NetApp INSIGHT 2026 | Pravjit Tiwana, NetApp & Konstantinos (KP) Papamiltiadis, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

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Pravjit Tiwana

SVP & GM - Cloud Storage and Services Business Unit

NetApp

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

Senior Vice President of Partnerships

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

play_circle_outline NetApp ONTAP Native on OCI: Co-Engineered, Deeply Integrated, Joint Development and Go-to-Market

play_circle_outline Seamless migration from on-prem ONTAP without application redesign

play_circle_outline Operational efficiencies: single console, provisioning, billing, and reduced complexity

play_circle_outline Benefits from OCI ecosystem: compute, AI integrations, security, and performance efficiencies

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Pravjit Tiwana, NetApp & Konstantinos (KP) Papamiltiadis, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Pravjit Tiwana

SVP & GM - Cloud Storage and Services Business Unit NetApp

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

Senior Vice President of Partnerships Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

In this interview from NetApp INSIGHT 2026, Pravjit Tiwana, senior vice president and general manager of cloud storage and services at NetApp, joins Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, senior vice president of partnerships at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and theCUBE Research's Christophe Bertrand about a newly announced, co-engineered ONTAP storage service built natively into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Tiwana explains why the first-party offering goes beyond a bolt-on integration, with deep engineering across control plane, dat... Read more

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What is the new ONTAP storage offering in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, how was it developed with the partner, and what customer benefits and integrations does it provide? add

What should partners and channel teams expect in terms of go‑to‑market collaboration, co‑marketing/co‑selling, and the customer migration experience when moving on‑premises applications or infrastructure to OCI using ONTAP? add

What was the primary motivation for offering ONTAP as a native, managed service on OCI, and what operational benefits does that provide? add

What are the benefits to customers of having ONTAP provided natively within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) rather than as a non‑native or bolted‑on solution? add

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Rebecca Knight

>> (INTRO)Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2026 here at the MGM in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside Christophe Bertrand, who is, of course, theCUBE Research's analyst in residence. We've got two terrific guests for this next segment. I'd like to welcome Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, KP, as he's known, SVP of Partnerships, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Welcome.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> Glad to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Pravjit Tiwana, SVP and GM, Cloud Storage and Services Business Unit here at NetApp. Thank you so much. I'm going to start with this big announcement that was yesterday, a new storage service. Why don't you start from the beginning about this partnership, what was actually announced, and why will it matter? Why does it matter for customers? Let's start with you,

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> KP.we are very excited about this partnership. We have been building storage products for as long as we've existed as a cloud company. But the reality is that we were missing something key. Something that our customers wanted for a very long time, something that solves for very mission-critical workloads, something that solves for large-scale deployment, something that may exist on customers' premises that they wanted to bring into the cloud. And so we spent, a few months trying to figure out the right arrangement. And since then we have been heads down, working to bring it to life.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> Yeah, same here as KP, right? Like we are very excited about the partnership. This is truly working backward from our customers. Our joint customers have been telling us that, hey, they want similar ONTAP experience natively available in Oracle. And that's why, right, if you see, this is a first-party service offering where all our capabilities are available natively inside the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This is not a bolt-on environment or anything.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> This is—

Pravjit Tiwana

>> and for customers, it's really good because now they get the similar ONTAP capabilities or richness which they are used to in Oracle Cloud natively. They can use their console, their APIs, everything, and provision it.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. Let's talk a little bit about the partnership and the specific announcement. How is it different from what you had before is my first question, and why should customers really think about it in a different way? And maybe you can also double-click on some of the work you've done as partners in terms of any sort of testing, security co-engineering. I'm very curious about all of that because I believe, your joint customers will be asking you those questions. So, Pravjit, I'm going to start with you, putting you on the spot.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> Yeah, no, absolutely right. Like, so first of all, we didn't have our ONTAP storage offering inside Oracle before this. This is the first time we are going to provide it in Oracle. And for customers, there's a lot of benefits from running their mission-critical workloads to compliance and regulatory requirement workloads. All of them now they can run natively inside OCI. As far as our partnership, this is a co-engineered and co-developed product of ours. It's not like just we have taken it and bolted it in OCI, but both KP's organizations and our organizations have worked very closely to have a deep integration into control plane, data plane, as well as to the OCI's native billing infrastructure, to provisioning, to console, to APIs. And this doesn't stop here only, right? We go the next step also. We do a combined and joint GTM for this thing as we take this product to our customers and to the market. So over the last 6, 7 months, our teams have been very busy working to make it a truly frictionless experience for our customers.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> Exactly.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> That's—that was the key thing for us too, right? Because we don't have any other storage solution that we integrate with a third-party that doesn't have that same depth of integration where people can provision the service, operate the service, see what they consume, and then eventually get billed for the service, all natively done. And the other key critical piece that was very important for us, at least when it comes to our customers' value prop, is that some of our customers already use NetApp on-prem. And so we didn't want to create a flow that is inconsistent to the experience that they get when they use, you know, like ONTAP on-prem.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Let me ask you a quick follow-up question. That's to both of you. You mentioned GTM, and I guess you have partners, you have a channel, you have marketing initiatives. Can you tell us more about what to expect?

