How We're Creating a Holistic Approach to Win in Hybrid Multicloud
Brad Anderson
Brad Anderson at NetApp INSIGHT[/caption]
Have you ever had one of those days where you’re both sad and excited at the same time? I’m having one of those mixed emotion days.
Today, Joel Reich announced his decision to retire after almost 18 years at NetApp. He leaves an amazing legacy at NetApp. Early on, he was a major contributor to creating the world’s first unified storage platform. Later, as the head of our Products and Operations team, he drove the Data Fabric strategy and integrated the portfolio, laying the groundwork for our market leadership in hybrid multicloud. Most recently, he led our Storage Systems and Software business unit to deliver leading flash solutions, including many industry firsts like end-to-end NVMe. Customers will benefit from Joel’s pioneering innovation and his steadfast leadership for years to come. Thank you, Joel.
While I’m sad to see Joel leave –happy for him of course – I’m also excited to assume the leadership mantle for the Storage Systems and Software business unit alongside the Cloud Infrastructure business unit. Each business unit remains laser focused on the important transitions that customers are prioritizing. Storage Systems and Software helps customers modernize IT by enabling the move from disk to flash while focused on flash-enabled business-critical SAN environments. Cloud Infrastructure helps customers build private and hybrid clouds to deliver the same services and experiences as public clouds. Bringing the two business units together under one roof means we can take an even more holistic approach to making NetApp easier to do business with and to accelerating our hybrid multicloud strategy. On top of this, our Cloud Data Services business unit fuels innovation with a rich data services portfolio running in the world’s biggest clouds to accelerate customers’ cloud-first strategies.
With a year and a half at NetApp under my belt, I’m more confident than ever in NetApp’s opportunity. Our private cloud solutions are growing, and the world’s biggest cloud providers have chosen to partner with NetApp. We offer flash solutions with the industry’s leading guaranteed storage efficiency, the highest performance and the most complete cloud integration. While our Q1 results weren’t what we had hoped, we are committed to taking our learnings and driving them back into the business.
We have an incredible portfolio and a team of high achievers. No other company can help customers build their data fabrics to support data-driven digital transformation. The NetApp team is all in and energized by the opportunity to build NetApp’s new legacy!
Brad Anderson
Brad Anderson is the executive vice president of the NetApp Hybrid Cloud Group. He is responsible for driving the strategy and execution to build a portfolio of offerings that helps customers build cloud-architected data centers. These data centers can then deliver cloud services for innovative applications in either private or service provider models. Brad has a broad business background, leading both startup and mature businesses, and he has a track record of turning emerging products into multimillion- and billion-dollar businesses. He brings substantial leadership experience and deep knowledge of the converged systems market to lead NetApp’s growth in the cloud infrastructure business and to help customers build their next-generation data centers. Brad spent nine years at HP Compaq as the senior vice president and GM of Industry Standard Servers, where he led the company’s $8 billion x86 server business. He spent seven years as president and GM of Dell's $12 billion Enterprise Solution Group leading servers, storage, networking and software businesses. He helped Dell acquire EqualLogic, Compellent, and Force10, and he grew each business significantly to enable Dell’s transition away from a mostly OEM model in storage and networking. Just before joining NetApp, Brad served as president and chief operating officer of Gravitant, a cloud service brokerage platform company, where he played an instrumental role in growing the business and in selling the company to IBM. Brad holds a Bachelor of Science degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.