NetApp: Architecting Outcomes in the Era of Intelligence

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George Kurian

CEO

NetApp

play_circle_outline NetApp's future vision and customer success stories

play_circle_outline Focus on flash, cloud storage, and AI as market drivers

play_circle_outline Strategies for staying ahead of competition and standing apart

play_circle_outline Exciting developments in intelligent data infrastructure and AI space

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George Kurian, NetApp

George Kurian

CEO NetApp

In a conversation during NetApp’s “Architecting outcomes in the Era of Intelligence” event, CEO George Kurian sits down with theCUBE Research’s Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay to outline NetApp’s forward-looking strategy. NetApp is evolving its data infrastructure portfolio to meet enterprise needs in an era defined by AI, hybrid cloud and relentless demand for speed, according to Kurian.

The discussion spotlights how NetApp is targeting growth by simplifying data management across flash, block and cloud. It is important to break down silos and deliv... Read more

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What is the view on the importance of data as an asset for organizations and how has this company been helping their clients in this regard? add

What strategies has NetApp used to capitalize on market transitions and emerging trends? add

What are the key factors that differentiate NetApp from its competitors and allow it to stay ahead in the market? add

What capabilities are being brought to clients in terms of data storage and access, knowledge, and meaning of data, as well as bridging the gap between operational systems and AI systems? add

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George Kurian, NetApp

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Converge 2025 here at the MGM. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Rob Strechay, my co-host and analyst. Rob, we're both fresh from the keynote. There is so much energy in the room. People are really jazzed about NetApp's future.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I think, again, people have really looked at this and are embracing it and I think the customer stories and where NetApp is really winning has really come through in a lot of those stories. And again, it comes from the top.

Rebecca Knight

>> It does. And on that, I would like to introduce our next guest, George Kurian, CEO of NetApp. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

George Kurian

>> Thank you so much for being here and for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> It is always a pleasure. You were up on the main stage yesterday talking passionately about NetApp's long-term vision. For those who might've missed your talk, talk a little bit about what you see, especially as you are advancing in areas like flash and cloud storage.

George Kurian

>> Yeah. Listen, our view is that data has and will continue to be an ever more important asset for enabling organizations, whether they are governments or whether they're private organizations or educational institutions, to achieve their stakeholder missions. And we have been in the business of allowing our clients to have the tools to do so. Many of the bets that we saw many years ago around unifying your data so that you can have better insights about bringing together all of the disparate data silos as well as public cloud and on-premises have really worked out in our favor. And now we are kind of deep in the next phase of the journey where we are bringing insight into the context and the structure of data. What this has allowed our clients to have is continuity and more value from their investments in us. And it has also resulted in us having a really strong year. We're excited. We've taken share in all flash. We are growing really nicely in cloud storage and our teams are here to look at what's the next chapter of growth for us.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, because you just started your FY26 now and you're going down there and I think some of the things that I heard from others who were there, you really spoke passionately about the search for human knowledge and the understanding and... How do you see that driving really the innovation track for NetApp and where you're going with not only the company but the products as well?

George Kurian

>> Yeah. We talked about the fact that we are in a long line of innovators starting from 25,000 years ago where people have tried to record data as a way to share their stories and the meaning of life to succeeding generations. And so we take that responsibility and obligation seriously. It requires us to act with humility, personal accountability, a sense of respect, and a drive for excellence in the way we work. And then I think what we see now is the possibility to have really powerful tools to be able to use data effectively. And so we talked to our teams about both the opportunity to do so and also the responsibility that we have to enable our clients to be able to do that.

Rebecca Knight

>> I want to pick up on that a little bit. You're approaching your 10th year as CEO. It's gone by fast, but you mentioned humility, accountability, reverence, excellence. How do you as a leader, as the CEO, emphasize those values day-to-day in the work inside the company to ensure that it is so much part of the culture and how work gets done?

