NetApp INSIGHT 2024 | Cesar Cernuda, NetApp & Adam Thier, Anaplan

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Adam Thier

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Anaplan

Three insights you might have missed from NetApp Insight 2024

As the demand for more efficient, secure and flexible infrastructure grows, organizations are increasingly turning to intelligent data solutions that simplify multicloud and hybrid environments. Highlighting these trends, NetApp Insight 2024 showcased innovations that unify systems into a single platform to meet diverse operational needs.NetApp’s Cesar Cernuda talks with theCUBE about the role of unified storage solutions in driving innovation and efficiency for businesses.“There’s plenty of data that lives on NetApp, and we have a big responsibility toward our customers,” Cesar Cernuda (pictured), president of NetApp Inc

Unified data solutions drive innovation and simplify AI integration

In today’s complex data landscape, businesses are turning to unified data solutions to streamline management and leverage artificial intelligence effectively.From ensuring data protection against ransomware to enabling advanced planning capabilities, organizations are looking for ways to simplify their data infrastructure while embracing innovation. One key insight is that businesses can only truly unlock the power of AI and data intelligence when they have a unified, reliable infrastructure, according to Adam Thier (pictured, right), chief product and technology officer of Anaplan Inc.NetApp’s Cesar Cernuda and Anaplan’s Adam Thier talk to theCUBE about unified data solutions

play_circle_outline Anaplan's leading SaaS solutions for planning across various industries with large customer databases.

play_circle_outline Benefits of using NetApp for streamlining operations, disaster recovery, customer movement, and data security.

play_circle_outline NetApp's Vision: AI, Security, Reliability, Performance, Simplicity, Savings in Intelligent Data Infrastructure

play_circle_outline NetApp and Anaplan Partner for Secure Innovation: Data Security, AI, and Competitive Edge

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Cesar Cernuda, NetApp & Adam Thier, Anaplan

Adam Thier

Chief Product & Technology Officer Anaplan

Anaplan relies on NetApp for streamlining their operations, with over 2,400 use cases including supply chain management and workforce planning. NetApp provides a single global view of their storage, simplifying disaster recovery and ensuring data security, particularly with AI integration. This partnership has helped Anaplan reduce errors, save time, and focus on innovation to stay ahead of competitors. Looking to the future, Anaplan seeks solutions from NetApp for data reliability, AI security, and emergency data snapshotting. By investing in new products an... Read more

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What is Anaplan and how does it utilize NetApp? add

What benefits has the company seen from using NetApp to streamline their operations? add

What are some challenges and considerations in embracing artificial intelligence in a way that ensures both data security and reliability in a company? add

What challenges does a billion dollar company face in balancing innovation with building a robust, reliable, and secure infrastructure to meet the needs of demanding customers? add

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Cesar Cernuda, NetApp & Adam Thier, Anaplan

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2024. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, sitting alongside my co-host, co-analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, we're in the home stretch. It's our penultimate segment. I'm dizzy from intelligent data infrastructure, AI solutions, so much.

Rob Strechay

>> I think we may have some more of that to go through. And again, I'm excited about this. I know both companies. Obviously, I know NetApp, and Anaplan, I know as well, but I am looking forward to digging into this and how it really helps build that product out.

Rebecca Knight

>> Spoiler alert. Okay, so let's welcome our next guest to the show. Adam Thier, he is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Anaplan. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, and Cesar Cernuda, president of NetApp. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

>> Great pleasure to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Always.

>> Thank you for being here.

Rebecca Knight

>> So much fun to see you. So, Adam, I want to start with you. I know Rob is familiar with Anaplan, but for our viewers who are not in the know, tell us a little bit about Anaplan and how you use NetApp.

Adam Thier

>> Okay. So Anaplan is the leading SaaS provider of planning solutions. Now, most people think that's like finance and budgeting, but we run some of the world's largest supply chains. We do the workforce planning for some of the world's largest company, hundreds of thousands of employees. We do sales performance, return to quota management. There are over 2,400 different use cases people use Anaplan for, ranging from doing the budget to deciding what goes on a plane from China tonight to all the DCs around the world, and from the DCs that night to every retail location around the world. So about a billion dollars, very complex, very large infrastructure. At any given moment, we have a million customer databases in memory in production.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Rebecca Knight

>> Wow.

Rob Strechay

>> That's a lot.

Rebecca Knight

>> You are describing something that is exceedingly complex. So how do you use NetApp to help streamline your operations?

Adam Thier

>> So we've used NetApp on and off. We had it in GCP and AWS, and like all companies, we grow. And we got big. And now, we're really complicated. We have our own data centers. We have our own Amazon instances, GCP instances, all over the world, like everywhere. And you couldn't see them all. We have petabytes and petabytes of storage. We have customers with 200 terabytes of models in memory, and we just had a mishmash of storage and looking at it and it was like, where's this customer? And somebody would go, . We put an end to that with NetApp is what we did. So now we're in the process of having a single view globally of all our storage. It facilitates disaster recovery. It facilitates our customer movement. We want to move them around. Data residency. And then the big one coming up that we're really focused on is ransomware.