Pravjit Tiwana

>> Yeah, so this is something, right, like there is some experience we have running our first-party services in other hyperscalers also. So a lot of things we have learned over years. The core here is jointly we want to work backward from customers and listen to them, right? Like, hey, what they want. And from a GTM perspective, yes, there will be a lot of co-development of our marketing initiatives as well as our co-selling. So our sellers organization and our OCI sellers organization, they work together on figuring out who are these customers? But one thing which KP said is very, very important when customers are moving their data or infrastructure to OCI. The one important thing is nobody wants to redo the application redesign and all. Now, if you have applications or systems running on-prem, you bring it to OCI with ONTAP, you don't have to do anything. It works as seamlessly as it was working on-prem. Now you can make it work on the cloud same way.

Rebecca Knight

>> So it's no secret that AI is putting tremendous pressure on existing data estates. Talk a little bit about what this will unlock for the organizations in terms of helping them manage their data, their existing enterprise data, as well as for their AI projects.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> You're absolutely right. From a perspective, right, data is the most important part, but the story doesn't end there only, right? The most important part is also how you prepare the data, how do you govern it, how it is compliant, how do you keep the lineage and all those. And over the last 20, 30 years in NetApp, we have worked on those data services capabilities, from data protection to compliance postures to regulatory requirements deeply integrated into the product itself. So for AI, we are not just providing them the data, but we are also providing that preparation for that data so that it can be used in their agent workflows or inferencing and so on. And in the fullness of time, both the companies do plan to work together to bring Oracle's great AI efforts into our ONTAP so customers don't have to move data somewhere else. They can run the AI right where the data lives. So we will be working and we have been working on those things too.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> So the data piece is key, right? It's key because data is being used for training, but it's key because data is also used to contextualize what AI can actually deliver. Right. And I think the workloads that we're optimizing for are ones where we bring the customer's data into the mix. And the customer's data is being used to deliver the results that will make GenAI workflows better or more efficient, more contextual, and all that within a secure and very well-governed environment.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's explore this a little further. So why was essentially what is an OCI native service, why was that the right approach?

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> How do you mean?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, it's for customers. They have options. Right, you decided to really combine the technologies in a way that is co-engineered, that has really thought through the process of not only migration potentially from on-prem to cloud to the management piece. So you're giving them something that's not hybrid, that's not combined, that's better than just cobbled together. So why is that a better approach for our customers? Is there economic benefit? Is there performance benefit? Is there maybe a maintenance over time benefit?

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> I would say it's all the above, right? I think the primary motivation, at least from my perspective, and Pravjit can complement what I say or maybe disagree with what I say, is the experience. When I'm going into the OCI console, I have the option to use the ONTAP as a native service. I don't have to jump to a different surface where I can configure the service, I can run the service, and I can get billed for that. So for me, the most important thing that we managed to build is from an operational perspective, we bring everything under one single interface that provides simplicity and consistency. The second thing which I think is probably specific to the ONTAP product, is that working natively on top of, OCI's infrastructure creates efficiencies that you wouldn't otherwise be able to have if it wasn't a managed service.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's talk about that. What type of efficiencies do you see? And maybe talk about security also, if you don't mind. It's a big topic.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> I'll let the experts speak to that.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> No, so KP is absolutely right, right? When customer goes to any hyperscaler, right? Expecting certain level of operational efficiencies, the way they consume it, with the way they manage it. They don't want to learn multiple things at the same time, right? There is a specific way in which you operate your services in OCI as a hyperscaler and customers are used to it. Otherwise, as KP was saying, right? Then you have to learn multiple things and then you have to operate multiple things. When you are running these things at a high scale, operations are probably one of the most important things, operations and service fundamentals, right? So from that perspective, being natively available inside OCI infrastructure, we can bring a lot of efficiencies. OCI comes with a lot of new compute instances. OCI comes with a lot of other AI integrations. OCI comes with security products, right? they all can work together. Otherwise, what happens is if it is not natively available, your customer will feel that, hey, it is bolted on or something on top. Put by force over existing. This is a natural, frictionless way for them to consume ONTAP, just like any other OCI service, be it on compute, be it databases, be it network, anything, right? So for them it is just a seamless integration of what they are doing. They don't have to think about, oh, now I have to go and configure my storage, configure my data, and I have to do it in a different way. It's the same way to do it everywhere.

