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We live and breathe storage on-premises… and in the cloud.

Brad Anderson
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Garter-magic-quadrant-netapp-primary-storage-arraysGartner names NetApp a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays  ...again.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. Wayne Gretzky, hockey legend.   Being an industry innovator sometimes means getting shots taken at you. At NetApp, we welcome it. It means we're doing something right. With our 28+ years of experience in the storage and data center business, we've seen a thing or two. We've been ahead of the market, anticipating our customers’ needs and industry changes. Each time, we were there, ready to serve the customer with the latest, cutting-edge storage solutions.

Recently, a prominent analyst firm Gartner published its annual report, “2020 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage.” Once again, NetApp was named a Leader based on our ability to execute and completeness of vision. We believe this is due to the strong capabilities and innovation of our portfolio of solutions, informed by our data fabric strategy.

We live and breathe storage. We know what the data we store and manage means to customers running their businesses. While a 100% primary storage data center may have been a reality 20 years ago, today, the public clouds are more crucial than ever to a modern data center. And a hybrid cloud, the use of both on-premises and public cloud, is the customers' new reality—and their future. NetApp's flexible solutions mean that our customers don't have to make "either/or" choices. And with over 87% of enterprises having a hybrid cloud strategy and 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, having strong knowledge of both on-premises and cloud architectures is key to fueling these organizations' journeys to the cloud.

ONTAP, our premier storage operating system, is the foundation of our growth in enterprise data centers and is built into the largest public clouds as a native first-party service. This unified storage OS approach is something only NetApp can do. And it's something all the major cloud providers who are our partners know as well. With ONTAP powering both our on-premises and cloud solutions, we help customers optimize for cost and performance and allow them to adapt instantly to unpredictable business demands by building a seamless hybrid cloud experience.

The world is changing fundamentally, and as we look for new ways to work, interact, and do business, digital transformation has accelerated at an unprecedented speed and global scale—what used to take years to achieve are now being accomplished in months, weeks, or even days. By applying our rich data-centric software innovation, we help businesses build their data fabric and accelerate their transformation to thrive in today’s new hybrid cloud world.

Our commitment to the on-premises market is stronger than ever. This past October at our annual INSIGHT user conference, we announced even more solutions and updates to solve customer's data center storage needs on-premises: the A250, our latest entry-level all-flash, end-to-end NVMe solutions, and the FAS500f, our first QLC product for those Tier 2 workloads needing performance, along with a lower TCO footprint, and ONTAP 9.8 with improved storage efficiencies, enhanced security, and expanded hybrid cloud connectivity.

We're different—a good different. We will keep leading by anticipating trends and innovating for the future. We have a history of skating to where the puck will be, not to where it has been. That doesn't mean we've forgotten either where we've been or how we've built a history of proven on-premises solutions to serve our customers. It means that we are here to help them wherever they are in their transformation journey: on-premises, in the cloud, and anywhere in between.
Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays, Santhosh Rao, Jeff Vogel, Roger Cox, Joseph Unsworth, November 30, 2020.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

† Source: Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report survey

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.

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