NetApp, Inc. (NTAP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to INSIGHT 2022. Coming to you this year from our new North American headquarters in beautiful San Jose, California. Get ready to hear more about how the cloud is evolving and how we can help you take advantage of this unique time in history with some big news we are excited to share because at NetApp, nothing inspires us more than our customers and our love of cloud. [Presentation]

I'm George Kurian, CEO of NetApp, and in our keynote section and in our on-demand featured sessions, we have one focus, you, our customers. Many of you know us from our industry-leading enterprise storage software and systems for your on-premises environments, some of you know us from our cloud storage offerings in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and others may know us in the cloud ops market from being customers of Spot, CloudCheckr and Instaclustr. No matter when you join the NetApp family, I'm proud to say this. This year, we've spent 3 decades navigating and transforming in the IT industry. You heard that right. We're celebrating 30 years of innovation at NetApp. Disruption continues to happen in the market and in technology, but our commitment to innovation to meet our customers, where they're headed will never change. Consider what we shared with you last year at our INSIGHT event, we shared our belief that the world is hybrid, how speed and agility continues to be critical to the success of your digital business and most importantly, how cloud was an imperative that couldn't be ignored. Today, we're going to start with how that journey to cloud is going and where you've told us, you'd like it to be better. We're then going to show you how we've taken those customer conversations and requests and applied them to our portfolio to make the journey simple and more secure. And finally, we're going to share with you our commitments to the kind of future we all want to have. You'll also hear directly from our customers about some incredible innovations we're helping bring to market and will be joined by our cloud partners, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to talk about how we're making cloud work for everyone. Today, we're living in a world that's moving faster than ever. And while we see the cloud, as the key to unlocking endless possibilities, I'm also here to tell you today, your initial journey to the cloud is over. You're thinking to yourself, what that can be true, but it is. For years, our industry has talked about the journey to cloud and digital transformation. The first years were filled with a lot of denial, then we experimented or tried to control the cloud by putting it in a box, a silo, which many hoped would just go away. But the public cloud continued to grow, developing a broad range of services that became increasingly attractive to our business leaders. And when coupled with a growing deficit of skilled IT talent and sudden shocks like COVID, driving digital customer interaction and work from home, cloud suddenly moved from an experiment to a business necessity. And while all of us face the same challenge, we addressed it in several different ways, but mostly ended up in the same place. Uncontrolled cloud sprawl greatly increased the complexity of managing applications, data and infrastructure in the cloud. New silos for applications and data were created due to the disparate implementations or lack of application portability, telemetry and cloud interoperability frameworks. Security risks have increased exponentially alongside cost management and containment issues and new challenges have appeared around asset visibility, governance, control and compliance. All of these challenges exist today, whether you have a single cloud or a hybrid cloud, but they're even harder to tackle across multiple clouds, which is where most businesses are today or will end up soon. Given these challenges, many of you have shared with us that the cloud, in fact, hasn't lived up to its full promise. Many of our traditional competitors have ignored these catalysts. They missed the first phase of cloud and they're about to miss the next. So back to my first point, your initial journey to cloud is over, and that's because we've reached the next phase of cloud. Cloud is now the de facto platform for your business and poised to deliver on its full promise for everyone, not just the early adopters and not just the start-ups, but enterprises across every industry as well. We call this new phase, the evolved cloud, where cloud is fully integrated into your architecture and operations and not just another silo of walled garden. The evolved cloud is secure and optimized continuously to deliver on the outcomes you need in dynamic business environments. The evolved cloud, let's say, your public cloud environments interoperate effortlessly with private clouds in your data centers, and evolved cloud ensures application and data consistency across clouds, so that you can keep your business logic moving forward and not be locked into a proprietary cloud application framework. A true evolved cloud solution has common data management capabilities at the storage infrastructure layer, common infrastructure management capabilities, common APIs and open source databases, data pipelines and workflows for stateful applications. Not to be overlooked, our optimization and automation for stateless and stateful applications for all the well-known Kubernetes distributions. And finally, you need all your hybrid multi-cloud to be delivered efficiently and cost effectively with billing and explanations that don't require a PhD in public cloud. Now this is where it gets exciting. With the help of some amazing NetApp customers and the feedback from so many of you, let's unpack what the evolved cloud means to the flexibility and adaptability of your hybrid multi-cloud environments. We're going to go deeper to help you manage your data and manage it securely. We're going to talk about how innovation and speed can coexist with efficiency and optimization in your hybrid multi-cloud world. We've heard your requirements for operational simplicity and are excited to share some key announcements with you soon. We know requirements change every day, but ESG commitments and sustainability road maps are driving decision-making more than ever. And that's why our commitment to you has to be far more than lip service. So let's start with a big issue, the challenges of data management are amplified in the cloud. Imagine a world, where applications can pull data from multiple clouds, where data moves freely between clouds and availability zones and where you need to adapt quickly to policy changes. Guess what? This is our wheelhouse. As AWS, Azure and Google Cloud built their clouds, one thing became abundantly clear, data management isn't easy. For 30 years, we've been building and evolving ONTAP. Today, it's the gold standard for data management and data protection. ONTAP keeps business-critical applications performing and important data always available and always secure. So the cloud leaders came to us. And today, we are the only enterprise-grade storage offering embedded natively in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Moving data, migrating and deploying new applications becomes remarkably easy when your storage foundation is the same on-prem and across every cloud Today, migrating applications to the cloud remains a major priority for you. And we have many, many stories of how we are accelerating this cumbersome process for our customers. We also have a multi-decade track record of protecting some of the most important data in the world. We treat your data like the precious asset it is and we secure it appropriately. We've built Zero Trust principles directly into ONTAP to ensure your valuable data is kept safe from ransomware and other cyberattacks. You'll hear much more about our security efforts later today. Now that we've built the foundation of industry-leading data management with the leading hyperscalers, we're helping them accelerate the move to public cloud for enterprise workloads like SAP and VMware. And of course, we remain committed to helping you modernize your data centers with the best storage infrastructure in the business with support for Kubernetes with connectivity to the cloud and with storage as a service consumption models. NetApp also accelerates the innovation process. Your customers and employees experience your digital business through the applications you build. With an evolved cloud experience, developers can choose their development platform anytime, and you can deploy your application anywhere. With AI, for example, we see our customers building applications in the cloud and pulling them back on premises to get the availability and performance they need. Now for our customers, innovation takes many shapes. COVVI, for example, is a high-growth start-up company, creating breakthrough innovation that makes the lives of so many people dramatically better. They have spent the last 5 years creating a world-leading multi-articulated, highly functional bionic hand. In our featured session, you'll get to hear from their CEO, Simon Pollard, about how the cloud data and the pandemic accelerated their ability to bring life-changing innovation to amputees and those born without limbs all around the world. And in our conversation on NetApp TV, you'll also get to hear from Jessica Smith, a patient advocate and former Paralympic swimmer, who shares her powerful story with me about the impact that COVVI bionic hand has had on her life. But as a preview, here's what Simon had to say about how the evolved cloud has changed everything for COVVI's business.