Rebecca Knight

>> It's removing complexity.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> So partnerships like this one really live or die on trust between two otherwise competitive companies. So what has to happen internally for this partnership to work and to be successful? And was there ever a time when you disagreed on an approach? And how do you collaborate to make the product what you both want it to be?

Pravjit Tiwana

>> I will say that for both the companies, our focus is not against each other or among us. What we really want to solve jointly is what customers want. If customers come tomorrow and say that, hey, we are not serving them the right way or we are not doing that, then we don't have any problem. Obviously we will work super hard to earn their trust, but in the end we want to make it all about what customers want versus, hey, is there one service or second service? The important thing here is, in storage in particular, we have been working at NetApp on storage in particular for the last 20, 30 years. Over the years, we have built so many capabilities, deep capabilities, and there is no compression algorithm for learning these gnarly scale problems just quickly. So we have learned a lot, sometimes by fire, sometimes by other ways. And those benefits go to the customers there. And from Oracle's side, we feel it is a win-win situation for our customers. It's not like, one versus the other. And as far as differences or things are concerned, I think we work as one team in the end. We also totally understand it is Oracle's first-party service. So we are like a provider to them in that sense. But we want to work only on behalf of our customers, joint customers, and work backward from there.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. And you guys have done a great job, I think, highlighting the benefits of this native Oracle integration, co-engineering. What type of workloads are you seeing or do you expect to see when we look at the real world and customers adopting the service? What do you expect? Maybe KP, we'll start with you.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (kp)

>> specifically, I think what we were discussing earlier still it's relevant for this question too. All the workloads that we have seen happening on-prem, we can see migrating over to the cloud. Why? Because you take advantage of every other thing that may exist as a service in the cloud, as a data source, in the cloud. And that, I think, combination makes the service very valuable. For me, the most important thing which speaks volumes to what Pravjit was saying earlier is that they spent 25 years working on something that is mission critical, that works in highly regulated environments, that is designed for scale. And those workloads, if we can bring them to our customers, because we operate at that level of scale too, right? We serve some of the biggest companies in the world with gigawatts worth of compute running in our infrastructure, right? So those types of workloads, I think, better fit the customer's needs. And those are the main motivations behind our partnership ultimately.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> Yeah, I'll say that, right? One of the important things here is with our joint service, What we also do is provide a unified storage for file, block, object, right? So if your application or your company's estate requires all of them, you don't have to do it 3 times, you do it 1 time, right? So that opens up a lot of workloads for customers in an easier way to consume. I'll say probably the obvious workloads which will be surfaced with this is, first of all, it's a file service and a block service. So basic construct of applications using file shares and all those are minimum 101s. But where we also are seeing a lot of demand is especially around EDA and HPC workloads, because EDA and HPC workloads require very high throughput, high performance, for which our joint service is very capable of delivering that. Then the other workloads where we see a lot of excitement is around virtualization, right? Especially when specific hypervisors are moving more and more to cloud. And then of course databases but where in coming months we will see more traction also is on workloads around inferencing, training as well as RAGs and AI-based workflows. So in totality, right, combination of file block and object gives customers a very wide array of workloads which they can run where especially the operational readiness as well as items like availability, reliability, security, the performance throughput, those are the important ones. Those are the workloads which we are after.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for coming on the show. A really interesting conversation.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Best of luck. Looking forward to talking more about this at Insight 2027.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Awesome.

Pravjit Tiwana

>> Thank you. All right.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Christophe Bertrand. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2026. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.