Chief Marketing Officer, NetApp Inc
Gabie Boko, NetApp & Paola Menegon, Aruba | NetApp Insight 2024
Gabie Boko, CMO, NetApp & Paola Menegon, Head of Strategic Opportunities/Alliances, Aruba, join theCUBE at NetApp Insight 2024.
About Gabrielle Boko
Gabrielle Boko, Chief Marketing Officer at NetApp, discussed the company's "intelligent data infrastructure" strategy during appearances at NetApp Insight 2024 and NetApp Converge 2024. She described the concept as "an idea that has a connected road map and proof points" rather than a single product, and said the company's approach involves integrating security, intelligence, and unified data management across block, file, and object storage. Boko stated that NetApp has embedded AI into tools such as BlueXP for ransomware monitoring and cloud operations, and she characterized generative AI as an opportunity for customers to extract value from their data more cost‑effectively and securely. Boko outlined her marketing strategy as "less is more," emphasizing fewer, more resonant messages to enable salespeople and brand ambassadors to tell a consistent story. She noted that NetApp deliberately avoided "AI‑washing" by focusing on its existing intelligence and legacy story. Boko also highlighted the importance of the company's ecosystem, including deep integrations with ONTAP, hyperscalers, and partners, and said the company aims to make functionality "built in, not bolted on." She described data as "the new product" and said intelligent data infrastructure is the product NetApp delivers to help customers protect, optimize, and leverage their data.
Transcript (27 segments)
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Rebecca Knight0:10
Insight 2024 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst Rob Strechay. The buzzword of Insight is definitely intelligence data infrastructure.
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Rob Strechay0:22
Absolutely. I think intelligent data infrastructure was launched last year, but really has taken shape. The impressive nature of all the announcements and what it's meant to customers and partners has been fantastic. And with that, I would like to welcome our next two guests to the show. We have Paola Menon, she is the head of strategic opportunities and alliances at Aruba. Thank you so much for coming, direct from Milan.
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Paola Menon0:48
Yes, exactly. Thanks to you for having us.
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Rob Strechay0:50
And Gabby Boko, she is the CMO here at NetApp. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
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Paola Menon1:11
When talking about Aruba, you imagine an island. Well, this is not the case actually. We are based in Italy. We are a privately owned company, an Italian company that was born in 1994, so we are actually on our 30-year anniversary this year. We were born in Italy, but then we expanded across Europe. We have multiple dimensions, I would say multiple souls. On one side, we are a cloud service provider, so we provide our customers with public cloud services, private clouds, and we do hybrid clouds, which is a trend that we have been hearing a lot during these two days. But on the other side, we started designing and building our own data centers. When I speak about customers, I refer to multiple levels, multiple types of customers. We start from private citizens, the general public, but we serve also public and private enterprise. And the last soul, which is very dear to me, is as a software provider, because we serve customers with trust services, like certified email, SSL certificates, digital signature, which actually allows digital transformation from within our customer business. So this is a little bit of Aruba.
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Rob Strechay2:48
And you do your role? Yeah.
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Paola Menon2:50
So I do alliances within Aruba, so I'm very excited to be here today because we are also going to talk a little bit about this new partnership.
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Gabrielle Boko3:10
What has happened so far, and I have a premonition it will continue in the keynotes tomorrow as well. What does that really mean and how does it differ from traditional systems in your view?
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Paola Menon3:23
Oh, that's such a great question.
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Gabrielle Boko3:25
From last year, we were really launching a narrative, a new brand, trying to figure out the direction of where we were going. We always knew that it would become bigger. We needed the time to really create partnerships with the likes of Aruba, with the likes of all the wonderful people you see on our floor and our festival grounds. But we also wanted to spend time really unpacking intelligent data infrastructure for our customers and our partners and give them connected roadmaps back, which is what you were really asking about. It's about helping them manage their data more effectively. That's ultimately what we're trying to do. So that means it gets to grow and it gets to change and evolve. And that's really what a good brand and a good narrative and a good strategy does.
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Rob Strechay4:23
I really like that 'connected roadmaps' because it's easy to visualize and understand how it can help you achieve the outcomes you're looking for. So Paola, what was it about NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure and these connected roadmaps that made you want to have an alliance with this company?