Communicating remotely with our bionic hands for upgrades enabling new features, analytics are all going to be a key part of COVVI's value proposition. In addition, storing user data centrally provided COVVI with significant opportunities and challenges at the same time. We knew that being able to apply machine learning to how the hands were being used would allow us to accelerate and improve future developments through social [ good ]. However, this is patient data and whatever we created is a data pathway and repository would need to be incredibly secure. This is where we've worked with both Amazon Web Services and NetApp to deliver a data platform, not only for the requirements and scale that we need today, but forward planning for where we want to be in 2 years to 3 years from now.

As your cloud and data estates grow, we know you need to balance the need for speed and flexibility with being well engineered and automated, so that you can consistently deliver SLAs and manage costs. Today, you're typically managing all of these outcomes and imperatives separately by system and environment. And you need specialized skills and platform knowledge to execute. For example, in the application life cycle, it's tempting to focus on CI/CD alone, but most of an application's life is spent in operations. That's why we pioneered the category of continuous optimization, as a key part of multi-cloud management. Today, Spot by NetApp is the leading platform for cloud ops and FinOps. In an evolved cloud state, you can integrate your applications with the powerful range of open source data technologies in the cloud and in doing so, tailor them to the experience that your customers expect. Our partnership with OpenText is a great example of how we are helping customers drive operational simplicity in an evolved cloud state. In our featured session, you can hear my conversation with OpenText's CEO, Mark J. Barrenechea, as we discuss the need for simplicity. OpenText helps its customers tackle the most complex digital transformation programs with the world's most complete and integrated information management platform. The whole conversation is available as part of our featured session, but here's what Mark has to say about navigating multi-cloud complexity to holistically manage operational, financial and environmental outcomes.

I have not met a single customer, who's made a uni-cloud decision. They're almost -- [ let's just ] start there. They're all multi-cloud. And we define cloud a little different. We don't say on-prem. We say off-cloud. So we say off-cloud, private cloud, public cloud and our API cloud. And we think that creates a mindset of cloud, integrated management, consume as you go, have the flexibility to scale on short planning cycles, make it easy, right, to manage. And that kind of gives you the opportunity to select [ best where ] to put those workloads, as some workloads are best off cloud or on-prem.

