NetApp hoping to tap more ASEAN customers with ONTAP

NetApp continues to experience strong growth in the Asia Pacific region as the intelligent data infrastructure vendor unveiled its strategy to support Southeast Asian businesses in their AI journey at INSIGHT Xtra Singapore 2026.

As businesses in the Southeast Asia continue to focus on developing AI use cases, NetApp has outlined a data management strategy designed to help enterprises move AI from initial pilots to large-scale production without sacrificing governance or operational stability and obtain the results that they are looking for.

The vendor has several successful customers in the region, including a bank in Indonesia as well as an energy utility company in Thailand. In Malaysia, NetApp has worked with a government agency to streamline their enterprise storage systems so that it can deliver services more efficiently, strengthen cyber resilience across agencies, while supporting the growing demand for seamless digital interactions.

Among the innovations available to ASEAN businesses include the NetApp AFX systems and the NetApp AI Data Engine. NetApp AFX storage was designed for demanding AI workloads and enables organizations to independently scale capacity and performance as needed, leading to cost efficiencies and better resource utilization.

According to Andrew Sotiropoulos, Senior Vice President & General Manager, APAC at NetApp (pictured above), the first customer to adapt NetApp AFX systems since it was made available is also from the Asian region. He said the customer has implemented the system and is about to deploy it with positive results expected to be seen in the future.

Built on NetApp ONTAP, AFX delivers proven, enterprise-grade data management and security features for enterprise AI. Useful for demanding AI workloads, NetApp AFX systems can scale linearly up to 128 nodes with TBs per second of bandwidth, allowing for massive data management capabilities.

“Firstly, ONTAP is the key differentiator for us. It's not about the hardware only. It is about the software because the software has all the tentacles to provide the value that we talk about at the end of the day. ONTAP sits across the platform, and we only have one operating environment. Some of our competitors have multiple environments. It becomes very confusing for customers because they can't optimize the human resource and the knowledge base of that resource,” Sotiropoulos said.

Sotiropoulos also shared that a lot of organizations still make storage decisions, network decisions, compute decisions. As such, they have been able to be at the table to provide value differentiation. He explained that when organizations stack the hardware, software, cyber resilience, rapid recovery, AI ops, and the ability to connect off prem as well as on prem, that's a lot of big ticks at the end of the day.

“And so, people talk to us for that reason. And it resonates with them,” he added.

NetApp in ASEAN

Henry Kho, Area Vice President & General Manager, GCASK (Greater China, ASEAN & South Korea), NetApp explained that the vendor intends to be a trusted customer advisor across all its customers and help them build innovation and help them use their data to transform their business as well as help them navigate AI, cyber resilience and modern data infrastructure.

With over 30 years of innovation, Kho stated that NetApp has brought to market is the first and only truly unified data storage system. He added that the vendor will continue to innovate and that the NetApp data platform continues to deliver on that promise.

“From our ONTAP to our new AI Data Engine and also our AFX portfolio, we continue to build on this intelligent data infrastructure and build a foundation layer to help our customers achieve enterprise AI. We continue to want to drive great partnerships across our customers and partners and also the hyperscalers to really help them achieve all these things across the multiple environments. And one thing that we want to do for sure is to help our customers consolidate all these various data services and also to help them be able to manage data wherever they are,” said Kho.

Looking at ASEAN customers and partners, Kho shared that what they have been grappling the most with is the explosion of data.

“If you look at the data within the company, there are structured data like spreadsheets and databases and all that, but 80 to 90% of most enterprises actually have unstructured data. All this data is spread across the enterprise, some in the cloud, some on-premises in different offices or at different data centers, and it's very hard to manage them. So, one of the things that we're helping them to do is to really help them to build a data platform and consolidate this information so that then they can make sense of the data and identify where sensitive pieces of information are and put the right guardrails around them,” said Kho.

As a lot of customers spend a lot of time trying to deal with managing their data because the data is all over different places, Kho pointed out that NetApp’s research and conversations with customers stated that up to 80% of time spent in AI is actually on solving the data management problem.

“So, a lot of customers right now are investing in GPUs and performance and all that, but AI is not really a performance issue. It is a data issue. And so, when customers realize that they're able to then rationalize that and work with us to build more complete solution around how they should manage this piece of data, their salary plan and overall income,” added Kho.

Innovation in data management

Kho also explained that most of their customers have invested a lot in building NetApp around data management. He said some customers were even surprised at the extent of innovation that NetApp has to offer.

“If you look at the online software, that piece is actually the industry's leading storage OS, and it's deployed not just across all the entire product portfolio, but it's also available in the cloud. So, all three hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google, as well as Amazon, have our solutions as first-party service within the cloud environment. With AI today, there is a lot of complexity as the tools don't exist in one place.It's not just on premises, but some of the tools are only available in the cloud as well. And not just in one cloud, but across multiple clouds because you can deploy multiple on premises. And so, customers are grappling with that and trying to decide how they can protect the data as well as leverage these tools and migrate data across all these different places,” said Kho.

Kho also pointed out that moving data can be a very costly process. This is where NetApp’s platform gives customers the ability to manage all the data, provide all the functionality on the platform, and manage the data wherever they are. It also provides customers with a virtual environment as though they are on a single platform and efficiently move data across all these environments.

“This is the single biggest value that I see a lot of customers looking at NetApp as slightly different from the rest of the storage that is out there,” Kho said.