NetApp INSIGHT 2026 | Willem Hendrickx, NetApp

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Willem Hendrickx

SVP, APAC & EMEA/LATAM

NetApp

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play_circle_outline Data Sovereignty: Location, Operations, Support, Telemetry and Partner Ecosystems (MSSPs, SAP, Hyperscalers)

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Willem Hendrickx, NetApp

Willem Hendrickx

SVP, APAC & EMEA/LATAM NetApp

In this interview from NetApp INSIGHT 2026, Willem Hendrickx, senior vice president and general manager of EMEA & LATAM at NetApp, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and theCUBE Research's Christophe Bertrand to discuss how NetApp is building a unified, trusted data foundation that makes enterprise data AI-ready across hybrid and multicloud environments. Hendrickx explains that sovereignty has evolved from a legal question into an architectural and operational decision, driving demand for solutions like the newly announced Keystone Sovereign offering and a new go... Read more

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How are customers—particularly in Europe—prioritizing their budgets when asked to invest simultaneously in AI, modernization, security, and resilience, and how should they strike the right balance among those priorities? add

What are customers looking for from technology, and how do those needs vary across different markets? add

Why are customers shifting from CapEx to storage-as-a-service, and how does NetApp Keystone address their needs? add

How are you addressing customers' concerns about data sovereignty (where data is stored and who operates/manages/supports it), and what solutions or partnerships are you offering to deliver a sovereign cloud-like experience? add

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Willem Hendrickx, NetApp

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(INTRO)

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2026 here at the MGM Grand. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Christophe Bertrand, who is theCUBE Research analyst in residence. We have a terrific new guest for this next segment. I'd like to welcome Willem Hendrickx. He is SVP and GM EMEA at NetApp. Welcome.

Willem Hendrickx

>> Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about your role and your remit? Because it's quite a large geography.

Willem Hendrickx

>> It's a large geography. So actually, I'm responsible for the revenues for NetApp in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and also the LATAM business.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. Okay. So I want to ask you about customers and how they're prioritizing their budget, particularly in Europe right now, because they're being asked to invest in AI, which is expensive, modernization, security, resilience all at once. How are you advising them or seeing them, or what are you hearing about how they're prioritizing and striking the right balance?

Willem Hendrickx

>> Yeah, let me first start with customers. My customers are not buying technology for the sake of technology. So it's all about business outcomes. And those business outcomes could be growth, could be reducing costs, resilience, or anything else. So, and to answer your question, that is basically different per market. So if you look at certain traditional markets like in Europe or traditional industries, they're focused right now more on sovereignty, more on cost, and regulations while you see other markets like Middle East or industries focusing more on how can I grow faster on AI. But the question really remains the same. how do I move fast while having control of my data? And this is what actually the flexibility is all about, right? Is the flexibility of where can I— customers want to make sure that they can control their data. Customers want to make sure that they can actually choose which technology they're going to use. And with this market right now going so fast, how can I change the technology moving forward? And that's actually our role. And that's why I'm super excited to be here because our role is really to provide them with one consistent data secure foundation so that we can actually achieve their outcomes. But more importantly, how can we help them do more innovation while not adding another layer of complexity, which most of the time happens.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So I think there's quite a bit going on in terms of how people consume now or enterprises consume data and in general, the fact that everything is more of an as-a-service approach. How do you manage that and what do you see in your geo that may be different from other geos?

Willem Hendrickx

>> Great question. And again, I think what I see is that we still have a lot of customers buying CapEx for 5 years. Most of those customers, they know the demand. But right now, you see also a lot of customers where the infrastructure needs to follow the business instead of the other way around. And there, the storage as a service comes into play because it provides them predictability. Predictability on cost, on availability, on performance, and on growth. And on top of that, it also makes sure that they have an operational burden taken away. Because right now you have a lot of people maintaining the infrastructure instead of focusing on business outcomes. So this is why we have Keystone, and Keystone is our as-a-service offering. And that allows our customers to take the benefit of the NetApp platform with defined SLAs and also performance control that we always give to all our customers. So I think there's sometimes a little bit of a thinking that as a service is more like a payment model. It's way more than that. It's really a business decision. Right.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And I was wondering, do you see a vast difference between the European Union and the Middle East, or is it just a vertical thing? I'm just curious.

Willem Hendrickx

>> It's more a vertical thing. And it's also depending on where the customers are in their cycle. What I mean by that, sometimes customers do both. They buy CapEx, but as I said, for certain projects, for example, important new projects, they actually take as a service. So we have actually a blended model, but we see the growth of AI as-a-service big time in Europe, especially sovereign AI.