George Kurian

>> I think it's important to role model those values in the way you operate and you expect your leadership team to operate. I'll draw out a few points there. I think humility does not mean a lack of self-confidence. Actually, I feel like this quietly self-confident people are actually really humble. And so an example of that is we learned that the hyper-scale cloud providers had enormous capabilities and we wanted to work with them, but we also were quietly self-confident in the fact that we had great tech and great client base and loyalty. And that's an example of that. In terms of all of the other things that I talked about, it's the way you show up and demonstrate it every day.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Yeah. I think, again, you've laid out for the teams here and for the company some really big, audacious goals for the year and for the coming years as well. And I think when you look at that, you are focusing in on some key strategies. What do you see as those key strategies and market drivers that are going to help propel NetApp and your customers into the future here?

George Kurian

>> We talked about four drivers, two that are secular and two that are company-specific. The four were: flash, block, cloud, and AI. I think of those two, flash and AI are secular drivers, meaning a lot of players can participate in that. And then block and cloud are company-specific. In one, we have the opportunity to grow share. In the other, we can capitalize on a really strong run that we have going on with the hyperscalers. I think what we talked about is that during market transitions, NetApp has been able to pick up enormous ground. We talked about how network computing was really the foundation of the company. We doubled down on strengths with internet computing, database grids, and virtualization, and now cloud. And AI is the next chapter. It's the next emerging trend that we are well-positioned to capitalize on. We are excited about. And so we talked about the idea that these market drivers are opportunities to capture growth and you need to set up the field to hunt, to land, expand, and protect to do that.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as you said, AI, it's reshaping every industry. There's a lot of buzz, a lot of hype. Your chief commercial officer, Dallas Olson, was up on the main stage talking about NetApp's opportunities with AI. What do you see as the biggest opportunities for NetApp here?

George Kurian

>> We are really focused on enterprise AI and service providers who are enabling enterprise AI. We haven't really focused on foundation models because we feel like it's going to be a few large players who have highly custom environments, and the total amount of data in a foundation model is not that large. What we really are working on is to enable enterprises that have data with NetApp to be able to use that data alongside advanced analytic tools and AI tools. And we have a really strong portfolio to do that.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I mean, it would seem like NetApp is really well set up, but yet the customers still have some challenges out there. There's hybrid cloud silos.

George Kurian

>> Correct.

Rob Strechay

>> Because it's not what cloud do you have. It's like, "We have these clouds, we have all of them," and then it's also the fact that security is top of mind. How do you see NetApp really helping address those challenges for customers?

George Kurian

>> Yeah, it's exactly right, Rob. I think that those are some of the precise challenges that our clients are dealing with. And what we are enabling them to do is to unify their data while keeping track of access control, privacy requirements, and mandates for compliance. And I'll give you an example. We're working one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world who have data spread between clinical environments with different types of equipment, data in research environments, and data in multiple clouds. We are bringing them the capability to unify all of that data in one platform and to carry forward all of their access controls so that if someone wants to try to load up data that got privacy controls on it into an LLM, we notify the administrator and say, "You want to avoid using this data." And we are super excited at the opportunity to be able to enable that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Competition is fierce. And I know that some have been calling out competitors as wannabes, the big and confused, the little and confused. How is NetApp positioning itself to stand apart and also stay ahead today?

George Kurian

>> I think innovation is the responsibility of waking up every morning trying to serve your clients better and trying to meet the technology agendas that clients require better and faster. I think that we talked about three or four things that differentiate us. One is that we are specialists and there are lots of players who have multiple lines of business where their teams are just not as expert as us, right? They are trying to be generalists. And so we talked about the data problems as an area of specialization that provides us opportunity. The second is that we are an open platform. We rely on silicon from the best players in the industry. We integrate our capabilities with the largest ecosystems in the industry so that we can deliver more value from customers in investment in us. And then the third is we are building on technology bets that have proven to be right, which is that we started by saying, "Hey, you want to unify data access. You want to unify that on a system. You want to unify that on a cluster. Now, you want to unify that across the public cloud." Every one of our competitors went down the path of having multiple disparate operating systems that now they're trying to refactor into a more converged model. And now we have the opportunity to break away because we are now integrating additional capabilities into this integrated platform. So those are the three that we highlighted.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think one of the things that always strikes me... I mean, our second year here, the fantastic event, there's a lot of partners here as well. And you kind of touched on that a little bit and it would seem, because a lot of the AI is spread between on-premise and cloud because the data-

George Kurian

>> Correct....

