NetApp continues to expand Spot, its all-encompassing portfolio for cloud storage and data management products, throughout 2022.
The company’s acquisitions this year include Fylamynt, a cloud automation startup, and Instaclustr, a database-as-a-service vendor. Terms for both deals, which are aimed at rounding out NetApp’s Spot, were not disclosed.
The acquisition spree appears to be winding down, however, with Michael Berry, CFO and executive vice president at NetApp, citing a potential pause in further acquisitions in the coming months during the fourth quarter and its fiscal 2022 earnings call in June.
“From a capital allocation perspective, we expect to pause CloudOps acquisitions for the first half of fiscal ’23, as we focus on strengthening our field and customer success with go-to-market moves , while integrating our CloudOps product portfolio,” Berry said during the call.
In this Q&A, Kevin McGrath, vice president and general manager of Spot by NetApp, talks about how recent acquisitions will add to Spot’s portfolio for customers, how he sees the software suite evolving and what the company’s next maneuvers are in the cloud. McGrath was the former CTO at Spot before NetApp’s acquisition of the startup in 2020.
Early analyst sentiment following the Phylamynt acquisition indicated some optimism about what it could add to the platform. What is the planned implementation for the technology, and what is next?
Kevin McGrath: Phylamynt will be Spot Connect and that will be the connective tissue between everything we do.
One of the things we’ve done is we have all these acquisitions [with] all these APIs. Spot Connect will be a drag-and-drop system. We want to connect all the different parts of NetApp together. We will not just put [our products] on the same console, but we’ll give you a nice, seamless way to connect them — not just to each other, but to the services you use, like ServiceNow, Jira and Slack.
Will we compete with some of the tools the cloud provider will offer? Absolutely.
Kevin McGrathVice president and general manager, NetApp Spot
[NetApp] Cloud Insights has tons of visibility and optimization that we’re going to start bringing to the platform. I think we’ll have a networking story sooner rather than later, as we start to bring it all together [tools] together
Last year, NetApp announced partnerships with several cloud hyperscalers, such as the debut of Amazon FSx for NetApp OnTap on AWS. However, NetApp’s Spot is a challenge with some hyperscaler tools and capabilities. How do you see those partnerships progressing?
McGrath: What the major cloud providers want is more usage. Will we compete with some of the tools the cloud provider will offer? Absolutely.
I think, in some cases, we will step on each other’s toes. But in other cases, let’s prove [to] the cloud provider that if someone uses our tool set, they’ll be a happier customer, a stickier customer, and a customer that will eventually scale more in their cloud.
One trend we’ve seen this year is vendors trying to sell outside of typical IT silos. Does Spot by NetApp continue a similar goal of expanding NetApp’s presence in the customer data management stack beyond storage, albeit with individual offerings within a catalog rather than just one product ?
McGrath: I think that’s one of the big transitions you’re seeing in the market. Your top-down sales from the CIO to an IT team, that kind of breaks off. We don’t always sell to the core IT department. NetApp CEO George Kurian says he wants to force NetApp to move away from selling only to storage admins.
Kevin McGrath
The people who will use the data going forward are not necessarily storage engineers. Remember that, at the end of the day, [NetApp OnTap] is not compatible with the hardware. It is software that can run anywhere. It doesn’t have to run on the hardware we ship to data centers. I think there’s a concerted effort to say, ‘We’re going to adapt to the cloud and not try to adapt the cloud to us.’
I don’t know if there’s a specific area, but these platform engineering teams, these DevOps teams — they have an impossible job. They get requirements from application teams, finance teams, business teams. As that role expands to more and more companies, we will continue to solve for their pain points.
We don’t want to remove any of the entry points. We want to keep that consumption-based cloud model. But for our larger customers, we really want to create a way for them to come in and consume data, and not have to worry about downstream point solutions. A set of services in their own way, a more usable way, as a SKU.
Editor’s note:This interview has been edited for clarity, length and style.
Tim McCarthy is a journalist who lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He covers cloud and data storage news.
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Kevin McGrath