FeatureThe pandemic has given digitisation a boost. For companies that see the digital transformation as an opportunity rather than a challenge, the situation has created a lot of chances to be innovative and creative, and further to achieve or even improve business goals.
Companies are more willing to invest into technical innovation. Being able to maintain businesses continuity, in a time of unprecedented disruption is largely being attributed to the adoption of cloud as the center of an organisations’ digital transformation initiative.
The focus is to enable businesses with their cloud journey.
Cloud will continue to be the platform that most organisations will chose to run their digital business on, and to engage with customers and employees, without interruptions.
“The focus is to enable businesses with their cloud journey – be it public, private, hybrid or multicloud,” says Maya Zakhour, Director Channel Sales Middle East, Africa, Italy, Spain at NetApp.
Artificial intelligence is becoming a mission-critical success factor for digital transformation in the modern enterprise, across sectors. Over the last few years, NetApp has released more than 25 reference architectures to address a wide range of use cases.
NetApp supports customers running more than 125 enterprise artificial intelligence projects globally – across industries from healthcare to retail to automotive.
Hannover Medical School uses data-driven diagnostics on NetApp for faster and better detection and treatment of chronic diseases. Cambridge Consultants, the leader in technology-based consulting, partnered with NetApp and NVIDIA to bring deep learning to organisations worldwide.
AI go to market
NetApp shares with NVIDIA a vision and history of optimising artificial intelligence’s full capabilities and business benefits for organisations of all sizes. “NetApp recently created an architecture that delivers the response times necessary to drive real business impact,” points out Maya.
NetApp recently created an architecture that delivers response times necessary to drive real business impact.
With NetApp ONTAP AI, powered by NVIDIA DGX systems and NetApp cloud-connected storage, state-of-the-art language models can be trained and optimised for rapid inference. This capability is key, providing the speed to accurately understand a person’s queries and to respond quickly and accurately to complex natural-language workloads.
NetApp’s product portfolio allows customers to tailor their choices based on artificial intelligence infrastructure requirements. NetApp artificial intelligence solutions are based on the following key building blocks: ONTAP software enables artificial intelligence and deep learning both on premises and in the hybrid cloud.
AFF all-flash systems accelerate artificial intelligence and deep learning workloads and remove performance bottlenecks. NetApp AI Control Plane is a full-stack solution to manage data and experiments across a hybrid cloud. Cloud Volumes can be used to rapidly prototype new projects and provide the ability to move artificial intelligence data to and from the cloud.
Cloud go to market
NetApp has a unique position in the market with cloud provider partnerships including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. This helps to make a centralised control plane with common storage operating system widely available.
NetApp provides a cloud portfolio of services for running applications in the cloud and any cloud that reduces cloud costs by up to 90%.
NetApp ensures hyper scalers are included in its go-to-market strategy.
The platform enables customers to run enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle, SQL and high-performance compute jobs for example in oil and gas exploration and genomics, cloud native applications like web apps, micro-services, any shape of containers in Kubernetes, and virtual desktops like Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop.
NetApp’s focus is to ensure partners are enabled and ready to deliver the best services, while rewarding them for the great job. According to Maya, when it comes to the cloud, “NetApp ensures that hyper scalers are included in its go-to-market strategy and aligns with them on achieving results. The market will see more of NetApp’s go-to-market activities through NetApp alliances with some of the largest partners in the region.”
The market will see more activities through NetApp alliances with some of the largest partners in the region.
Over the last few years, cloud has taken the lead in IT speed, agility, and flexibility. Despite clear plus points, migrating to the cloud can often raise concerns – from data security to the cost, time and complexity of shifting workloads.
NetApp addresses these concerns with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP with which customers can lift and shift their workloads directly to any cloud – adding the benefits of the cloud to their existing processes.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP is the industry’s leading cloud data management solution. It is based on ONTAP which is NetApp’s data management software that has been around for almost 3 decades, running natively in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
By design, it delivers extreme performance and advanced data management capabilities to satisfy even most demanding applications in the cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is already implemented and working successfully more than a thousand customers globally and can be consumed by the hour or up front.
Digital opportunities for partners
NetApp has key partnerships in the NetApp AI Partner Network, to deliver artificial intelligence solutions holistically, including a mature, best-of-breed infrastructure with NVIDIA. It also includes synergy between NetApp hardware and software and leading data science platform suppliers such as Iguazio.
Local partners are crucial components to deliver cutting-edge solutions to customers.
This means teams can run data science software with less challenges on the full suite of NetApp data management capabilities using the most suitable infrastructure for the job.
“Local partners are the crucial components to deliver cutting-edge solutions to customers. NetApp has recognised this and is establishing artificial intelligence partners as part of NetApp channel enablement, who in turn receive training and resources to generate value and business with artificial intelligence,” says Maya.
NetApp is establishing artificial intelligence partners as part of channel enablement.
NetApp listens to its NetApp partners’ feedback. The NetApp unified partner programme keeps evolving to include specialisations, roadmaps from enablement, sales, pre-sales, post-sales, services, all the way to rewarding schemes.
This year NetApp has focused a lot more on specialisations which covers specific areas, including cloud, artificial intelligence, enterprise applications, DevOps, amongst others.
All partners can sell and earn rebates on Cloud Data Services portfolio.
For partners who have extensive experience in migrating and managing customer workloads in public cloud environments with the NetApp Cloud Data Services portfolio, NetApp is introducing a new Cloud Preferred Partner level. It is simplifying how partners interact with NetApp Cloud Data Services Portfolio by expanding the support, tools and incentives for cloud partners around the world. All partners can sell and earn rebates on Cloud Data Services portfolio.
With an aggressive alignment of global partners and enablement of its own channel partners in AI, cloud, DX, NetApp is moving into a dominating position in delivering transformative digital solutions.
NetApp is taking an aggressive approach around partnering with hyper scalars and building opportunities for channel partners in AI, cloud, digital transformation.