Operations today aren't just about cost, efficiency, performance and cyber safety. As we face the unparalleled challenges of climate change, sustainability is top of mind for all of us. NetApp takes a no-BS approach to sustainability and ESG commitments. Don't be fooled when others make long-term net 0 claims with no plans behind them or say they're going to offset their emissions, not reduce them. Instead, NetApp is focused on measurable achievable steps that make meaningful reductions. When it comes to sustainability, there are 3 things to keep in mind. First, you will not minimize your environmental impact by putting more storage and unused data in your data center. The public cloud is inherently more energy efficient and typically uses more renewable energy than corporate data centers. So it's imperative that you move the data that makes sense to public cloud. NetApp has your back, we are ready to help you today. Second, you need information and tools to help you make the right decisions. NetApp has the best service in the market to help you inventory your IT environment, analyze utilization levels and identify workloads to migrate to cloud. It's called Cloud Insights, more on that in a bit. And third, let's be realistic. We know that there is data you need to keep in your data center. We believe it's paramount to provide you energy use data. While other vendors are making pretty marketing-based claims, we report on the actual power usage of your on-prem ONTAP systems and Cloud Insights. Today, we are introducing a 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee for SAN workloads on all of our ONTAP all-flash systems, including AFF, all San Array and even FAS500f. So consider this -- with our 4:1 efficiency guarantee and our cloud tiering, which typically sees 60% or more of data being tiered to the public cloud, it means you could use up to 80% less on-premises storage with NetApp than you would with a typical competitive storage array. And how significant is this? If you were to replace 80% of the on-premises storage shipped by a competitor this year with NetApp using our 4:1 efficiency guarantee and cloud tiering to a net 0 cloud provider, it would save over 5.5 million kilograms of carbon dioxide. That's the equivalent of over 6 million pounds of coal burned or the emissions of more than 600,000 gallons of gasoline consumed. As one of the most digitally advanced auto manufacturers in the world, Porsche is a great example of a customer that's using the evolved cloud to help deliver on their cutting-edge vision of sustainable mobility. Recently, we announced a partnership with the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team, providing them with our hybrid cloud solutions, so they can continue to write race car history. In our featured session, you'll get to hear my full conversation with Friedemann Kurz, as we discuss how data will be critical to the future of electric vehicle technology. But first, here's a preview of what he had to say.

We are racing purely electric, and so it's more and more about the efficiency of the power trains we have in those race cars and on how to use the power we have in the battery as much as efficient as we can. That's also very special about the Formula E. And last but not least, of course, technology. We always try to push the boundaries of the technology. We try to reduce the energy consumptions. We try to improve the performance of battery and engines to be able to be as quick as possible on the racetrack.

As a reminder, here's what's coming up. We know you want greater simplicity. We think you'll be excited about our big upcoming announcement. We know you want enhanced security. You're going to hear about the latest security enhancements we've built into ONTAP and how it might help you address your data security challenges. We also know you want to learn more about our innovation on our application services platform Spot. And we know you care about environmental sustainability. We'll talk more about how we can help you meet your environmental targets. Lastly, you'll also hear the latest updates from some of our key partners and how we're working together to deliver a flexible and adaptable cloud experience for you. Your initial journey to cloud may be over, but your experience with the evolved cloud is just beginning. Free of lock-in, the evolved cloud can help you modernize your on-prem environment, enable mobility between environments, activate and govern data, ensure cyber resiliency and automate your operations. We have a lot to cover, so let's get started by turning things over to our program host today, Jenni Flinders, Senior Vice President of our Worldwide Partner Group. Over to you, Jenni.

Hello, everyone. Let me add my welcome to NetApp INSIGHT 2022. I'm Jenni Flinders, and I'm thrilled to serve as your host for today's program. Now as you heard in George's keynote, NetApp is committed to delivering on the promise of the evolved cloud for both our partners and our customers. We are working to accelerate growth and drive success, whether it be on-premises, hybrid cloud or cloud environments. Now I can't stress this enough for George, myself and the rest of the presenters you will see today, this is more than just a job. This is our passion. And you'll notice this is an ongoing theme at INSIGHT and beyond. So everything you'll see here today was built for the love of cloud. Now we all know that love can be serious business, but on the other hand, love can and should be a lot of fun too. So we have a little of the latter coming up in just a moment, but first, a word from one of our sponsors, who make this program possible. Take a look. [Presentation]

Thank you to our wonderful INSIGHT 2022 sponsors. We always appreciate your support. I mentioned earlier that at NetApp, we do what we do for the love of cloud, sometimes, that love just can't be contained. [Presentation]

See unbridled enthusiasm. We can't help our [ fellows ]. Okay. We have lots more in-store for you during this broadcast. And just a reminder, we have even more INSIGHT content and resources available online, be sure to check out NetApp.tv to view our on-demand sessions. They're a great way to double-click on the topics we're covering today and get even more out of INSIGHT. Up next, a sneak peek of some new NetApp products and services that promise to accelerate your client journey and deliver even more value for your organization. As you're about to see, NetApp's expansive portfolio is making it easier for customers and partners alike to realize the value and deliver on critical business outcomes. Now here to tell you more is NetApp's one and only Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Harv Bhela.

