Asia is our fastest growing business: George Kurian, NetApp CEO

“Asia is our fastest-growing business, and we see it as a really important market. There are different regions in Asia which are at different stages of their business evolution, and so we tailor our partner strategy to the needs of the region,” says George Kurian, NetApp CEO.

At NetApp Insight 2025, George Kurian, NetApp CEO, announced several new products that he believes will enhance storage capabilities for customers in the age of AI. This includes the introduction of NetApp AFX, a new, disaggregated storage system designed specifically for enterprise AI workloads.

In a media session with CRN Asia and journalists from Asia Pacific during NetApp Insight 2025, Kurian shared how the Asia Pacific market is the fastest growing business for them. He also explained what customers are hoping to get more from them.

NetApp had a really good income for its FY 2025 NetApp. So, what really drove it?

We had a strong fiscal year 25, and we continue to set higher records even this year because we are serving clients around their business needs, especially around data. We are building an even more software-rich, higher margin portfolio of products, and we are operating our business with efficiency.

How important is the APAC region for NetApp, and how are you working with channel partners in the region to support the continuous growth you're having?

Asia is our fastest-growing business, and we see it as a really important market. There are different regions in Asia which are at different stages of their business evolution, and so we tailor our partner strategy to the needs of the region.

If you look at China, we sell into China through the Lenovo joint venture. If you look at other parts of Asia, we address them through partnerships with local resellers, distributors, and so on. And our goal is to help our clients be successful as well as our partners through solutions and services that they can build on top of our technology portfolio.

As an enterprise-grade AI data platform provider, how is NetApp dealing with the competition from other storage vendors?

We have always been in the business of helping our clients create value from their data. I think over time, we see that creating value from the data is about adding a lot more software functionality alongside data storage. So, for example, we have integrated a lot of security capabilities alongside the data. We have made it easy to use data across different cloud use cases.

The latest set of applications that clients want to use their data with is AI applications like multimodal or large language models. And what we are doing for them is to enable them to use all of their unstructured data, meaning documents, messages, log files, video, audio, with those AI applications much, much more easily. This allows a client of NetApp's storage infrastructure to have much more value from the storage because they can use it in so many different ways than from our traditional competitors.

With regard to how we see the company progressing, we have always been a software company that sells technology in systems, but this continues the journey of evolving NetApp to be a data software company. Regarding traditional data platform providers, we see that we can work with them because we are solving unstructured data problems in a way that they cannot solve. So, over time, there is an opportunity to work with them.

There may be some overlap, but in kind of a broad case, we feel that it is more complimentary than what they are doing.

One of the announcements at NetApp Insight is on cyber resiliency. How important is that going to play a role in developing more solutions for your customers?

Yeah, I think data becomes more important to how businesses operate, and what we have realized is two important things, which is that malicious attackers are actually after your data. They are not after your network or your servers.

They really are using those launching points to come after your data. And then the second is you need to be able to build the case where an attacker compromises your cyber security model, and more and more we see the industry talking about cyber resilience versus cyber protection. So, we have built and we continue to enhance the set of capabilities to protect against malicious attacks right where the data is created or where it is being accessed.

And we think that by doing it there, it can not only reduce the risk and exposure dramatically because you can detect in milliseconds what is happening, but it also gives you the ability to have the last line of defense alongside all of the other layers in your security stack. And so, you will see us continue to innovate alongside the industry in that direction.

NetApp has a core system which seems to be related to AI. What is the main theme of this year's event?

Our goal this year is to help our clients understand what they need to do to get ready for AI with their data.

We see clients needing to modernize their data center infrastructures so that they can be ready for AI. We see them needing to enhance the level of cyber resilience so that they can protect from AI powered attacks to their data. We have said for a long time that you want to treat hybrid clouds as one integrated architecture as opposed to multiple different silos.

And so, we are helping our clients do all of that while enabling them to use AI tools very efficiently with their infrastructure. So, our view, just to summarize, is not just about AI. It's actually fundamental to your data.

As the industry is moving towards AI factories today, what's your outlook on the future of data centers? And what role does NetApp really play and what space does it fit in?

I think the data center of the future has a new computing paradigm, which is accelerated computing.

We think that it will be powered by Ethernet fabrics, which simplify how a client can deploy a data center network. We see that the speed of those network fabrics allow you to build composable systems like AFX. And we see that clients will want to combine their accelerated computing with their enterprise computing, just like they ended up with cloud.

And so, what we really see is that you need to integrate your enterprise applications with your AI landscapes. And that might be that your enterprise applications run in a traditional data center or your own on-premises environment. And your accelerated computing may be in a Neo cloud.

And you want to bridge those two. We have done that exceptionally well in the hyperscaler cloud environments. And we see the same opportunity in the AI landscapes.

Looking at the balance between public cloud and on-premises environments within data infrastructure for AI adoption, what scenarios NetApp is facing in its mid-term strategies, and what approach it is considering.

I think that our view of public versus private cloud for enterprise workloads continues to be that it will stay hybrid for a long time.

There are pushes in both directions. The pace of innovation as well as the new AI platforms, for example, in the hyperscale's is causing more people to want to lean in that direction. At the same time, concerns about sovereignty and control of your data is causing some people to go in the other direction, meaning more on-premises.

I think with regard to AI itself, if you need a very large-scale computing environment for a long period of time, like, for example, if you are training foundation models or you are doing a huge amount of model fine-tuning, it's probably better economically to build in a Neo cloud or hyperscaler cloud. Because of energy efficiency, the ability to have liquid cooling racks, and so on. If you are doing RAC, meaning more inferencing use cases, you can deploy that in your own data centers.

You don't need massive amounts of computing for those use cases. Our view is that over time, if technology needs to progress, you will have to get more energy-efficient silicon. You will have to find ways for the models themselves to become more efficient.

We are helping with that by making the data pipeline much more efficient. Let's see what we can get to. We'll start here.

You've been meeting your customers for the past few months and weeks. What is the main challenge they are facing and what are they telling you, basically?

I think most of them are trying to build resilient businesses, given some of the geopolitical environments.

I think they are looking at how they can use their data and business systems to drive growth, but also productivity. There is a lot of interest in what AI tools can I use to drive better productivity or better innovation. Innovation means digital innovation.

Productivity means cost savings. For example, you can look at manufacturing. We are involved in digital twins so that you can shorten the time it takes to build an automotive.

In healthcare, we are involved in many use cases around better, faster drug discovery, better healthcare delivery, and lower cost healthcare delivery. In financial services, I want to risk mitigate my business. I want to use advanced algorithms.

I want to reduce the back-office cost of administering claims or underwriting mortgage applications. I think that's sort of where many of the discussions are. What we find common across them is data.

That's where our conversation with the customers starts. Now, AI trends have shifted to generative AI, to agentic AI in the last two or three years. The organization has a more complex challenge than before, such as building a large system.

As a NetApp chief, if you had to describe NetApp's next four or five years in one phrase, what would it be?

The company that helps organizations around the world derive knowledge from their data.