Rebecca Knight

>> The conversation keeps circling back to sovereignty. How do you define it and how do your customers define it? And is there a gap between those?

Willem Hendrickx

>> I think it's probably the biggest thing that I talk about with my customers. And I think, listen, let me take it from the customer perspective. My customer is not only asking, hey, where do you store your data? It's who operates it, who manages it, where is your support, what is your telemetry? So it's way more than where the data is stored. And so what I see is that actually our customers, what they really want is a cloud-like experience but having control of their data, right? And so you see actually a change of where sovereignty is not only a legal discussion but it's actually an architectural design and an operational decision more than anything else. And so we're here, of course, at INSIGHT. And for us, this is critically important. We have a lot of public sector customers. A lot of finance customers who really, sovereignty is very big. You know, look at Germany, look at France. So we have two announcements that I want to call out. The first one, we just talked about as-a-service. I'm super happy that we basically announced Keystone Sovereign, which quite frankly my customer has been asking for big time. And the way we approach that on the market is we, of course, have a direct relationship with the customer through our partners. But secondly, a lot of my partners who have local relationships in the countries, MSSPs, large operators, they can take that NetApp solution embedded in their overall solution and provide a full sovereign solution to my customers. The second one, talking about partners, because you cannot do sovereign alone, is our announcement as a result of that. And SAP has good relationship with all of the hyperscalers— basically, sorry, AWS, Microsoft, and also Google, but they build their own sovereign cloud. And what we are doing right now is actually having a relationship where we're going to go to market because NetApp is in the backend. And so we're now going with SAP to our overall customer, providing a full sovereign solution. And so our commitment is there. And I think this is just a start.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So let me follow up on that. Couple of points. Obviously, I know a little bit about the European Union. I know, I know. And of course, there are some interesting twists and turns. I mean, we saw a few years ago GDPR fundamentally

Willem Hendrickx

>> changed—100%.

Christophe Bertrand

>> —a lot of architectures, as a matter of fact, and really at the data level and changing the conversation around governance and compliance, really compliance, but truly governance when you think about it. What do you think is going to happen in Europe with some of the work the European Union has done and is doing Do you feel like we're gearing up for even more complexity in how your clients have to deploy sovereign AI, compliant AI in Europe?

Willem Hendrickx

>> Yeah, I think we're just at the beginning, right? And I think the European community is working on that. I think the European community takes a little bit of time before they basically get the regulations out. But I think there's also a difference between sovereign AI and others because sovereign AI is way more difficult. Than what we normally do. This is also why you see Neo Clouds happening with sovereign AI. You see basically telcos building gigafactories. You see the Europeans pushing more European investments in that particular area. So you just mentioned Neo Clouds.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Let's talk about that. What is a Neo Cloud?

Willem Hendrickx

>> Well, a Neo Cloud is basically they are building gigafactories with GPUs to provide AI services to customers that could be hyperscalers, that could be enterprises. Typically in Europe, you see more sovereign AI neoclouds. So quite frankly, every country starts to have their own neoclouds and you see telcos investing in gigafactories so that they can actually support their overall customers. And when you look at the neoclouds, all they care about is making sure that their GPUs are not idle. The cost of having a GPU that is idle is expensive. And this is where, and I think you talked about it during the show, this is why we actually launched Novus. Novus is basically our fastest storage. And this is where we have 100 terabytes per second. I think what I want to talk about though is that because we sometimes forget the ecosystem and definitely in Europe it's all about ecosystem. And what I mean by that, if you're a neo cloud, you want to look for off-takers. And sometimes the hyperscalers are off-takers. And what we're now trying to do with Novus is, of course, we have the best solution in the backend, is to see how we can create a go-to-market play with the neo clouds. Because think of it from my customer perspective. My customers have two choices. First, I'm going to build my own gigafactory or I'm going to rent capacity. So if I can make sure that we're basically bringing the two together, allowing the NeoClouds to provide added value to my customers. My customers can take advantage of the NeoClouds while they're assessing if they have to build. That's what we are working on. So I'm super excited, of course, about the Novus, but more important is to create that go-to-market discussion with my NeoClouds, which they, by the way, love.

Rebecca Knight

>> So for a typical enterprise though, how different is their AI challenge from, say, a Neo Cloud or what an AI factory is doing?