Hello. I am Harv Bhela. In just a moment, I'll be sharing an exciting announcement. But first, let me say that I am so thrilled to be at NetApp. And here with all of you today at INSIGHT 2022, my first INSIGHT since joining NetApp earlier this year. I know that if you are watching right now, you have history with NetApp. history on-premises, history with ONTAP, history with INSIGHT, thank you for that. And as we move together into this next phase of cloud, I truly believe that NetApp is one of your most important and strategic partners in that journey. Our portfolio of products is grounded in 30 years of continuous innovation to help you store data, manage data and protect your data, all made ever more simple with our data services and our application services on-premises and in the public clouds. The NetApp portfolio has 3 strategic components. First, let's talk about storage. We built the best on-premises and cloud storage infrastructure in the world. It's underpinned by ONTAP, the world's leading storage operating platform on-premises and in the cloud, where it's available natively on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. And unlike those other storage options, we let you run file, block and object from a single operating environment anywhere across your hybrid multi-cloud. We are so excited to share with you the latest enhancements to ONTAP later on. Second, we continue to invest in data services such as data protection, data privacy and data governance and in the needs of data-intensive workloads like AI and ML. Again, the beauty of our approach here is it spans across both on-premises and the cloud with the same simplified experience. And third, application services, our Spot by NetApp portfolio includes powerful capabilities that continuously optimize public cloud resources. And with Instaclustr, we offer managed services that ease the transition to open source databases, all right? So we've got all these awesome capabilities not only on-premises, but integrated with all the major cloud providers. What does it mean for you? It means 4 things. Number one, it means simplicity, the simplicity to manage everything across on-premises and all the public cloud when and where you need it at your fingertips. Number 2, it means security, then you can see everything in your hybrid multi-cloud, it means you can easily protect all of your data and protect your organization. Number 3, it means savings, who didn't want the flexibility to align your technology usage with your financial objectives, so you're spending only what you need and optimizing all of this in real time. And fourth and finally, it means sustainability, having the visibility and controlling where and how you're consuming energy. So when you think about how we tie all of these 4 things together for you, that brings us to our big announcement. We're making all of this even more amazing and even more simple by introducing BlueXP, NetApp's unified experience platform. BlueXP is a unified storage and data services experience that lets you manage hybrid multi-cloud environment in a single control plane and with a single set of APIs. It's the next big step in fulfilling our vision to give you the simplicity, the security, the savings, the sustainability you need to bring your evolved cloud to life, and it's available today. And what you'll see today is just the beginning. We'll continue to invest in building new and advanced storage and data services into BlueXP. We've got an incredible team here to tell you more about the details of BlueXP, how it works, and how does the rest of NetApp portfolio is evolving to meet your needs. Gabie and Ronen take it away.

Everybody, I'm Gabie Boko. George described the world you're all experiencing today. There are so many resources at your disposal, so many clouds, so many opportunities to innovate and move your business forward. And after all, 90% of you are operating in a hybrid multi-cloud. But as George also mentioned, how do you make sense of it all? How do you store, manage and protect your data? How do you maintain control with disparate frameworks and management tools? How do you leverage the public clouds, while still maintaining all the great things you're doing in your data center. And while you're doing all that, how can you meet your SLAs, keep finance happy and keep your sanity. Well, as you heard from Harv, the answer is NetApp BlueXP. I'm joined here today by my friend and colleague, Ronen Schwartz, [ whose team ] is bringing BlueXP to life. Ronen, what is BlueXP?

First, I'm so proud of the work we have done, and the team has actually brought to life BlueXP. In simplest of term, BlueXP is your NetApp hybrid multi-cloud experience. This is your environment to manage storage and data services. BlueXP brings together the best-of-breed NetApp storage and data services across on-premises and the cloud. No need for different frameworks, different tool sets and different expertise. BlueXP also allows you to catalog your data, monitor the entire enterprise infrastructure, whether it's NetApp or non-NetApp. BlueXP give you unparalleled data and infrastructure observability. This is integrated approach that combines an intuitive UI with AIOps. Those of you like me, who thinks API first, BlueXP is offering a consistent set of APIs to storage and data services on-prem and in the cloud. Only NetApp has the vision, the portfolio, the expertise and the deep integration with all public clouds to help you change the way you work forever.

This sounds really cool. And for all of you watching, this is not going to be a regular main stage session, we're going to roll up our sleeves right here and now and learn more about BlueXP. But before we do, we want to let you know that this is something that you can start using today. We're going to share a handful of [ insight ] opportunities here in this first hour of INSIGHT. So this is your first opportunity. Sign up and register to use BlueXP starting...

Now.

Now. It's free, and you can use it today to manage and monitor your storage and data across your entire hybrid multi-cloud. But we need to go a little bit deeper. BlueXP is about simplicity, Ronen, what does simplicity mean to us?

Well, first, is bring our entire data estate together in one unified management experience. Second, BlueXP console is about as simple as it get. Let me grab my tablet and show you what I mean. It starts with an intuitive view of your entire data estate, where you can see, analyze and manage your NetApp data in the cloud and on-premises. We call this the canvas. And to start, I've left it fairly empty. Already, you can see this is the control plane to manage your data across multiple clouds. Here, we've got cloud volume service on Google Cloud, Azure, NetApp Files or ANF and [ non-ONTAP ] technology in the form of AWS S3.

So Ronen, some of our people here at INSIGHT aren't here for cloud. They're on-prem, ride or die storage business for life. Have you forgotten about our industry-leading on-premise storage business here?

Gabie, we would never forget on-premise. Most of us are living in a hybrid environment. The hybrid view is critical. Let me show you. As I click here to add working environments, you see the option to add on-premises. You will note that we have added the ability to basically manage storage grid and E-Series system, now select the ONTAP and basically add an AFF system and enter the IP address and credential and I click add. This has now been added to your canvas.

So just to be clear, we can see all of those resources across the data center and multiple clouds, that's a pretty big deal.

