NetApp - Dave's Blog

Fortune Magazine says NetApp Is A Great Place To Work

For the sixth year in a row, NetApp has been in Fortune’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. This year we are #14.

To generate the list, Fortune works with Robert Levering, who is the founder of The Great Place to Work Institute, and last year I had a chance to hear him describe his research. He believes that the most important factors for measuring a good working environment are that employees:

• Trust in the people they work for
• Have pride in what they do
• Enjoy the people they work with

Dan once told me that getting into the Best Companies list gave him more satisfaction than any other award or accomplishment at NetApp. When Dan first joined NetApp, creating a healthy corporate culture was one of his highest priorities. (I’ve described some of the things he did here and here.) I think he believes that a healthy company culture is the foundation for everything else a company does.

Sometimes people talk about “building a corporate culture”, but I think that’s the wrong metaphor. To me, the word building implies something mechanical that you can design exactly the way you want it. I don’t see culture that way. Culture is more like a plant. You can water it, pick weeds from it, maybe fertilize it, but you can’t really control it. Culture is something that you nurture, care for and worry about, not something that you design or build.

People who like NetApp’s culture often worry about how to keep it from changing. I think that culture should change! Culture is like a baby: it’s cute when it drools and spits food out of its mouth, but imagine if it were the same at age 21. The best culture for a startup with a handful of employees is probably completely wrong for a large company with tens of thousands of employees. On the other hand, I want the core values at the heart of our culture – like teamwork, trust and integrity – to remain constant even as the culture grows and evolves.

It’s interesting that Robert Levering does not focus on the kinds of employee benefits that you often see in articles about good places to work, like volleyball courts, yoga classes or nap rooms. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with cool perks! (Google with its free gourmet lunches is #1 on the Best Companies list.) The point is that these things aren’t what create long-term employee satisfaction. I think that Levering is right on target. It’s much more important that you trust the people you work for, take pride in your work, and enjoy the people you work with.

This blog entry is very NetApp-centric, but I think there is a benefit for customers in working with employees who take pride in what they do and trust the people they work with. Tom Georgens, who runs all product operations at NetApp, put it like this:

Great milk comes from happy cows.

As one of the cows, I have some discomfort with Tom's analogy, but I do agree with his basic point. :-)

NetApp Buys Onaro: A Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-Compatible Acquisition

There are lots of things to check when you buy a company. Is there good product synergy? Strategic fit? Cultural fit? Are there happy joint customers? In the case of our recent Onaro acquisition, we also used this test: Are the Gartner Magic Quadrant rankings compatible? In fact, Gartner lists NetApp and Onaro as the two most visionary companies in Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software. (Third and fourth place vendors are EMC and then IBM.)

To see how familiar people are with Gartner Magic Quadrants, I did a quick poll of some random engineers: 28.6 percent hadn’t heard of magic quadrants, and another 42.9 percent had only a vague idea, so it seems worth explaining.

Gartner ranks companies by two criteria: Completeness of Vision, and Ability to Execute. Vision measures things like how well you understand the customers’ needs, and how well you innovate to meet them. Execution measures things like customer experience, track record and operational capabilities. Combining the measures into two dimensions gives you the magic quadrant:

You are a leader if you have good vision as well as a proven ability to execute. A challenger has good execution, but not much vision. I think of Dell as a challenger. They may not have any vision at all, besides “copy the leader”, but they have great execution.

Execution is based largely on track record, so when you enter a new market, you usually start out as a niche player, or – if you are lucky – a visionary. NetApp just showed up for the first time last year in Gartner’s Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software quadrant. It would be impolite to paste Gartner’s copyrighted material into my blog, so here’s the link. As a first time entrant, we were pleased to be ranked in the visionary quadrant, with more vision than any other storage system vendor. Onaro was the only company above us, so the solution was obvious. :-)

For more information, you can see our own press release, but I also thought that Deni Connor did a good job of capturing both what Onaro does, and also our rationale for the purchase:

I've always been a fan of Onaro and its SANScreen product, which provides real-time analysis and monitoring of how storage, servers and network devices interact when faced with changes to the infrastructure…. Onaro just announced NAS Insight, which provides visibility into multiple NAS systems.

…

The acquisition has been rumored to be worth $120 million. If true, that is a small price to pay for the value Network Appliance receives from Onaro’s technology.

What I like about Onaro’s products is that they help you understand your data center at a higher level of abstraction. You can focus on storage service levels, and whether you are meeting them, instead of worrying so much about the low-level details of storage systems, servers and networks.