NetApp’s partner ecosystem continues to gain momentum in APAC

NetApp continues to grow its partner ecosystem by adding new partners and enabling them by training partners on new technology and solutions.

At NepApp’s second fiscal quarter 2025 quarterly financial conference call recently, Thomas Kurian, CEO of NetApp stated that the storage and cloud technology developer’s solid growth across the board showed how closely NetApp is meeting customer needs.

Globally, NetApp continues to transform the industry in its offerings. Specifically, the company’s focus in flash storage continues to dominate its revenue. The company’s annualized all-flash array revenue run rate reached an all-time high of US$3.8 billion.

Innovation is also at the core of the company with NetApp announcing the latest advancements in the NetApp intelligent data infrastructure portfolio to modernize businesses' IT operations. This includes performance and capacity updates for enterprise storage as well as improved capacity density, security, and scalability for NetApp’s industry-leading software-defined object storage solution, StorageGRID.

In Asia Pacific, the growth has also been positive. NetApp recently announced the appointment of Ganesan Arumugam as its Senior Director for APAC Channel Sales & Alliances. Additionally, Arumugam will serve as the APAC representative for NetApp’s Worldwide Partner Organization (WPO), overseeing the continued growth of NetApp’s Partner Sphere program, which aims to drive the adoption of unified data storage, integrated data services, and CloudOps solutions among customers.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Ganesan shared that when it comes to data management solutions, NetApp has always been the pioneers. This starts from NAS to the unified storage, to All-Flash and now, on to AI and the cloud.

“We are the first company to come out with the cloud offering as a first party offering. From that perspective, if you look at it, we are always the innovator in this industry in this field. We will continue to do that to meet the customer requirements,” said Ganesan.

Ganesan added that NetApp recently came out with a new intelligent data infrastructure for its customers. He believes customers are going in for modernizing their data center to modernize applications. This is the need of the hour because it’s all about microservices and the applications on the mobile and internet for any company to be successful.

“When we look at these things, the data plays a critical role that is a cornerstone or the center stage. For example, if you take AI, it runs on the data. For customers, it’s how they can access the data wherever it is and in a secure and meaningful way. So, that's our objective in terms of the intelligent data infrastructure we are helping our customers to build,” said Ganesan.

As the competition in the industry gets intense as well, Ganesan believes that as pioneers in industry in terms of the innovations, they are capable of experiencing continued success.

“We are the first company, or we are the only company today who made our solution available on the cloud as a first party service. That means today, if you look at AWS or Azure or Google, they offer our technology or our data management solution as a first party service. That's a great acknowledgement. Even on the AI front, we recently announced a lot of enhancements focusing on our joint partnership with AWS and Google where through their workloads, they are giving it access as a cloud service to their customers. It’s integrated with the NetApp,” mentioned Ganesan.

NetApp’s partner ecosystem

To help businesses in this journey, Ganesan explained that NetApp’s partners play a critical role. He highlighted NetApp’s success in building their partner ecosystem across the globe. Regionally, NetApp continues to grow its partner ecosystem by adding new partners and enabling them by training them on new technology and the solutions available so that they will be able to articulate to their customers and implement it.

“Today, if you look at our approach in terms of the partner enablement, we moved away from just a product certification to the solution competency. So, we help our custom partners to build a competency around the solution because at the end of the day, a solution is what they are selling to the customers,” explained Ganesan.

As customers are looking for a solution, be it for backup, modernizing data centers or implementing modern applications, NetApp’s approach is ensuring partners are trained and enabled to implement the services. For partners, it’s also critical because it allows them to demonstrate their capabilities around the solutions with NetApp’s technology.

“When the partners talk to the customers, the issues or the challenges or the requirements coming in from the partners are multifaceted. We are looking at how we can make our partners the solution advisor to the customers rather than being just a product purchase,” he added.

Based on the feedback from partners, NetApp will then structure multiple options for customers, through the partners. For example, some customers prefer a CapEx model while others prefer OpEx. There are also customers that want a different approach. Ganesan explained that this is where they prepare partners to bring in value in terms of various levels of services they can incorporate into these models.

“For the customers that are moving to the cloud and still they want the same technology as they have it on their premises, that's where our first party cloud offerings come out, which we are offering through all our hyperscalers. We encourage our partners to work closely with our hyperscaler partners to offer their services as a first party or as a third party,” said Ganesan.

Partners have the flexibility

Ganesan also mentioned that partners can pick up the solution set they want depending on the country they are operating in and the kind of customers they are servicing.

“They can pick up the solution set they want. It can be an ERP implementation, a backup solution, a DR solution, an AI solution or it can be a cloud. So, there are various solution competences we have developed which helps the partners to select. It's not that a single partner will be an expert on all. They will want to be specialized in certain areas,” explained Ganesan.

For example, Ganesan highlighted they have competency on the data center modernization for partners that focus on that. They can pick up which technical skills, certification they need from NetApp and what are the other allied certifications. NetApp looks at the partner's capability around the solutions and then certifies them. For Ganesan, that's how NetApp differentiates themselves in terms of the partner enablement compared to the market.

According to Ganesan, NetApp rechristened its partnership program more than a year back. Ganesan said they changed the entire approach; from the way they engage with partners and getting their feedback. The new partnership program is simpler and has various types of partners integrated in it.

“When I say partner, it's a single word. But in reality, the partner can be a System Integrator partner, service partner, or can be a distributor, a GSI partner who is present globally or can even be a local value-added reseller. All these different sets of partners, we brought them under the single umbrella and made all the solutions available to them,” he said.

Ganesan added, “There are various constructs of the program in terms of tiering the partner based on their capabilities and providing the necessary skill sets, both on the sales and the technical side. For example, employees in a partner organization can take the training through our partner portal based on their roles. They can be a sale or a pre-sale or focusing on implementation, they can go in for those trainings and build their skill set.”

NetApp’s 2025 plans for Asia Pacific

With more than 80% of NetApp’s business done through partners, Ganesan also commented that these figures are improving year on year. To deal with this, NetApp has also launched an internal program called Partner First.

According to Ganesan, the Partner First program gives NetApp the opportunity to have the first preference on whether they can service a customer engagement or turn it through the partner. In the Asia Pacific region, this represents more than 90% of the businesses with some areas capping the entire 100%.

“In India, we operate 100% through partners. We want to see more relevance and more participation from the partners. That's our global goal as well as a regional goal. And based on the success we had in the areas where we engage with the partner, we want to learn from that and implement it in the other regions also,” said Ganesan.

While NetApp has many partners registered across APAC, Ganesan pointed out that his focus in 2025 will be to look at the quality of partners, especially with more partners eager to sign up.

“I would call it a focused approach. We go and pick up the partners who are interested and who are looking at investing with us in terms of the manpower resources. We reciprocate with our investments to them so that we will be able to grow together. That's why we tiered our partner program into Prestige, Preferred and Approved,” he explained.

Breaking down the tiers, Ganesan pointed out that any partner that signs up becomes an Approved partner. They will get access to all assets so they can learn and build their skills to grow their business. As they grow, NetApp will move them into Preferred and Prestige partners.

“We invest in the prestige and preferred partners. We select partners in terms of our marketing fund or the rebate programs and support them in the sales engagements. We grow with them. However, one of the biggest issues partners face is attrition, whereby the people they train often end up jumping over to another bigger organization,” he said.

Looking towards 2025, Ganesan believes the key focus will be working with the partner and learning from them to better understand customer demands. This in turn will also help them prepare their partners to better deal with customers, ensuring success for all.