Yes. This is a big deal. You won't find another management console with the breadth of hybrid multi-cloud and the depth of capabilities. Let me show you a real-world scenario, how we can easily protect the data across the hybrid multi-cloud. Let's take that AFF system that I just added to the canvas, and I can simply drag and drop that into an AWS S3 bucket, where now I want to store my back up. I select the backup and restore service, which takes me to the backup and restore tab. I enter my AWS account information and the access keys and move to the network step. In this case, I'm using the default private endpoint configuration. Then I have the option to select one of my company's backup policies. I can have different policies for different data and workloads. I'm going to create a new policy to create daily backups for a year. I'm also going to turn on our data lock compliance setting, so the backup cannot be deleted. Then [ select the ] volumes that I want to protect, which, of course, I always choose all of them. As I return to my canvas, I see that our AFF system is now protected directly to the AWS S3 resources. It's done. No backup software, no backup VMs, no agent, just a simple drag and drop, a true hybrid workflow done in minutes. I wasn't kidding when I said this is easy.

It is easy. And this leads us to another [ insight ] opportunity. Remember, as we mentioned before, register for BlueXP and you too can start using the backup and restore service on unlimited capacity free for 30 days.

There is more.

No. And also free for 30 days, enjoy unlimited data tiering because that is also a pretty big deal.

Gabie, you can protect your data right away and save tons of money by tiering call data to object storage on-premise and in the cloud and talk about sustainability. Data tiering to cloud provider is also a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.

That's amazing. Okay. So we've seen some of our hybrid multi-cloud capabilities in action here, and we're definitely going to go much deeper with you into some of these with more demos in our featured sessions, but now Ronen, multi-cloud, as we know, is for ever increasing in complexity and the only way to stay ahead of it is to employ AI/ML. What are we doing to help our customers stay ahead of that curve here?

BlueXP offers integrated AIOps, which means 3 things: first, AI-enabled health and status monitoring; second, alerts; and third and most importantly, proactive guidance and suggested actions so that you can avoid further trouble. More than AIOps, BlueXP is offering integrated security. AI and machine learning are constantly auditing both the user and the data level activities, immediately detecting the anomalies and taking prescribed actions.

But correct me if I'm wrong, not all of these capabilities are new.

You're correct. Our customer will recognize the capabilities of our Cloud Insight and Active IQ, but now this is all part of BlueXP.

Okay. Now this is -- it's still getting good. I still feel like that it's -- there's going to be more is coming here because we're going to move on to security and ransomware. These are clearly superhot topics. You need to protect all of your data, all of your infrastructure at all times, everywhere.

Yes. BlueXP give you the capability to discover and secure data. For example, let's look at the ransomware protection dashboard in BlueXP. At the glance, we get an overall ransomware protection score. It gives me a very visible metrics to drive my enterprise. I get a cheat sheet with recommended actions to improve my score. We can see hundreds on sensitive items in the unprotected data sources. This is something that takes 2 minutes to fix and stay tuned, I will show you how to fix it in the featured session.

I know we sound like a broken record, but the featured sessions are going to be amazing because that leads us into our third [ insight ] opportunity. Just like Ronen showed us a moment ago, you can activate your free trial of data sense within BlueXP to perform a ransomware audit across your entire environment. And again, you can start doing this today. Okay, back to business. So Ronen, who's going to benefit from all the simplicity and all these great features we've been seeing in BlueXP?

Well, Gabie, we are all about the ops. It doesn't matter if you are in IT ops, cloud ops or DevOp, BlueXP provides value, research deployment, observability, cyber resilience, data governance and data mobility and even financial management all through a single experience and consistent APIs.

Okay. You mentioned financial management. Let's talk dollars and cents here. How does BlueXP help you -- give you the flexibility to manage your spending across hybrid multi-cloud?

If you need to align your tech with business needs and FinOps expectations, and I'm guessing you like me, you have to, you need flexible consumption across your data center and the clouds. NetApp is already supporting flexible consumption with Keystone. BlueXP lets you control your flexible consumption, so you can shift resources to the cloud when needed. Let's go to the digital wallet and then to the Keystone Flex subscription. I can choose one of my subscriptions and edit it here. I can request additional capacity in both my on-prem storage and additional CVO primary storage. One click is all it takes.

This feels like a true connected experience. I bet technical and FinOps teams out there will become best friends in no time just like us, Ronen. So while we're talking about the user experience, do you have to use the CUI?

No. The real value of BlueXP is in the APIs. With API support, you can adopt infrastructure as code. BlueXP capabilities is Terraform, Puppet, Ansible and more. We also have many ways to access BlueXP even in a restriction or dark side, I'll talk more about it -- this in the featured session.

Okay. Cool. So we have demonstrated now that BlueXP is the hybrid multi-cloud storage and data service experience. Ronen what really makes this unique?

Gabie, this is unique. NetApp is the only company with this level of tight relationship with the hyperscalers. We are offering an ONTAP based storage, native storage in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and only BlueXP's bring a hybrid multi-cloud experience across the resources you need.

Wherever and whenever you need them. There are other companies out there, who claim they deliver a modern data experience, don't believe it.

Yes, you should not believe it. They just cannot do it. They don't even come close to having the capabilities and the deep partnership to be integrated with all the biggest cloud providers.

