NetApp INSIGHT 2026 | Jen Prenner, Product Marketing

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Jen Prenner

SVP, Product Marketing

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Jen Prenner, Product Marketing

Jen Prenner

SVP, Product Marketing NetApp

In this interview from NetApp INSIGHT 2026, Jen Prenner, senior vice president of product marketing at NetApp, joins theCUBE's Christophe Bertrand and Rebecca Knight to discuss how unified storage and an autonomous control plane are becoming the foundation for AI-ready enterprise infrastructure. Prenner explains that NetApp's AI data services layer makes decades of structured and unstructured data accessible, governed and protected without requiring costly re-architecture. She details how unifying file, block and object storage across cloud, edge and on-premi... Read more

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How should the main message of Insight 2026 be summarized for customers? add

How does NetApp help customers turn large volumes of legacy enterprise data into usable, governed AI-ready data without adding complexity or requiring data re-architecting or movement? add

How would you describe the broader vision for the NetApp platform, and what should customers take away from this year's NetApp Insight event? add

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Rebecca Knight

>> (INTRO)Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2026 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside Christophe Bertrand, theCUBE's analyst in residence. This is our last segment of the

Christophe Bertrand

>> day.Last but not

Rebecca Knight

>> least.Last but not least. We saved the best for last. Don't tell our other guests. I would like to welcome Jen Prenner, SVP Product Marketing at NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the show,

Jen Prenner

>> Jen.Yeah, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you've been with NetApp for a little over a year. I'm curious, you've worked at a lot of the who's who of tech companies.

Jen Prenner

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> What was it about this opportunity and maybe this opportunity in this moment of time that was too compelling for you to pass up?

Jen Prenner

>> Yeah, it's a great question. I felt that AI was something that anyone who still wants to work wants to be close to in one way, shape, or form. And I've always been at the cutting edge of technology, whether that was at Meta or Amazon, And this era of AI, the infrastructure era, was just something that I felt like I could really lend my expertise to in making technology approachable, clear, and helping businesses understand what they could get from a company like NetApp.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So look, we've been here at Insight 2026 for a couple of days. Lots of announcements, some last Friday, more announcements about NetApp platform, lots of discussions around cloud and cyber resilience, AI of course, and more AI and even more AI. Okay, if you were to summarize the message of this event, which, I was here last year, the vibe is very different. What would you tell your customers? How would you summarize it?

Jen Prenner

>> Good question. I've been thinking about it a lot because our announcements have really run the gamut of all the things we're talking about, as you mentioned. I think I would summarize it in that we are here to build intelligent data infrastructure with and for our customers. And how we do that is through the NetApp platform. And so all those announcements that you just mentioned, cloud, AI, all of them, they're really about helping our customers understand the value of the NetApp platform and what they can get from it.

Rebecca Knight

>> So when you first started, you talked about your approach being making technology accessible, clear, helping companies understand what they can get from it. We know that so many customers are sitting on enormous troves of enterprise data that was created long before AI was the thing that it is. How do you help tell the story of how they make that data useful without making things more complicated?

Jen Prenner

>> Well, I think to tell this story, it first starts with having products that are worthy of storytelling. And when you think about our AI data services layer and what we can do with all the data that you mentioned that has been created long ago, that's structured and unstructured and governed and ungoverned, for data to be usable for AI, it needs to be accessible, governed, protected, available. You need to be able to do that with all that data for your projects without re-architecting the data or moving it, or that all adds cost and complexity and those sort of things. And so when you have a product that works, then I can focus on how do I tell that story? George talked yesterday a lot about context and memory, and those are things that people understand. not everybody understands the more technical terms, but when you talk about data being context and memory, then you get to understanding what all that data can do for your business and whether it was created 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or yesterday. We can help you with our AI data services, bring it all together to make sure your projects work and then go from pilot to production to produce real business value for customers.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. But when you look at the reality, though, enterprise environments today are spread across multiple types of infrastructure, whether in a data center or in the cloud or specialized AI environments. So how do you maintain flexibility without having to recreate a specific data infrastructure every time?

