What are the key trends shaping your business in India today?

As per IDC’s recent market share data, NetApp is again the market leader with a 36 per cent share in the all-flash space in India and in the overall external OEM storage market, with a 29.5 per cent market share. We are delivering a true unified enterprise intelligent infrastructure from a storage standpoint. Our intelligent data infrastructure is helping customers turn their data into a catalyst of innovation, resilience, or growth.

Some parameters like flexibility and ability to use any data anywhere, deployment choice, and securing data are key differentiators. A few use cases continue to stick through in India, irrespective of the industry — data infrastructure modernisation, cloud transformation, and strengthening cyber resilience. In the last six months, we brought a few features and new product lines, starting with the AI data engine — the enterprise-grade platform helping customers get their AI ready. It drives resiliency and performance, unifying all the data and creating a single pipeline. This is one big innovation Indian customers are warming up to. The second is NetApp AFX because it’s about disaggregated architecture, which, along with ONTAP storage, helps enterprises drive AI without scaling. These are some trends we see in the Indian market.

How is your new data platform resonating with existing NetApp customers, and what does adoption look like so far?

With respect to the data platform, our market share is growing as customers become aware that they cannot treat storage and data infrastructure in a siloed manner. In the past, data infrastructure was bought because data volumes were growing. With AI becoming the central nerve point of businesses, without good data, there is no good AI. AI initiatives will be successful only if clean data is available in the right format, the right place, and in the most efficient way. Customers have, in the last few years, understood that without having a proper data platform their AI initiatives make it a long journey.

While Gen AI investments are expected to grow by 60 per cent every three years, only 30 per cent of the companies are successful in driving their AI initiatives holistically because many Indian enterprises either have legacy infrastructure, modernising which as a unified data platform is critical. NetApp can help these organisations take the plunge to move their enterprise data to become enterprise AI-ready data. For instance, nine out of the banks in India leverage NetApp, including the core banking workload, like payments, or the tier one and tier 2 workloads, like internet banking, mobile banking, trade, fraud and risk management. This is for two reasons — we can bring in unified storage from a data infrastructure standpoint and help them drive AI initiatives. The public sector has been our biggest offtake in the last two years; whether central or state, we are seeing many new initiatives in the government, both in terms of modernising their data infrastructure and data centres. Surveillance and smart city projects are other big initiatives. While there is work to do, the growth and momentum are evident.

With data centre investments accelerating globally and in India, how is NetApp positioned to capitalise on this opportunity?

We work closely with many cloud service providers who are building private clouds and providing cloud services for Indian and global customers. We partner with the Airtels, TCS, ESDS, who work with us when they set up, continue to build and expand their private cloud to offer their infrastructure and pass services to enterprise and SME customers. This growth will continue. Neo Cloud is a big opportunity in India, both in bringing in AI and setting up AI clouds, and in building the overall infra and platform services to cater to various enterprise and SMB business needs.

How are Indian enterprises adopting AI infrastructure differently from their global counterparts?

Indian enterprises are passionate about building AI initiatives to quickly transform their businesses. They are redesigning business processes and driving pilots from a business case standpoint. However, only 30 per cent of those opportunities are becoming production-ready and enterprise-scale. Most use cases are still at pilot stages. These companies leveraging AI across all their environments, whether core, operations, or internal applications, will take a while. A big challenge is it is not easy to move data around to drive AI at scale. But the interest is there.

With flash storage costs rising amid supply chain disruptions, how is adoption evolving in a price-sensitive market like India? Are enterprises still making the transition to all-flash?

India is a flash market. Irrespective of the workload, there’s a huge interest because customers believe it’s high-performance and reliable, especially in banks, telcos, large enterprises, manufacturing, and the public sector. With the supply chain demand, there is a cost rise and demand issues. We anticipated that the supply chain demand disruption would hit us during the March-April time frame. So, from December onwards, we did various interventions with our customers and partner ecosystem community to share the messages in terms of the upcoming demand supply challenges, rising cost, and how could they plan earlier.

Second, we are also helping customers not just by informing them about the price increase, but also with innovative solutions. With the ONTAP, available on-prem and cloud, we are helping them migrate faster to cloud, but continue to leverage ONTAP both on-prem and cloud. This is making their cloud transformation easy. In terms of our subscription options, we bring in a unique value proposition where, with our Keystone solution, we can convert the CapEx investments into OpEx. We’re telling customers with long-term plans with NetApp that they can secure by buying the software now and spacing out hardware requirements over time to avoid putting all the money on day one for five years.

We also work with the customers’ data infrastructure architects, re-looking at their landscape and helping them optimise, so instead of buying 100 petabytes, they can reduce it to about 60 petabytes. We are helping them save existing infrastructure and deploy more. We want to ensure business continuity, but with some recommendations and best practices, they can leverage both the technology and look at cost optimisation efficiently.

Where does India rank among NetApp’s global markets in terms of growth and strategic importance?

India continues to be a strong market from a global business standpoint, which is evident in the investments we make here. We have an engineering hub and a solution centre in India. Almost 60 per cent of global engineering is driven from our campus in Bangalore, and we continue to bring in the right talent. The momentum is there, and we are poised to grow strongly in India.