And you know what else they don't have is ONTAP? We've got 30 years of continuous innovation and industry leadership with ONTAP.

Yes. ONTAP actually underlies much of the BlueXP storage technology. To all of you, ONTAP users out there, whether you're on-premise or in the cloud today, we are pleased to be announcing the latest version of ONTAP.

You know what, Ronen, can you highlight just a few features that ONTAP brings to the BlueXP experience for us?

There is so much that we are doing. Frankly, it's a giant list. If the developers wouldn't be angry with me for missing something really important, I can highlight a few big features. First, we continue to harden our integrated anti-ransomware features. It is fully autonomous, and this gives a huge advantage to catch ransomware in its tracks and enable rapid recovery. In the latest version, we have added temper-proof capabilities to prevent dilution of your primary local snapshots.

Our competitors like to talk a lot about ransomware, but they only offer piecemeal solutions. No one else in the industry offers this integrated combination of proactive protection against ransomware and iron-clad protection of your backups.

Yes, you're absolutely right. And I have another big announcement to share. We are increasing the value of your files by offering simultaneous access to data by both NAS and S3. We are now offering a single OS for block file and object deploy a single ONTAP system, and you can support every application. We made it easy for block customers to switch between fiber channel, iSCSI and NVMe on the same system. Now customer can access the same data via NAS and S3.

30 years of innovation on ONTAP and still running strong. I love this. Ronen, thank you for sharing and giving us a glimpse into NetApp BlueXP and all of the latest ONTAP updates. And for those of you out there, 2 things. Number one, don't forget about those special [ insight ] offers. And don't forget to join our featured sessions to learn even more about BlueXP, ONTAP, and all of our capabilities with our cloud partners, AWS, Azure and Google. Now let's go back to Jenni?

Welcome back just a moment ago, Gabie and Ronen previewed some new product updates, discussed ransomware safeguards and took us through some exciting demos. There is a lot more insight coming your way. But first, take a look at this. [Presentation]

We can't wait to roll out the new offerings the team told you about because nothing makes us happier than making our customers fall in love with cloud right along with us. In fact, we've received some particularly lovely testimonials from customers recently. Check this out and feel the love. [Presentation]

How sweet? Thank you for sharing your experience with us and on such beautiful stationery. Okay. We have more of our keynote session coming up shortly. But first, a tip for you experts out there. If you'd like to dive deeper into the topics covered here, stay turned after the keynote for our hyperscaler featured session and then check out our on-demand featured sessions available on NetApp.TV right after the show. Now our next segment touches a core theme for INSIGHT, simplicity because as organizations evolve their use of cloud, one of the key challenges they encounter is taming the growing complexity of their cloud environment. Earlier, you heard how we're addressing that for data and storage, but that's not all we've been doing to simplify your evolved cloud. We're also making significant investments and simplifying your operations in the cloud. Now there is no better person than Kevin McGrath, Vice President of Spot by NetApp to pull back the curtain and show you all that we've been doing on that front. Kevin, take it away.