Jen Prenner

>> Yeah, it's a good question and one we've thought about and talked about. And as we were thinking about the platform, there's two layers that sort of address that particular question. And one is about unified storage and how we think about unified storage is more than simply file types. It's more than blocks and objects. It's really about unifying file, block, and object, but also unifying environments. So whether you want to store your data on the cloud, at the edge, or on-prem, or some combination of all three, which is what most customers do, we feel like allowing a unified strategy to take hold is how you access all of that data without creating that complexity, without creating more silos. we announced OCI, which is yet another amazing, addition to our portfolio, to our platform. So if your data is stored there, great. Now we can utilize it across the board for whatever it is that you need to do.

Rebecca Knight

>> Every day it seems there's a new scary headline about a cyberattack, and increasingly they're targeting an organization's data and its ability to recover afterward. How does that change what is expected of the underlying data?

Jen Prenner

>> Yeah, protection, proactive protection as we like to call it, has changed and the stakes are different now. we talk a lot about proactive protection in the machine era, whereas a lot of cyber products were developed for a different era, a more human-grade era. And now what we believe is that protection needs to be built in at all layers and not bolted on, but built in, whether that's at the storage layer through ONTAP, whether that's in the AI Data Services layer with autonomous protection. The data layer provides a lot of that protection. So you're getting it at all the layers. And then you think about, we announced Commvault, a good— an evolution, I should say, of our partnership with Commvault. And so not only do we believe that data protection needs to be at all layers, but we do it, we have our own products that we do, but we also partner. We have phenomenal partners like Commvault, who come to the table to help us with that as well.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So let's talk about economics a little bit. Budgets are what they are when it comes to IT infrastructure. They're not getting necessarily much larger. So a lot of customers are probably struggling with resources. So how can you help them do more with less?

Jen Prenner

>> Good question. There's, I think, many ways we can help customers do more with less, but one of the ways is through what we call Complete Control or our autonomous control plane. Teams need a unified view, and one of those things that ends up costing businesses a lot is when you have separate teams managing separate data estates using separate tools. You have to have experts for all of them. With what we announced this week, which was the evolution to Console and Console Local, you have one environment that can manage everything for you, whether that's your cloud or on-prem, whether you're looking at workloads or something else, you can manage all of that. Your fleet manageability, your observability, reporting, analytics, remediation, all of that can be done with Console within one tool. So you don't have to have separate teams, separate tools, which end up costing a lot of money. So I think there's a lot of ways in which the right intelligent infrastructure actually helps customers save money. But that's just one of them that I think we're talking about today.

Rebecca Knight

>> One thing that's been so clear in all of our conversations that we're having here on theCUBE is that NetApp is in a really sweet spot in terms of getting new customers interested. Customers that haven't really ever thought much about data or thought too hard about it are coming your way. As we are wrapping up NetApp Insight and wrapping up this conversation too, Jen, what do you, how do you describe the broader vision for the NetApp platform and what do you want customers to take away from the theme of this year's event?

Jen Prenner

>> I think that one of the things I want them to take away is that NetApp is your partner for the AI era beyond storage. We've talked a lot about being beyond boundaries. And so whether that is AI factories and what we talked about with NVIDIA or, your cloud or a console or any of those things, what we want folks to understand is that NetApp is far more than your storage provider. When we think about being the company that helps you build intelligent data infrastructure, one layer of that is unified storage. But the other layers, the protection, the control planes, the data layers, those are all things that we help you with. So I think historically we've been thought of as a storage player and we are, we are the best. We have 30 years of trust with our customers, but we also have a lot more so that customers can take their ambitions and turn them into something that's real and that is producing business value for them.

Rebecca Knight

>> I will look forward to hearing more at Insight 2027.

Jen Prenner

>> I will look forward to talking with you then. Thank you so much for the time.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much.

Jen Prenner

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> And thank you so much for joining us at theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2026. I'm Rebecca Knight for Christophe Bertrand. You've been watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.