NetApp in the weeks and months ahead is looking to drive a series of initiatives that will increase the number of partners selling cloud-based services.
At the NetApp product portfolio continues to evolve, the challenge is to bring together NetApp offerings and technologies from other vendors together in a way that makes them simpler to consume for the customer, says Jim Elder, NetApp channel chief for the Americas.
NetApp has a long history of working with, for example, Cisco to create FlexPod platforms for on-premises IT environments. That same micro-channels approach now needs to be applied to drive cloud storage software consumption alongside the CloudJumper framework for managing virtual desktop platforms that NetApp just acquired, says Elder.
“It has to meet in the channel to solve a customer problem,” says Elder.
As part of that focus, NetApp also recently launched a Keystone initiative that makes it simpler for customers to consume NetApp offerings as a service regardless of platform, notes Elder.
That channel-centric approach stands in contrast to rivals that are trying to drive sales of a stack of infrastructure that don’t provide channel partners with as much flexibility, adds Elder.
At the same time, Elder notes the way core technologies are being consumed in the age of the cloud is evolving. DevOps teams are exercising more influence over platforms as IT processes continue to become more automated, notes Elder. Partners need to be able to work with vendors that are making the strategic investments required to stay relevant regardless of where application workloads are deployed by whom within an IT organization, says Elder.
As part of that effort, NetApp recently acquired Talon Storage to extend the reach of NetApp Cloud Volumes out to remote offices while at the same time launching a Project Astra initiative to advance data management in Kubernetes environments spanning multiple clouds.
In its most recent third-quarter, NetApp posted revenues of $1.4 billion, a decline from $1.56 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2019. No one knows for sure what the impact the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic might have on IT spending through 2020. However, NetApp is betting that while on-premises IT environments will always be relevant, a much greater percentage of workloads are about to move into the cloud. The challenge and the opportunity for partners is to find a way to add value on top of what have already become a set of core cloud commodity services.
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