Thanks, Jenni, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. It was back in 2020 that NetApp acquired Spot, a company with innovative technology for reducing cloud compute costs. That's been followed by a series of cloud-related acquisitions and new product announcements. None of these acquisitions on the surface have anything to do with storage. Today, George talked about the evolved cloud. You saw the overall vision and strategy behind NetApp's portfolio. Today, I'm excited to unveil another key part of what we've done to bring that vision to reality, namely, how we're bringing these powerful technologies together to simplify the complexity of cloud. George talked about how you're in a state of continuous transformation and innovation as you evolve your use of cloud. Your applications are a critical part of that transformation. The best-in-class solutions for managing data and storage that your teams are utilizing for NetApp are one part of what your applications need to bring together and operate all the different pieces, you rely on your operations team, DevOps, SecOps, FinOps, SRE, platform engineering, whatever the role is involved, the cloud operations team has the critical responsibility to ensure that you can deploy, scale and optimize infrastructure and applications that use your data in the cloud. What we're unveiling today is the portfolio we've built to give operation teams a best-of-suite platform for cloud operations or as we like to call it, cloud ops. We've made strategic investments to expand our Spot by NetApp portfolio to make it what your operation teams can depend on to deliver world-class operations reliably, repeatedly and consistently across all of your applications and clouds. Spot simplifies the cloud for cloud ops teams. It's a holistic integrated solution that is the antidote to the complexity of today's patchwork of tactical band-aids and other vendors or do-it-yourself approaches with more point tools, more scripts, more dashboards and more alerts that definitely don't make your cloud simpler and is never going to scale. Spot makes it possible to deploy and operate applications faster, more reliably and more efficiently. An IDC study found that customers using Spot have realized 40% more efficient IT staff and 57% faster time to deploy, while realizing significant ROI in just a few months. In an environment of uncertain and limited budgets and resources, Spot is one of the most impactful solutions you can implement to save time and money, so that you can continue to invest in more and better ways to use your data. Now let's take a closer look at how Spot uses automation and optimization to simplify your infrastructure, operations and applications. Most of you are already optimizing your storage infrastructure with NetApp solutions. Spot is the clear choice when it comes to doing the same for the compute resources you're using alongside your storage resources. Our solutions analyze millions of data points about your application needs and about cloud resource availability to continuously optimize capacity, cost and utilization of compute and data every day. Spot Elastigroup does that for virtual machines. Spot Ocean does that for containers and Kubernetes and Spot Eco does that for commitment purchases. We've now also added capabilities that extend optimization to networking and storage. That includes our recently released Spot Storage dashboard that monitors your cloud environment to identify wasted storage resources and provide actionable recommendations that deliver immediate savings and new features that optimize network costs through smart deployment of compute resources to minimize costly network traffic. Infrastructure optimization is one part of simplifying cloud, but equally important is simplifying operations. Operations teams are overstretched trying to keep up with constantly changing business needs and application demands. Most don't have the headcount to keep up, but even for those that do, it's extremely hard to find and hire skilled cloud operations experts. Automation is the secret weapon that we're giving these teams to tame the complexity of the evolved cloud. We've brought together cost management, visibility, security, governance and compliance in our Spot by NetApp portfolio to help cloud operations teams simplify and automate their day-to-day tasks automatically and continuously, so they get more done in the cloud. For example, we added sophisticated cost management and visibility capabilities to our portfolio with CloudCheckr that are particularly valuable for MSPs, giving them flexible ways to understand, analyze, manage and allocate cloud costs to applications for their clients. We also recently announced the general availability of Spot Security, which simplifies cloud security posture management for operations and security teams, cutting through the noise of warnings and alerts to help them identify and address risks in their cloud environment. And today, we're announcing that we will be delivering workflow automation technology, we're calling Spot Connect that will give teams the ability to use drag-and-drop workflows to connect their infrastructure to other systems from monitoring to configuration management to notification and approval tools. Finally, let's look at how we're simplifying your applications, data applications like databases, data pipelines and data processing are foundational components used by so many applications in the cloud. Our data management, infrastructure optimization and operations automation are extremely valuable for those data applications. To simplify your cloud, even more, we've made strategic investments to be able to give you the full benefit of those capabilities for common open source applications, you're probably already using today. The first example is Spot Ocean for Apache Spark, which utilizes our automation and optimization technologies to deliver Apache Spark, as a fully optimized cloud native service. We've significantly expanded that with the recent acquisition of Instaclustr. Instaclustr offers pure open source data applications as a service, supported and managed by a team of experts in deploying and operating open source data applications. From databases and data processing technology, such as Apache Cassandra, Postgres, Redis and Apache Kafka to open source workflow automation with Cadence, Instaclustr makes it possible to deploy open source applications in minutes, while benefiting from operations expertise that ensures those services are reliable, scalable and fully optimized at all times. And now that Instaclustr is part of Spot by NetApp, those services will be delivered with the same great optimization and automation capabilities, Spot customers already enjoy today. You can see while we're excited to have Instaclustr, as part of this platform. which brings us to our next [ insight ] opportunity. You can go ahead and try it yourself today by going to Instaclustr.com and signing up for a free trial. This is now our expanded Spot by NetApp portfolio, a cloud ops platform that builds on and extends NetApp's vision and leadership for your evolved cloud. For a deeper dive, check out the operation cloud op session available now.

Thank you, Kevin. For you folks at home, I hope you enjoyed the closer look at Spot by NetApp. Now as Kevin discussed, we've invested so much hard work and resources into technologies that make Spot go -- you might even say we put a lot of love into them that shouldn't come as a surprise if you've been paying attention so far. Can't you just feel the love and [ perhaps ] check this out. [Presentation]

Earlier, we saw what happens when a NetApp's love just overflows to the point, where we can't help, but burst into song, sometimes that love reveals itself in other ways. [Presentation]

It's a same old story. Gold meets cloud, gold dances with cloud. Wait, I'm digressing. Hold on. Okay. Since we're sharing so much love for cloud today, let's take a look at one more love letter we recently received from a customer. [Presentation]