Rob Strechay

>> has gravity and a lot of it. 85% by some account is on-prem data that people want to use in their AI. Are you seeing the partners also helping with that because they're down there in the trenches with you, with the customers every day?

George Kurian

>> Absolutely. I think that the data challenge is the hardest challenge for enterprises to overcome. If you look at models over the last two years, you have a plethora of models, all very capable, some large, some small, some domain specific, that makes the model problem really go away. Right? I think the challenge that we see with clients now is, do they know where their data is? Do they know what's high quality data? Do they know how to have the right governance and access controls in place? And interestingly, the fastest ROI that we and the others in the market are seeing are from the regulated industries like healthcare, like pharma, where their data is already well organized. And so what we are working on with our partners is, to both on the technology partner side, to bring more integrated stacks so that it's easier for clients and on the go-to-market partners to bring consultative capabilities that allow people to address some of these challenges and clients.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we said, this is your 10th year as CEO but you're a technology veteran. By all accounts, this is a very special moment in technology in terms of how fast changes are taking place in these warp speed shifts. I'm curious to hear lessons that you've personally learned leading NetApp through these changes and how they are shaping the company's direction.

George Kurian

>> I think it's... you bring both a philosophical view of it and a values-oriented view of it. I think the philosophical view of things that we follow is: if it's good for our clients, we need to embrace it, even if it could be in the near term disruptive to our business. Cloud was a perfect example of that. The second is that you cannot say yes to every idea. You have to be much more discreet. And a good strategy starts with saying no to a bunch of things. And so if you look at our annual playbook, it's really one or two things that we're asking our field and our product teams to go after. And then the third thing I would say is when change happens, you need to be able to have the quiet confidence that your successes in the past means that you're capable, but also not be wed to the ideas of the past but have the humility to take and embrace the future. You'll make mistakes, it's okay, so long as you're learning from it, and you need to encourage the organization to not be fearful of change.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I love that. And I think, again, that's so NetApp, right? I mean, again, to me that's definitely one of the impressive things about NetApp, but also just looking ahead for this year, what are some of the things that you see as exciting developments or innovations that you'll see in the intelligent data infrastructure and AI space that people should look out for?

George Kurian

>> Yeah. We talked about the fact that we are bringing the world's richest, featured, disaggregated storage architecture. We have made fantastic progress on it. I have seen the performance benchmarks and scaling benchmarks. We're pretty much done with development and we'll be bringing to your clients soon. We are bringing a lot more capabilities around, not just unifying data storage and access, but actually unifying knowledge and meaning of the data so that you can have a way to have a catalog of all your data, to have a deep and enriched understanding of the structure of data, and the relationships between entities in your data to carry forward your governance and access controls, and to automate these pipelines of data for AI systems. One of the really interesting things that we saw was that the gap between operational systems and AI systems is exactly like the gap between on-prem and cloud many years ago. And we are like, "We know how to bridge that," and that's what we're doing here.

Rebecca Knight

>> You've seen this before.

George Kurian

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> George, it is always a pleasure to have you on and hear you talk about tech and leadership too. A really, really great conversation.

George Kurian

>> Thank you. Thank you. I've always enjoyed having you here. Thanks so much for coming.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent.

George Kurian

>> Nice to meet you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes.

Rob Strechay

>> Good to see you.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Converge 2025. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and analysis.