Growing NetApp Even When The Storage Market Stalls

The storage industry is seeing what may be a plateau, with sales either falling a bit or rising a bit depending on the quarter even as revenue increasingly shifts from the old-school vendors to the cloud and hyper-scalers.

NetApp is the exception. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is bucking the trend by growing its storage revenue through focusing on sales of what it calls "strategic technologies" such as flash storage and the cloud. The company also just released its first entry into the hyper-converged infrastructure market, an appliance called HCI, and is building a strategic relationship that will make NetApp's NFS technology a native part of the Microsoft Azure cloud, signaling that NetApp still has plenty of room to grow.

CRN spoke with NetApp CEO George Kurian about whether the company can maintain its growth momentum in the face of a slowing storage industry, and about whether the company might actually, finally become the No. 1 storage vendor.

Here's insight into these and other important NetApp issues from the company's CEO.