Of Cockroaches, Antibodies and Corporate Culture

This past summer I was asked by Dan (our CEO) what I thought the essence of NetApp’s competitive advantage is. I surprised myself a bit by resisting the urge to cite our technology or the people that make it happen. The underlying answer is best told by exposing a recent anecdote about my team.

Segmenting Competitors

Like most competitive groups we segment our competitors into various categories. Major competitors include the usual suspects who also sell storage either as a core competency, or by happenstance as part of an overall systems business. This is a short list. The far more speculative and therefore intriguing ones however are those smaller competitors from below. That is a much longer list and considerably more dynamic, which courtesy of a vibrant VC / M&A market also seems to grow almost every week. Of that group we naturally we pay the most attention to those competitors who have demonstrated market traction.

Nicknames

At one point we also gave them a catchy nickname. It was a carefully selected double-entendre. On the one hand, we wanted to recognize their success via a measure of respect, yet on the other hand we wanted to assert some antagonism into the nickname since this is after all a very competitive industry. So we elected to go with “Cockroaches” as our nickname for emerging competitors. As a species, Cockroaches are renowned for their endurance  in the face of various real and potential predators far higher up the food chain. That takes care of the flattery. Humans’ general revulsion by that same species also neatly satisfies the antagonistic requirement.

Getting Carried Away

Quite proud of this nickname, my team & I started using it liberally in our discussions of deserving emerging competitors. And that’s when the trouble started.

You see, NetApp as a business has been at the forefront of establishing a strong & positive “corporate culture” as an asset. We’re actually the only focused storage vendor to even have a page dedicated to it on our web site, and one of a precious few in the IT industry to emphasize the topic at large. We’re quite proud of it and as per my earlier “Zen” posting on this blog, we’ve received numerous industry accolades as a result.

Corporate Antibodies

Strong corporate culture also means developing a proper immune system to help us set and maintain a higher standard. Those “corporate antibodies” actually kicked in as my team & I started abusing the privilege of the cockroach metaphor. Although never intending to use the term punitively or publicly, it nevertheless inevitably leaked out to our partners, customers and even some of  those emerging competitors as well. A while after my team introduced the term and just about when we started abusing it, some very thoughtful NetApp colleagues chimed in and passionately argued in defense of respect for our competitors. Their forces quickly grew in numbers and became the prevailing opinion.

As you can imagine, this is a perspective that is an affront to the emotional side of any team dedicated to beating the competition at every instance. Yet try as we did to deny the truth, the rational side in us acknowledged that those colleagues of ours were indeed right. Moreover, they are the embodiment of NetApp’s Corporate Culture and they acted properly as the corporate antibodies that sustain it.

Our True Competitive Advantage

So then, what is the essence of NetApp’s competitive advantage ? Our corporate culture of course. Coming back to my answer for Dan, fundamentally our strong and positive corporate culture is what attracts and retains the top talent in our industry to plan, develop, market, sell, service and support the innovative solutions NetApp is renowned for.