NetApp In The Cloud Age: Q&A with CEO Tom Georgens
February 26, 2014
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Rob Preston.
The irony of the storage industry is that as data volumes continue to soar and storage budgets grab a larger share of overall IT budgets, the system vendors positioned to profit from those trends are under intense financial pressure. The aggregate growth rate of storage vendors is flat to negative, as cheaper technology alternatives emerge and as some cash-strapped customers delay their storage purchasing decisions, in part to evaluate alternative models such as cloud, virtualization, and even open source.
NetApp, one of the industry’s leading vendors, is feeling that pressure. In its most recent quarter, the company’s revenue was relatively flat — down 1.2% from the year-earlier quarter to $1.61 billion — though its gross profit was up 3.9% to a very healthy $1 billion. In a wide-ranging interview just prior to NetApp’s third-quarter financial report, CEO Tom Georgens emphasized the company’s strengths as a "data management" vendor and integrator, that it’s not just a purveyor of commodity storage systems…
What follows are his responses about cloud competitors, the CIO role, software-defined storage, the Edward Snowden effect, and more…
Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/netapp-in-the-cloud-age-ceo-tom-georgens-qanda/d/d-id/1114009
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