Willem Hendrickx

>> Yeah, it's a bit like startups, right? They don't have history. So neoclouds don't have history. So they're building big, big gigafactories and they can do that. Most of the enterprises, they live like NetApp for 30 years. They have a lot of data. They live in different countries, they have different clouds. So they have already data that is there for a long time. So their challenge is we have the data. How can I make that AI ready? And this is where I think our role comes in from a NetApp perspective to help them to make sure that we can make that data AI ready because that will give them the competitive advantage. And this is where you see, if you don't do that, you see a lot of AI pilots, but they never get in production. And you can only do that when you really make everything AI ready.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So I'd like to talk about one of the great capabilities that you've always had or certainly have had for a long time, including ecosystem partners around cyber resilience. And obviously in Europe, there's no question that there may be a couple of things going on from a geopolitical perspective. And we've actually seen in the news as recently as a couple of weeks ago how there are literally— there's this, I guess, asymmetrical sort of warfare going on. And cyber is obviously often AI-powered, a big topic. And has been successful in many cases. So tell us more about how maybe cyber resilience is taking a new dimension for NetApp in the context of what's going on in your geo.

Willem Hendrickx

>> Yeah, cyber was always there, right? I think the big difference is, of course, one, geopolitical difference, and you have a lot of nation-state attacks that are happening, right? Secondly, what you also, of course, see with AI, it's way easier to leverage AI to attack. So the question is not if you're going to be attacked, the question is when it's going to happen. And so if you really take a step back on that one, it's like, okay, if it happens, can I still operate as a company? And then, how can I recover my trusted data? And so when you look at cyber, a lot of investments are happening on basically defense and prevention. That's great, but I also think that you need to have an investment on what I call detection, right? And if you look at, for example, from a NetApp perspective, we put the detection in the data layer, and that is very unique. And I was actually a couple of weeks ago with a bank who just did a very large investment on NetApp, and I asked them like, why did you buy NetApp over the competitors. And that was exactly because of that reason, right? Because we have built-in ransomware intelligence. And why is that important? Because think about if you don't have that, it's very easy to exfiltrate your data or your files, right? And that costs you a lot of money. So having those capabilities on the data layer allows us to give our customers way more, I would say, protection that combined with the fact that we can basically recover the data, in an instant, it's a pretty good, pretty good story.

Rebecca Knight

>> So when you're thinking about all the pressures facing your customers who are investing in AI in terms of cyberattacks, in terms of budget, in terms of innovation and speed, what are the questions that keep coming up? Do you sense— is there a theme in terms of the one question that you hear from customers again and again?

Willem Hendrickx

>> we talk about this with many, many different teams. And I think that's the challenge because it's fragmentation. So everywhere you look, you have AI, you have let's say, on-prem, you have software as a service, and you have cloud, right? Do you really want to have 4 different operating models? Do you really want to have 4 groups looking at the same issue? Do you really want to have that? So I think our job is to actually create a little bit more. There's enough chaos. Can we help them to actually reduce that chaos? Right. And this is where, again, the one consistent secure data foundation comes into play so we can basically look at that from a holistic view and provide value to our customers so that they can achieve, again, what I said in the beginning, business outcomes. Because if you don't, you spend a lot of money, on all of those particular silos.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So looking ahead, what do you think will be the most important decisions that are made today or this year to influence the next few years?

Willem Hendrickx

>> of course, you can't— you can't get away from AI and cloud. But I think, again, if you take a step back, it's all going to be very much business-related discussions. I think we sometimes talk too much about technology. And so if you look at it from a business, right, you have AI, you have cloud, and let's say you have cyber, which we talked about. What's happening most of the time is these are silo decisions. And so everyone is looking at their own silos and making their own decisions. And AI is one of them. So you see AI projects living on an island, which is not being actually endorsed by the overall business. So I think there's going to be two elements. Either you're going to continue to do that or you're going to take a holistic view. Where is our business? What do we need to do? And there I think this is going to be more a platform choice, right? And I think if you do a platform choice, then I really believe you're going to have more grip on your business because you're going to reduce cost and you're going to focus on business outcomes and you're going to drive innovation. And as a European, I really need my— I really endorse that because we need to be way more innovative than we have been. We, of course, have sovereignty and regulation, and that is not an easy thing. So we need to make sure we take that burden away so our customers can drive way more growth than they can do today. A great note to end on.

Rebecca Knight

>> Inspirational. Willem, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Really interesting conversation.

Willem Hendrickx

>> Thank you very much.

Rebecca Knight

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