NetApp made a big AI channel play last week at its annual Insight customer and partner event in Las Vegas. IT Europa heard how the company intended to help partners take advantage.
As previously reported, the company unveiled a new range of AI optimised flash storage appliances that could be used on-premises, through the cloud on-demand, and in hybrid cloud environments, along with new security software that could protect data from widening ransomware attacks. It also announced a raft of technology alliances with leading cloud and enterprise data providers to help get these solutions to market.
“Around five years ago, when NVIDIA launched its own AI hardware solutions, we designed and developed our own hardware simplification solutions to match them and work with them, said Russell Fishman, NetApp senior director, field advocacy and solutions technology. “It was about infrastructure simplification, and getting more out of your data in mission critical industries with high compliance needs.”
Fishman said company AI projects commonly start up in a silo, and that NetApp wanted to help break these silos, although sometimes CISOs (certified information security officers), because of good reasons, can slow projects down.
“You can start an AI project with a credit card in the cloud. The challenge is to move from that to a true production environment. The CISO may say you can’t use that data, asking you where you got it from, and whether it addresses all compliance demands etc.”
Fishman said company executives, including members of the C-suite involved, will probably not know these answers as the project was set up quickly. “We are adding a unique and differentiated offer for customers, to build an ecosystem of partners using use cases and examples of commercial deployments to help everyone,” he said.
Jenni Flinders, NetApp’s senior vice president of the of the worldwide partner organisation, told the Las Vegas conference: “We have 1,400 partners here at the show, and, already, 96 of them are NetApp certified to have the AI conversation with customers [in connection with NetApp’s new AI-optimised offering].”
Further, said Flinders, out of the 1,400 in attendance, 187 were certified around cloud transformation, 389 were cyber resilience experts, and 576 were data infrastructure modernisation experts. All were able to push NetApp’s Keystone on-demand cloud services, she added.
World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh also addressed delegates. “There is an incredible opportunity around generative AI, security, and through AI transformation, and there’s no one else we’d like to do it with more than NetApp,” said the channel leader.
Gagan Gulati, senior vice president and general manager, data services at NetApp, is leading the firm’s AI security play. He said: “Partners are becoming MSPs now, and many have a security practise, and we are helping them to build it. Our Keystone on-demand service is expected to grow rapidly.
“When enterprises talk about AI, it’s not a case of whether they are investing in it, it’s how much.”
