There are many flavors of  partnerships in tech — some dismissed as optical deals or Barney deals. What does a real-deal, deep-engineering partnership look like? It looks like an osmosis between two companies’ portfolios that changes the way end-users consume and benefit from them. It looks like NetApp Inc.’s partnership with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud.

“Customers don’t care about how something’s implemented; they care about the value that they get out of it,” said Tad Brockway (pictured, right), head of product management for Azure Storage, Azure Stack and M&E at Microsoft.

But for those interested, here’s the deep-engineering bit. NetApp and Azure have collaborated deep in the weeds on a new offering called Azure NetApp Files. It features a special design for advanced networking capabilities all the way down to the switch level for super-low latency and high throughput. This allows a cross-directional hybridization of NetApp’s ONTAP storage and data-management software and Azure cloud.

“We’re bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we’re wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure,” Brockway said.

Brockway and Anthony Lye (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the cloud business unit at at NetApp Inc., spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas. They discussed the companies’ partnership and how enterprises are adapting to hybrid IT. (* Disclosure below.)

Clouding the IT issue

Azure NetApp Files brings all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem into the public cloud for a “no-compromise transformation for your existing apps,” Brockway said.

Azure’s cloud is capable of extending itself and adding tons of value outside of Azure cloud proper, Lye added.

“I think you’re going to see sort of a cloud-defined IT business as opposed to an IT-defined cloud,” Lye stated. This puts more creative power in the hands of developers and others.

“What used to be sort of a very linear process through the CIO has now been fractured,” Lye explained. “A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line-of-business people are funding project work, sometimes without IT’s knowledge.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the NetApp Insight event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp Insight. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE