Three years in: Can Kurian heal sickly NetApp's woes? After three years of flat and declining revenues, NetApp needs to regain its mojo and George Kurian is the CEO tasked with doing just that. Kurian, a year into his CEO role, is running NetApp at a time when this external array company par excellence is facing numerous threats: rampant all-flash array competition, hyper- …
This is a Classic!
And it's a classic because it's precisely what NetApp people do, habitually. Always promising something "new, and exciting" coming in the "Next Release" that will "revolutionize" storage and of course it never does simply because if you really want to create something new and truly innovative you have to start with a clean slate.
Ladies and Gentlemen the good days of NetApp are behind them. A Storage OS in it's 6th full year that only accounts for about a quarter of the install base is not a success story any way you slice it.
NetApp sales people remind me of those annoying Microsoft popups about upgrading to Windows 10. They encourage you to do it, you look at it and you press the "x" because deep down you know the light at the end of tunnel is not that of "simplicity", "ease of use" but that of management complexity galore that stares you down.
Think about all the transitions that EMC, HPE and IBM have gone thru. From Clariion to CX to VNX1 to VNX2 to Unity. From DMX to VMAX1, VMAX2 VMAX3.
All these require the install base to migrate their data. HPE with StoreServe is no different. Same for IBM. Yet, their customers have done it, time after time after time but the NetApp install base is defecting at a much faster rate than they are converting it to Clustered ONTAP and All Flash! What does that say? Simply, that there are deeper issue than just data migration.
"Ontap 9 is AWESOME and i've seen the NDA roadmap for 9.1. NetApp is once again firing on all cylinders."
The only thing that's firing on all cylinders is NetApp marketing, but a NDA Roadmap won't get anyone excited anymore.
That sort of hype-marketing will work for companies like Apple where people expect great things being announced at launch events, but surely not NetApp where over-promise and under-deliver has become the norm.
Soon NetApp will "once again be firing in all Departments and Geographies" !
Who said that NetApp was not innovating anymore?
ONTAP 9 is bringing many little jewels: RAID-TEC, Compaction, 8-nodes MetroCluster, 16TB SSD for their All-Flash FAS, new ADP for AFF, Application Provisioning in System Manager, SnapLock, Updated Software Suite (for free!).
...and there is more to come!
Can't wait to bring the first cluster on 9.0 into production in a few weeks!
6 years later.
I wouldnt call large SSD's innovation.
Snaplock comes 5 years after NetApp screwed 7 mode customers.
8 node Metrocluster - wow. I thought the industry had moved past this
Ontap 9 is Ontap 8.4 with a new coloured jacket.
NEtApp marketing isnt fooling anyone these days.
Netapp needs to turn itself inside out and go beyond marketing or its future will remain questionable and its revenues will continue to suffer
The company is in need of strong leadership that underpromises and overdelivers. The company is also in need to curb employee and executive exodus because no matter the marketing rhetoric all you have to do is look on places like glassdoor or thelayoff.com to find out what people on the inside think and feel...
lastly.... netapp has yet to figure out why the lose! it's not because of features but because the company acted like the very same thing they detested and fought against for years....EMC.
it became an arrogant, self-congratulatory, self-serving, myopic organization.
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