NetApp in the Data Center
Most product launches are primarily about the cool new products a company is just shipping. Our launch earlier this week was different—it is mostly about a strategy that we've been working towards since the late nineties.
Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of cool new products that we are announcing: a new high-end storage system, broader switch and HBA support for 4 Gb Fibre Channel SAN, a restructuring and update of our manageability software family, and new service offerings to help customers deploy storage more quickly.
But never mind today's new products, this launch is more about strategy than products. If you look at NetApp in the mid and late nineties, we sold mostly to engineering organizations at technical companies. Cisco and Yahoo! became customers during that time. We reached $1 billion in revenue selling to customers like that, but we knew that to get past a billion we'd need to broaden our market. Tech is a great niche, but if you want to get really big, you have to crack the data centers of non-technical companies. You have to change your focus from Cisco to Nabisco.
I got lessons in enterprise selling from an IT manager at Georgia-Pacific. This was back in the late nineties when we had just begun targeting non-technical companies, and we didn't yet know much about it. I was giving this IT manager a presentation about all of our cool features—Snapshots and SnapMirrors and the advantages of our write anywhere flexible layout on disk and so on. Before I finished, he interrupted me and said, "Slow down son. What you don't seem to understand is, here at Georgia Pacific, we take logs and we turn them into paper. How's this box of yours gonna help us do that better?" I was dead in the water. I had no clue about his business, and I had no clue about whether or not we could help him turn logs into paper.
Rob Salmon (our executive VP of field operations) got a similar lesson, again in the late nineties, from a bank in North Carolina. He was visiting the CIO, and before he went out, he checked the customer support records to find out what their experience was like. They hadn't had any outages or any serious problems—just a couple of calls about how this or that feature works—so he figured that it would be a friendly meeting. The first thing the CIO said to him was, "Rob, I just want you to know that your salesmen really piss me off."
Not at all the meeting Rob was expecting! He asked the customer for more details, and the CIO said, "Your sales guys come in and they tell me about your cool new box, and your cool new features, and then they lean back and smile, like they are done. I pay you guys enough money that I expect you to come in here and understand my business problems and tell me how you are going to work with my people to help me solve them."
Over the years, our attempts to sell to enterprise data centers have driven change through pretty much every part of NetApp. Our sales and market strategy has changed, we've made large investments in customer support and professional services, we've retooled our engineering release model and development processes. Even organizations like finance and legal have had to change as we've gotten into leasing and volume purchase agreements. And of course, the products themselves have changed. Our new high-end storage system (FAS6000) scales beyond a thousand disks, over double the new CLARiiONs that EMC just launched. In capacity, performance and reliability, it's well beyond the modular mid-tier of the market and up into the range of frame arrays like Symmetrix and TagmaStore. (In addition to Fibre Channel SAN, it also supports NAS and iSCSI.)
For a strategy like serving enterprise data centers, you never reach a point where you can say, "Yesterday we weren't enterprise-ready, but today we are." It's only after the fact, when you've got thousands of commercial customers running business critical apps on your equipment that you can look back and say, "Eight years ago we weren't enterprise-ready, but today we are." Never mind all the new products, that's the real message of the "Data Center Proven" launch.
Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of cool new products that we are announcing: a new high-end storage system, broader switch and HBA support for 4 Gb Fibre Channel SAN, a restructuring and update of our manageability software family, and new service offerings to help customers deploy storage more quickly.
But never mind today's new products, this launch is more about strategy than products. If you look at NetApp in the mid and late nineties, we sold mostly to engineering organizations at technical companies. Cisco and Yahoo! became customers during that time. We reached $1 billion in revenue selling to customers like that, but we knew that to get past a billion we'd need to broaden our market. Tech is a great niche, but if you want to get really big, you have to crack the data centers of non-technical companies. You have to change your focus from Cisco to Nabisco.
I got lessons in enterprise selling from an IT manager at Georgia-Pacific. This was back in the late nineties when we had just begun targeting non-technical companies, and we didn't yet know much about it. I was giving this IT manager a presentation about all of our cool features—Snapshots and SnapMirrors and the advantages of our write anywhere flexible layout on disk and so on. Before I finished, he interrupted me and said, "Slow down son. What you don't seem to understand is, here at Georgia Pacific, we take logs and we turn them into paper. How's this box of yours gonna help us do that better?" I was dead in the water. I had no clue about his business, and I had no clue about whether or not we could help him turn logs into paper.
Rob Salmon (our executive VP of field operations) got a similar lesson, again in the late nineties, from a bank in North Carolina. He was visiting the CIO, and before he went out, he checked the customer support records to find out what their experience was like. They hadn't had any outages or any serious problems—just a couple of calls about how this or that feature works—so he figured that it would be a friendly meeting. The first thing the CIO said to him was, "Rob, I just want you to know that your salesmen really piss me off."
Not at all the meeting Rob was expecting! He asked the customer for more details, and the CIO said, "Your sales guys come in and they tell me about your cool new box, and your cool new features, and then they lean back and smile, like they are done. I pay you guys enough money that I expect you to come in here and understand my business problems and tell me how you are going to work with my people to help me solve them."
Over the years, our attempts to sell to enterprise data centers have driven change through pretty much every part of NetApp. Our sales and market strategy has changed, we've made large investments in customer support and professional services, we've retooled our engineering release model and development processes. Even organizations like finance and legal have had to change as we've gotten into leasing and volume purchase agreements. And of course, the products themselves have changed. Our new high-end storage system (FAS6000) scales beyond a thousand disks, over double the new CLARiiONs that EMC just launched. In capacity, performance and reliability, it's well beyond the modular mid-tier of the market and up into the range of frame arrays like Symmetrix and TagmaStore. (In addition to Fibre Channel SAN, it also supports NAS and iSCSI.)
For a strategy like serving enterprise data centers, you never reach a point where you can say, "Yesterday we weren't enterprise-ready, but today we are." It's only after the fact, when you've got thousands of commercial customers running business critical apps on your equipment that you can look back and say, "Eight years ago we weren't enterprise-ready, but today we are." Never mind all the new products, that's the real message of the "Data Center Proven" launch.
Comments