NetApp’s marketing strategies and future plans
Jahnavi- What are your opinions on the tech market in the year end and future predictions for you as a company and for the market?
Ganesan – Today we are amidst a ‘techade’ prompted by accelerated advances and adoption of technology across industry verticals. Amidst this, it is safe to say that technology will continue to play a pivotal role in business operations with data and cloud taking the center stage. As we forge ahead on our cloud journey, the next phase of the evolved cloud will see enterprises turning to a unified control plane to remove management complexity, secure themselves against evolving cyber threats, implement sustainability measures and bring in cost optimisation. To this extent, channel partnerships will be very important in enabling growth among businesses in 2023 and beyond. We have seen their roles evolve over the last few years, and today they are more important than ever before. Today, channel partners must provide responsiveness, flexibility, and strategic enablement to customers to thrive in a service- based industry. What will enable business success, is partners that can drive digital and cloud transformations among customers. This will require modern business models with highly specialized services, and capabilities that support the entire customer journey.
Jahnavi- What all marketing strategies are followed by the NetApp? How do you think and recognise which strategies are the best for your organisation?
Ganesan – In today’s highly dynamic technology space, speed is the new scale. Organisations too demand solutions that can help them put their data to work to keep innovating and stay ahead of the digital curve. We are working towards serving the needs of our customers. We are soon going to deliver a personalized, data-driven engagement model that allows our current and future customers to move at warp speed and align with the new ways they want to engage with their solution partners.
The changes we recently announced at a global level in our GTM strategy will see the company ramp up its efforts to drive consistency and simplicity across the global sales organization, and more aggressively address key markets and segments while reaching new customers and partners. NetApp in India remains committed to a 100% channel model and our partners will continue to work with us as before. With the introduction of NetApp
Keystone, our partners can now look forward to more business participation from customers. We recently updated our Unified Partner Program wherein we simplified our programs to remove complications and get some rebate percentage. We have introduced an incentive program not just for our partner organisations but also for our partner sales teams.
Moreover, we are training our partners and are providing them with a platform from where they can guide their customers to turn their data into a ‘proactive’ differentiating asset.
Jahnavi- You aim to make your customers rely on you to make their apps faster, their data centers run better, their business reach new levels of excellence. How do you manage to cope with everything at once?
Ganesan – Our focus is on delivering technology solutions that help our customers to modernize their data centres. As cloud adoption has accelerated, our cloud solutions for instance, BlueXP, help customers in migrating their data efficiently, securely, and in an optimised way.
NetApp’s new BlueXP platform unifies several cloud management functions under a single plane. It simplifies and streamlines functions across cloud environments for a consistent and easy-to-use experience.
NetApp offers powerful and efficient storage and data management solutions for your enterprise apps, on your premises and in the cloud. Our solutions directly integrate with enterprise application workflows, enabling our partners and customers to reduce system administration costs, better protect data, and accelerate access to your data anywhere. Storage-efficient database copies and thin provisioning help reduce storage and administrative overhead by up to 90%. And when you’re moving databases to the cloud, NetApp enterprise application specialists and solutions help you develop applications faster, reduce costs by up to 60%, and perform online backups in minutes rather than hours.
Jahnavi- Do you think Digitization and Automation are going to be the only way forward for corporates to ensure better control altogether?
Ganesan – Emerging technologies, edge computing, and IoT devices have transformed multiple industries across sectors. Today, data is at the heart of everything we do. It’s data that enables innovation, production, and even distribution. For example: In terms of manufacturing sector, you can maximize efficiency and productivity by comparing data for multiple plants and then developing operational best practices for standardization across all
factory floors. Enterprises can keep production lines running by resolving issues in real time. If something is going wrong with a piece of equipment, they can share real-time operational data with the vendor so that they can instantly troubleshoot, look for spare parts, and check the availability of service technicians. This level of synchronization can shave days off in problem resolution. At the same time, they can optimize supply chains with real-time visibility into availability of supplies from your partners so you know how to plan and when
you need to look to other sources. Although Industry 4.0 has made automation and digitization the norm for industry leaders, that’s only half the equation. The real revolution is yet to come.
Jahnavi- What are the long-term goals of the company along with the focused vision of the company?
Ganesan – In line with our vision for the future we continue to focus on building our channel partner network. We recently announced NetApp Partner Sphere which delivers a flexible path to advancement and growth for all partner sales motions. By consolidating and simplifying multiple programs into one that includes all partner types, business models and routes to market, this program enables partners to evolve their business in the cloud.
The program offers robust training and support to help partners capture cloud market share, brings new validation, recognition and rewards for partners’ investments in competencies and services, and the accelerated growth structure allows partners to contribute transformational value to joint customers.
Jahnavi- How do you manage to cope with the staff of your company to be motivated along with achieving great and desired results from them?
Ganesan – We are an employee-friendly organisation and our focus is always on providing the right environment and culture. Through our various HR programs, we invest in talent development, growth, and provide equal opportunities. This helps in creating a competitive environment keeping our employees motivated.
