We presented NetApp’s
Cloud Strategy at our annual Industry Analyst Meeting a few weeks ago. To
summarize, our goal is to be the storage provider of choice to companies building
cloud-compute environments.
We have a strong
customer base in all different types of cloud computing from clouds for
consumer apps like e-mail to clouds for business apps like ERP and CRM.
Customers include Oracle on Demand, Yahoo!
Mail, SAP by design, Photobucket, AT&T, IBM Hosting, and many, many more. Although nobody
formally measures it yet, we believe that we are already the number one cloud
storage vendor in the industry.
Analysts had surprisingly
varied reactions. On the positive side, one said, “NetApp nailed its cloud
positioning. It gets the
requirements & relates them well to its products,” and another said,
"During the
two-day event NetApp provided a substantial amount of evidence to support its
enterprise cloud storage story and is one of the better stories I have heard in
this vein.” With the opposite point of view, a third said, "I would probably go as far as to say they do not have a cloud
strategy.” Wow. At least we can’t accuse them of copying each other.
Part of the
disagreement comes because NetApp’s strategy is not to build clouds ourselves,
but to help other people build them. Some people view this as an excellent
strategy, while others think it doesn’t even count as cloud a computing strategy
at all. In response, I would ask this simple question: “Does Microsoft have a
PC strategy?” It’s true that Microsoft doesn’t actually build any PCs, but it
seems obvious to me that they are a key driver in the PC industry and
absolutely have a PC strategy.
Still, it’s a
fair question to ask why we chose the strategy we have. The Microsoft analogy
helps answer the question. Microsoft’s core competency is to develop software.
That is a very, very different set of skills for a company than running
efficient manufacturing lines to produce PCs, so Microsoft leaves that part of
the overall solution to other vendors like Dell and HP. Microsoft designs an
important piece of the PC – arguably the single most important – and they have
strong opinions about how PCs should be used and how they should evolve, but
they don’t actually build the PC themselves. Likewise, NetApp’s core competency
is storage and data management. This is a very different skill set from running
large data centers efficiently. I won’t go so far as to claim that storage and
data management is the single most important element in cloud computing, but it
certainly ranks up there. So even though we don’t provide cloud computing directly,
we have strong opinions about how clouds should be built and used and how they
should evolve. To me, that’s a cloud strategy.
(Here are some
links for more thoughts on cloud
computing and how
to build efficient data centers from Dave Robbins, our CTO in IT.)
