Tom Georgens, chief executive of  NetApp, sat down at theCube at VMWorld 2011 with John Furrier and Dave Vellante. He started talking about his company’s fiscal performance–how this year segments such as the public sector and financial services took a hit–but growth remained steady over the board compared to last year’s 30 percent YoY growth.  The interview also extended a lot towards Georgens’ outlook for his company, and he started off by noting that he plans on building on its core business without overlap, rather than branching out, in a manner similar to what Cisco did.

The discussion then moved to big data.  Georgens explained that NetApp looks at the term as three different categories – analytics, big bandwidth, and content – and established a foothold in each area separately. The last two in particular are growing in volume at an ever-accelerating pace, causing a big storage management issue for companies NetApp is looking to solve, he continued.  The firm plans on expanding its portfolio in this area as well with the emphasis put on security.

Georgens was then asked how his company is positioning itself around the whole topic of convergence, where ventures such as VCE have been proven to be quite successful recently. Here’s what he said in reply to Vellante’s question:

“If you look at the independent storage players, they are gonna compete primarily on the vector of innovation. If you look at the server guys, they are gonna compete primarily on the vector of innovation…it’s very important for NetApp to partner with other likeminded players like Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and the like to basically tightly integrate our stuff.”

NetApp’s relationship with Oracle, both a customer and competitor, is a bit more complex than that. Georgens said Exadata is basically a bigger threat to NetApp’s competition that the company itself, which is why it would rather “embrace it and use it as a strength,” at least for now.

The interview wrapped up with data and backup protection. NetApp is active in this space, but is also looking at the long run five to ten years from now. “Backup functionality will emerge upstream, whether in the server, in the backup software, or as a service,” the chief executive said. “I think for us there is a clear market for the data domain product today, but I think that over time that’s [a standalone data reduction device] not going to be a dominant model.”


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