Rob Strechay

>> I can imagine, with that much data and sensitive data to customers and what they would look at is their intellectual property, I'm sure. But you're also going down the path of AI.

Adam Thier

>> Of course.

Rob Strechay

>> And embedding AI in your product. And how does really what NetApp brings to bear helping you with that?

Adam Thier

>> Well, again, now the customer's data, I can't touch for AI, but all the master data around the models and all that stuff is invaluable. But I can't use it if I can't get to it. And that's where NetApp is key, and that's for my own use for my customers. The conversational AI, we're building. The early warning, anomaly detection. The model building co-pilot, so people build their implementations easier. That's all coming out of that. And again, if I've got stuff over here and I got stuff over here, I can't do a good job unless I can see it all and work with it all. On the other side, again, securing that data, that's the other... As much as the feature functionality is really critical to me, not losing my estate is more critical.

Rob Strechay

>> Not going down.

Adam Thier

>> Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Going down when you're in the SaaS business, that's a no-no. So how do you see these challenges? Because you see, obviously, across NetApp, how do these challenges play out for others as well, and what are you seeing as those challenges?

>> Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for your trust.

Adam Thier

>> You're welcome.

>> And I think you've answered probably already my question , but there's no doubt we live in a new era, the era of intelligence and data, data and intelligence, and that has put new opportunities, but at the same time, new challenges. So the growth of data has been exponential the last years. So the amount of data that you're talking about how things have changed is something that is a top of mind for you in your company, but many companies. How do you embrace AI? How do you embrace AI in a way that you can protect your data that is secure, but at the same time, that you have the reliability, the performance of your data? That's probably the biggest challenge that every CIO and I will say every CEO, in an organization is facing today.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, Adam, what are some of the tangible business results that you've seen as a result of working with NetApp, and as you've said, simplifying and streamlining your operations?

Adam Thier

>> So I think simplifying is the key benefit right now. Before, it was a lot of people, a lot of places, a lot of... PagerDuty goes off. I'm looking at PagerDuty. People ask me what keeps me up at night. It's PagerDuty keeps me up at night. But just being able to have that kind of seamless view has been so enabling to us.

Rebecca Knight

>> When you say enabling, is it that it gives you more time, that it gives you more peace of mind, that it gives you...?

Adam Thier

>> More time, more peace of mind, a faster ability to react to things that are going on. Much reduced... We're expanding constantly. We'll add hundreds of millions of dollars of customer this year. So every year, it's a huge amount of new customer, I don't want to say coming in, expanding it and finding the room. We got planning models so we know how to plan for it, but now being able to actually connect the plan to the execution through NetApp, it's simpler, it's cleaner, it's easier, fewer mistakes, fewer tragedies, thousands of lives saved in the process, if you will.

Rob Strechay

>> And including your own. And because you don't have your PagerDuty phone thrown at you in the middle of the night, which been there, been on the offside and I've had that happen. I mean, over the past year, since the last Insight, things have changed at a radical speed, I would say. And the challenges and the approaches, I mean, you think back, it's been only two years really since ChatGPT took off and we got into this. How are you seeing NetApp really stepping up that roadmap? Intelligent data infrastructure was really rolled out last year as kind of a vision. And this year, it's kind of paying out. How do you see that playing with the customers that you're talking to and people like Anaplan?

>> Well, I think, first of all, is key to listen to customers. I think, Adam here, if you guys are sharing clearly and openly, hey, what are your pain points? What are the things that you need? And we have a big role. I mean, look, there's plenty of data that lives on NetApp, and we have a big responsibility towards our customers. Our vision on intelligent date infrastructure was not just a response of those customer needs, but a reality of what's happening in the world. In a way, what our customers are asking us for is to have a unified storage plan, where they can embrace public cloud, multi-cloud, the world of on premise. With a single engine, and our case, what we're bringing is single operating system, which is ONTAP. But at the same time, when you have that unified storage is to make sure that you can run intelligent data services. A big part of our commitment as NetApp is to provide some of those intelligent data services to help you work with your storage. And all that with a commitment of saying, simplicity, security, savings, sustainability. So that's our real change in the last 12 months, in a way, embracing AI in a way that really come implemented in our customers, working with them hand to hand.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think, again, you hit on a really good topic, and you kind of brought it up a little bit, that you're not just on-prem, you do have on-prem, but you have things in multiple different clouds. Talk to us about how the enablement of ONTAP being that single operating system from a storage perspective has helped you go to those other places.

Adam Thier

>> Let me make it really simple. Separation of duties. It's customer data. Now, some of them are doing BYOK, we're doing... It's separation of duties. If I got four different systems I'm dealing with, and five different layers, four times five is 20, right? Or I can have four. So that reduction, and when you've got 20 and I make mistakes and confusion and there's overlap, that's just like a huge thing, just in that small little piece. But separation of duties is no joke. My customers are big, beefy, serious people. They don't just go, oh, do you have separation of duties, Adam? And I'm like, oh yeah, sure. No, they push and they test. So it just simplifies and we avoid the manual errors, the mistakes that end up costing me a fortune. So just having that, and it is, it's simplification. As the data explodes and the sources explode, and the number of APIs explode and the amount of data coming to and fro and hither and yon increases, it gets beyond the ability of human comprehension fairly quickly.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, Cesar, Adam is really emphasizing how this has helped erode his maybe your headaches, because as you said, this is really about peace of mind, having more security, having a faster reaction time. But it also enables and empowers more innovation to drive business outcomes. So how does this giving him peace of mind then help him have more time to focus on what the real value adds for the organization?

>> Well, that's a big part of our commitment. He'll be better suited to go say where he's spending his time that he couldn't spend it before. So let Adam answer that. But this is big part of our strategy as we think about innovation. Saying, what are the biggest pain points, not just on the technological side? So we think about business. Hey, how are you going to go and grow your business so you can go and help your customers in a different way? I want to make sure that we innovate in advance to take care of some of those headaches and some of those key workloads, pains on the infrastructure side. And I'll say, beyond storage. When you think about our intelligent data infrastructure, our commitment is beyond storage. We embrace security in a way that not anybody else is doing. Our ransomware commitments and how we go and have those recovery plans, and how we bring even BlueXP as a single dashboard, to kind of monitor your data and understand, how's your data performing? You have in some issues in some places or not, is something unique. And a big differentiator has been, and it is, the fact that we're investing in a truly hybrid cloud world where the only company that has, as you have seen them here, the three biggest hyperscalers as a first-party service. So we have ONTAP embedded in their consoles. So that's very important for customers because then you need to go and choose to be on-prem or they choose to be on the cloud. You can go and decide to be in both places and have an inter-portability with a seamless experience on your data. And that's what makes us very different.

Rob Strechay

>> And would seem that, again, that where it helps you is, again, trying to, you said, minimize the number of parts, pieces that you have inside of yours, because ultimately, this is part of the service that you offer to your clients and your customers. So you're trying to have that reliability, security. Sustainability has to be a big piece of it because that costs you money and you're around the world and there's different geographies. The security, there's sovereignty and things of that nature that you probably have to meet for customers. What do you see as some of those things that, like we heard about the metadata namespace and things of that nature, and some of the new parts that are coming out, where do you look for NetApp to take you next? What are you hoping for?

Adam Thier

>> Well, so like I said, we're a billion dollar company. And unlike a lot of my smaller competitors that spend all their money on innovation and building stuff and kind of don't pay a lot of attention to these other things, we have to both build a robust, reliable, secure infrastructure and spend money on that to meet the needs of my really demanding customers, and innovate. So I have to find the balance. And the balance for us is, we need to innovate. Just like NetApp needs to innovate and have brought out all these new products, we've brought out, in the past year and a half, six new products, data orchestration, geospatial mapping, workflow. And we also brought to market nine new applications in planning and supply chain workforce. To do those things through that innovation, I still have to do these things. So being able to simplify those things and being able to be very efficient allows us to open the doors on innovation and outpace my competitors. So they're just trying to catch me on innovation and not doing any things to be secure. Now, what I look for next from these guys is, I can't have the estate go down. And so what they were doing on AI and security, the whole, oh, something's going wrong. Snapshot the data, right? This is where the future is and it's going to get uglier and rougher from here. So those are the things I'm looking for. It's the data, right?

Rob Strechay

>> Funny enough, all of the systems run on data, including AI. Yes.

>> That's a core. But actually, leaving . You asked me before about, hey, how do you go and spend your time? That's go back to the point you're saying, you want to spend more time innovating versus ensuring they have the right platform behind you. And in my way, that's what I've been spending my time trying, to innovate, to enable you for that growth.

Adam Thier

>> Exactly.

>> So when we could have start years ago innovating and say, we're going to be best in class in this world, which is going to be a world hybrid cloud, and everyone talks about hybrid cloud, but that requires to do the big investments that we have made and the work keep doing with hyperscalers, with Nvidia, ensuring that we're best in class for our customers, so they can differentiate themselves. When do we go and talk about security, we invest in millions of dollars to make sure that our platform, our intelligent data infrastructure that we want you to go and build is secure and you can really be safe, so you can spend your area and time in other places, right?

Adam Thier

>> Exactly.

>> Probably the conference you have seen, we've been talking a lot about block storage. We made some announcement as well around block. Many of our customers have been asking us that, hey, we don't want you to be only a file or object storage, but we had already 20,000 customers on block. The reality, they were asking us for more. So that's our job.

Adam Thier

>> Yes.

>> And I love how you have described yours because in a way, we're doing the same, serving you as you serve your customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> A great note to end on. Caesar and Adam, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE.

Adam Thier

>> You're welcome.

Rebecca Knight

>> Really interesting conversation.

>> Thank you for being here. Thank you for the invite.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.