created.

“We provide BlueXP classification as a no cost option – that’s our tool for analysing and mapping out a data landscape. That’s really starting to evolve and there’s a great opportunity to take that as a way of helping companies improve data assessments,” he said.

Partner play

Noting around 67 per cent of NetApp’s business is partner-originated, NetApp director of partner and alliances Stephen Persoglia laid out the significant growth opportunities in the SMB and commercial market, recently partnering with the likes of CompNow and Insight Enterprises.

“We’ve brought on a lot of partners that play into that space,” he said. 

Persoglia added storage as-a-service it was like a “bridge to the cloud” particularly for customers that aren’t quite ready to embrace the cloud but want to start leaning in on resources that will make it a reality to manage that type of environment.

“We have seen the growth over the last four quarters with our C- series, ASA and SAN platforms – getting into the smaller end of the market with all the enterprise features that we offer to those large enterprise customers,” he said.