And with that, we are nearing the end of our session. Thanks to all our presenters, singers, dancers and letter writers that have shown their love of cloud today. Our next presenter needs no introduction because, well, our next presenter is me. As Senior Vice President of our Worldwide Partner Organization, I can attest that accelerating your success in the evolved cloud only happens with a vibrant and committed partner ecosystem, accelerating your success and delivering business outcomes for you is our top priority. And I can assure you that we have the most capable partners lined up to do just that from offering advisory services, to managed services to support services and even integrated technology solutions, our partners can help you take advantage of the evolved cloud with deep expertise in everything from hybrid cloud to AI, to modern data analytics and cloud ops. Today, I want to share 3 important updates with you and announce an exciting offer. As you've already heard, the evolved card is not one solution. NetApp is a critical partner with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud for running enterprise workloads. We're cloud agnostic. And there is no other data service provider that works as closely with all 3 providers on delivering co-engineered solutions, as we do. We truly are the only enterprise-grade storage operating system embedded across all 3. Right after this hour, stay tuned as we talk more about how we are elevating the cloud experience with each of these partners. But first, let me highlight some of the amazing things we are doing. With AWS since the launch of FSX ONTAP last year, we've seen amazing momentum in solving challenges for thousands of customers. We've added partner competencies and migration, financial services and public sector. We've also received certifications and support for SQL and SAP. Now with Google Cloud, together, we recently announced a medical imaging suite that simplifies the management of medical imaging data and accelerates the migration from on-premises imaging repositories to the cloud, all while setting the stage to take advantage of Google's AI and machine learning capabilities. And on Azure, more than a dozen customers have now surpassed the 1 petabyte level of storage through Azure NetApp Files or ANF. In fact, ANF is [ certified ] for use with SAP HANA production databases and was trusted by SAP themselves for its own Azure migration. ANF is a critical foundation for running their enterprise workloads on Azure, like VMware. In fact, speaking of VMware, we've made it easier than ever to migrate and manage your VMware cloud workloads in any of these clouds. Recently, at VMware Explore, we announced new levels of industry first joint development, and we've enabled the use of NetApp cloud services, as a supplemental data store. It's certified and supported with VMware Cloud services across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, all powerful features for those of you using VMware and considering the cloud. Now customer success is imperative to us. And we're committed to providing support to those of you, who are evolving how you are operating across clouds. We recently implemented a digital support strategy, including a best-in-class support site that is intended to be the place for you to begin your support journey with us. We address more than 65% of our support issues via our digital support channels. And in fact, 98% of our customers are highly satisfied with our site. We've also integrated our award-winning Active IQ capabilities into NetApp BlueXP, including the powerful digital adviser that simplifies the proactive care and optimization of your NetApp environment. And finally, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about storage as a service. You need financial flexibility as you evolve to the cloud, and it can be hard to plan and manage cloud migrations. Today, we're announcing the new general availability of our enhanced Keystone Storage as a service for hybrid cloud that brings on-premises and cloud storage services together in a single, flexible subscription. Keystone continues to lead the industry and storage as a service innovation. And now we've extended the capabilities with our partners. Moving forward, you'll continue to see additional improvements to accelerate your success. For example, with Cisco, we offer FlexPod as a service, a joint solution delivering storage, networking and compute in a pure consumption model. With NVIDIA, we offer AI as a service. This is a joint solution delivering NetApp storage through Keystone and NVIDIA's DGX A100 for a customer to run their AI workloads hosted on Equinix colocation facilities. Now Keystone management is also part of BlueXP. So both on-premise services and cloud services can be administered through a single console. So today, I am excited to share with you our final [ insight ] opportunity. For a limited time, we are offering you our Keystone storage as a service with no burst charges for 6 months. This allows you to use up to 20% additional capacity at no additional charge, as you evaluate your storage capacity needs. So great partners, knowledgeable specialists, easy-to-use services and best-in-class consumption options that give you the power you need to make the right decisions for your business. And this is just a few more reasons for you to turn to NetApp, as your strategic partner for you and the evolved cloud. So let's go check in with NetApp's President, Cesar Cernuda and go get his thoughts, as he brings this hour to a close for us.

Thanks, Jenni. Hi, everyone. What a great session this has been. We covered a lot today. So let me take a moment to recap. We're feeling the pressure to innovate, to protect your data, applications and infrastructure and to optimize for cost and sustainability. Today, the cloud is more powerful than ever, moving into an evolved [ state ] that opens new opportunities. NetApp is ready. We're ready to help you modernize your data centers, protect your data, migrate applications to the cloud and automate and optimize your cloud. Our #1 rule be adaptable. We love the cloud. We love AWS. We love Azure, and we love Google Cloud, and we love on-prem. Our old storage competitors might claim to be cloud-friendly, but with a [ clean eye] I can very clearly see they don't even come close to the NetApp portfolio. First, with storage infrastructure. When it comes to on-prem environments and modernizing your data center, the NetApp AFF, all-flash storage arrays check every box of your enterprise workloads, performance, resilience, flexibility, security, cloud connectivity. ONTAP is the industry-leading storage operating environment and the only consistent enterprise-grade option available in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Stay tune after this session to hear from each of those partners, they can't wait to tell you about the latest NetApp powered enhancements to their offerings for enterprise workloads, including VMware and SAP. Then there's hybrid multi-cloud simplicity. You heard about BlueXP. Go and register to start using it today. It's free. And you can manage and monitor your storage and data across your entire hybrid multi-cloud. Another highlight of the NetApp portfolio, data protection and security. NetApp delivers [ try and true ] data protection with a common approach to security and intelligence. You can activate your free trial of Cloud Insights and data sense on BlueXP to perform on ransomware [ outed ] across your entire environment. When it comes to sustainability, everything starts with efficiency, that's why we're offering a free 30-day trial of cloud [indiscernible] on BlueXP to help you automate moving [ cloud ] data to the cloud. This can also help you dramatically reduce storage costs. Let's talk about speed and innovation. We told you how NetApp is removing barriers through cloud innovation with Spot. We have a free trial of Instaclustr [ that later ] deploy open source that applications in minutes. It's operated by experts, so your teams can focus on building and scaling reliable applications faster. Finally, you just heard Jenni talk about Keystone. For the first time, we're offering Keystone with no burst charge for 6 months. This allows you to use up to 20% additional capacity at no extra charge, as you evaluate your storage capacity needs. Now stay tuned for those featured sessions.