During your eight months with Spot PC, what are some of the changes that have happened there?

So NetApp acquired CloudJumper about two and a half years ago. And soon after the acquisition, they saw an opportunity, as the marketplace shifted, as Microsoft began to invest more in the Azure Virtual Desktop, they saw an opportunity to take the learnings that they had had as CloudJumper as a software vendor and even as a service provider and colocation [provider] to take that to a cloud-first model. And what got me interested about this era of NetApp is that, starting about five years ago, NetApp started acquiring companies that had built infrastructure tools and infrastructure technology that was focused on cloud-first. And everybody knows NetApp. They’ve been in the storage business for 30 years [and the company is the] gold, gold standard for file storage. But this was the opportunity to start building a cloud portfolio, and they looked at the back end, they looked at security, they looked at observability and discovery. And one of the places they looked at was at the desktop and what was happening at the endpoint.

When NetApp acquired CloudJumper, they saw this opportunity once they got to know the technology to combine it not just with Azure NetApp Files, which is now the gold standard for file storage up in the Azure Cloud, but also the NetApp Cloud Insights technology they acquired as well as the Spot technology like Spot Elastigroup [cloud infrastructure automation service]. If you take just those three services, but then you combine them with Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Azure Log Analytics, there’s a whole bunch of services that we’ve incorporated on the Microsoft side, and we’ve bundled that up into a managed service offering.

And then we’ve also chosen to take on the risk by offering it at a fixed price per seat, per month. So gone are the days where you are acquiring all this infrastructure to run these desktops and then the price changes every month based on who used what, where and when. So we’ve gone and taken the extra step of taking on that risk, which is a huge benefit to the MSP community. Because one of the problems on the MSP side is they’re having that challenge of how to get predictable margins, and then how to get a predictable business that they can scale. And so we simplify all that for them. And that’s what really got me excited about coming to NetApp: the strength of this growing cloud portfolio. I’m not sure what our public data is, but it’s approaching $500 million in annual run rate, which is very significant. And we have this great partnership with Microsoft, not just around our use of AVD [Azure Virtual Desktop] and the Windows 365 Cloud PC, but also ANF [Azure NetApp Files] and CVO [Cloud Volumes Ontap] and a bunch of other services that we do with Azure. NetApp also has great relationships with AWS and Google Cloud Platform as well. But that was most exciting. And I think we’re one of two product areas within NetApp now that are really targeting MSPs. And I really like the model. The MSPs I’ve been able to develop some relationships with have some really interesting businesses, and they’re really looking to leverage and take advantage of the automation and the technical help we can provide.