In a period of transition, NetApp Inc. is looking to boost traditional storage services with comprehensive data strategies to customers. Its latest effort to support customers through the digital revolution is a thought leadership survey project conducted with International Data Corp.

Learning which data strategies are most successful across industries are Brett Roscoe (pictured, left), vice president of product and solutions marketing at NetApp, and Laura DuBois (pictured, right), group vice president of enterprise storage, servers and infrastructure software at IDC.

“We’re going through a transformation, so we know our customers are going through a journey themselves. … We wanted to work with IDC … to understand … what the tools and engagement models [are] for us to help them along that journey,” Roscoe said.

Roscoe and DuBois spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the NetApp Insight event in Berlin, Germany. They discussed how NetApp and IDC worked together to discover customer painpoints around data integration, as well as the best practices they advise for businesses looking to remain relevant. (* Disclosure below.)

Disrupt or be disrupted

Through the study, Roscoe and DuBois discovered three major tent poles of customer data behavior: thrivers, survivors and data resistors. The main differentiator for thrivers, and the goal for competitive businesses, and is an ability to store, analyze and implement data within a repeatable process.

“They set a high-level business objective … [to] leverage data … to help drive business forward,” Roscoe said.

Thrivers turn their data into insights for customers fast to help them optimize their own environments, as well as focus hiring efforts around new data roles to allow data to drive business decisions within every team. “We see new roles emerging around data. … Enterprise architecture and these data roles are very closely aligned,” DuBois said regarding companies successfully integrating data in their processes.

While data has long been fundamental to business strategies, the amount of data now available through machine learning and the “internet of things” means companies need new procedures to optimally leverage their data. This is the need NetApp hopes to meet by giving companies tools to measure themselves and work toward improvements.

“Let us show you tools and capabilities that we can bring to bear in your environment to … help you on your path … to being a data thriver,” Roscoe said.

Efficiently storing and analyzing data is an goal achievable for most organizations, but driving real business results from the findings is a greater challenge. While some are still slow to incorporate NetApp’s findings, Roscoe and DuBois are certain businesses must disrupt — or risk becoming the disrupted.

“There is a direct correlation that says if you are taking a high business value of your data … that you are going to be more profitable … generate more revenue … and be more relevant in the next 10 to 20 years,” Roscoe concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE