5 Bold Statements On Transforming For A Hybrid World From NetApp’s CEO

‘From a business strategy standpoint, lean into digital and cloud. Pick a few big bets with hard impact business cases and move fast. Structure the digital organization to have flexibility in strategy and operating model, even if that means having to disrupt your traditional business,’ says NetApp CEO George Kurian.

Transforming To Meet A Hybrid World

NetApp may be best known as a storage vendor, but it is also busily transforming itself into a leading provider of technology to manage data and applications across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and public cloud infrastructures. Its cloud message is one the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been hammering on for almost a decade, and is now the leading topic whenever NetApp brings partners and customers together.

Take this year’s NetApp Insight 2021 conference, which Wednesday was held in a virtual format for the second year in a row due to the impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus impact. While the company this week introduced a new all-flash storage array, that was a minor announcement compared to the amount of cloud-focused software news. That included a new version of its Ontap management software featuring sophisticated anti-ransomware protection and the ability to work with the advanced NVMe over TCP protocol, new relationships with the three top cloud hyperscalers, improvements to its Cloud Manager management platform, and new capabilities for the NetApp Spot offering for finding the best cloud instance to run a cloud application.

NetApp CEO George Kurian, in his NetApp Insight keynote, also noted that his company is itself going through the same digital transformations its customers are seeing.

“We’re transforming our own operations to enable speed and resilience,” he said. ”Our supply chain has built resilience to operate in multiple geographies independently. Our technology portfolio development practices use DevOps principles, and our high-trust culture has proven to be a tailwind at a time when we’ve needed it.”

For a look at what businesses need to do to prepare for future challenges, get some tips from a company going through its own transformation.

Living In A Hybrid, Digital, And Data-driven World

So what are the big trends that we see? From a business architecture standpoint, we still believe that the world is hybrid, digital, and data driven.

The future of business is hybrid combining physical and digital. According to a new McKinsey survey, companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply chain interactions and of their own internal operations by three to four years. The future of work is hybrid, combining in-office and home office work. According to Gartner, by the end of 2021, 51 percent of all knowledge workers ... will be working remotely. At NetApp, we’ll officially launch our new hybrid work model in January 2022.

Leverage Data To Drive Business Transformation

The winning businesses are leveraging data to drive their business transformation across all industries. The Boston Consulting Group indicates 20 [percent] to 30 percent EBITDA gains. That’s substantial for data-driven corporations versus their benchmark peer companies. With digital increasingly becoming the first place of customer engagement and competition, businesses need to respond with speed and flexibility to the changing business landscape.

The New Rules For Success

First, speed is the new scale, replacing physical business size as the basis for competitive advantage. Second, businesses need to create flexibility. In an age when businesses aren’t just trying to disrupt the world, but the world is disrupting businesses, leading companies are planning for multiple futures as fluid as their IT environment itself. Third, businesses need to develop a high-trust culture that empowers employees to move fast, but also to be responsible stewards of the business. And finally, we see cloud, software, AI, and data as the foundation for a modern digital business.

Call To Action

So what do we suggest you do? Three things.

From a business strategy standpoint, lean into digital and cloud. Pick a few big bets with hard impact business cases and move fast. Structure the digital organization to have flexibility in strategy and operating model, even if that means having to disrupt your traditional business.

Second, transform your IT portfolio and platform. Leverage cloud while simultaneously consolidating and simplifying data management. ... And third, be cloud-native. Develop cloud-native ways of working with cloud-native technologies. Recent benchmarks have shown that time-to-market for new features reduces by 40 [percent] to 55 percent, time to deploy code to production improves by approximately the same amount, and downtime reduces by almost 60 percent. Phenomenal numbers.

Transformation The NetApp Way

So how is NetApp transforming? We’ve been transforming NetApp to help organizations seize the promise of this moment. We’re accelerating the pace of innovation in our portfolio, on-prem and in the cloud, listening closely to our customers and to our partners. ...

We are also transforming the way we support and serve our customers to make it easier and more modern. Frankly, we’re transforming and modernizing our go to market model.

And lastly, we’re transforming our own operations to enable speed and resilience. Our supply chain has built resilience to operate in multiple geographies independently. Our technology portfolio development practices use DevOps principles, and our high-trust culture has proven to be a tailwind at a time when we’ve needed it.