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Paola Menon4:38
Well, I really like the meaning of connected roadmap because this is exactly what happened between Aruba and NetApp. We started more than 13 years ago working together on the first customer, but then we actually evolved. From that infrastructure, we can leverage together different services that we provide to our customers. It was really a connected roadmap between us because we were able to have a conversation to understand which is the best technology that would fit our needs and also the different customers that we serve. We were able to evolve in growing complexity because one real value for us in working with NetApp is having the simplicity across all portfolio to manage a complex infrastructure that for a cloud provider is always growing. Thinking also about security, I really appreciate all the features regarding ransomware protection and the different customers that are out there.
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Gabrielle Boko6:12
Because they're a customer, but they have customers, and those customers are your customers as well. How do you see that all playing out as part of this partnership in the connected roadmap way?
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Paola Menon6:23
Well, you know, it's really how we like to think about the layers of our relationships. We have all the traditional alliances, partnerships, etc., but we have this nice reserved bucket that we have for technology kind of partnerships. And those are the connected roadmaps, the most demonstrable of what a connected ecosystem really starts to look like. So for IDI, intelligent data infrastructure, we really see that as the future-proof point for how we bring that to life. And we're able to bring a partner product roadmap all in one. So that's what we're excited about again in that evolution of intelligent data infrastructure and relationships like Aruba that help us take it to the next level.
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Rob Strechay7:25
How do you define how this relationship has helped you drive innovation for your customers?
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Paola Menon7:30
Well, this relationship actually started as a relationship based on technology, but then it has evolved up to sharing the same company values. So for us, bringing the same best-of-breed technology, knowing that we have a partner we can count on, is probably what makes us sleep at night, knowing that we can serve our customers with the best services. What we really appreciate is also the fact of having a team we can rely on that is there for us, supports us, and gives us the best competencies to offer to our customers as well.
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Rob Strechay8:25
It's so interesting to talk about shared values because it sounds a little squishy, but yet it is so because it is what will make or break a partnership and it will help create these outcomes that you're both looking for. So when you think about the shared values that the team has, and as you said you can rely on each other, and that's so critical, can you just describe a little bit about what that's like and what these shared values are and how it helps you achieve what you're looking to achieve?
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Paola Menon8:52
Yeah, absolutely. So I really believe our value is their treasure. It's something they can trust us with, and they want to make sure that we secure it in our data center network. We provide the design cloud, and that strive for innovation to keep on innovating continually in the technology that we provide them is another aspect that we share. We are evolving our technology towards AI, we are evolving towards even a deeper security. So this is something that we share as well. I believe reliability is a big piece, and I don't want to forget about one of the key values for us, which is sustainability. It's something that again we share.
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Rob Strechay10:14
It's true. And we had Jeff on earlier about the six S's that he had there: sustainability, simplicity, scale, smarts, security, and I knew I was going to miss one. It'll come to me. But when I look at it, because there's always a lot of noise, intelligent data infrastructure like you said is the vision, it's not a destination, it's that roadmap, that joint roadmap, and a way to get to AI and other things. But also under the hood, it's really around unified storage. You're out there talking to customers about that.
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Gabrielle Boko11:10
Absolutely. I think intelligent data infrastructure as you think about it for our whole portfolio is really three things, and they are the three pillars of what we believe make customers like Aruba, partnerships like we have with Aruba, successful. Unified data storage is absolutely one, but it's the new way to unify it. I like to call it because it has to be more than just what it was before. You have to keep evolving it. I think that's what you saw from our announcements today. It has to be more value, more volume for less price. It has to be block, file, and object. It has to be many things. Unified is important. It has to have a fantastic operating system that allows you to have an integrated view. The second pillar is about intelligent services. That is a new direction for us, but that also brings in things that we have been dealing with. That's our CloudOps portfolio that is now fully integrated, and we're thinking about this differently. And then the final one is solutions, because we believe in workloads that are going to help you drive AI. We believe in workloads and solutions that our partners have that we want to showcase as part of IDI, as part of intelligent data infrastructure. So all of those building blocks together, they may start with unified storage, we know that's our core, but they have to be rounded and complete so that our partners and customers can participate in that landscape.
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Rob Strechay12:53
Building on that, Paola was just talking about this shared idea of customer centricity. How do you incorporate feedback from customers and partners that you're seeing on the festival grounds and elsewhere to really help shape this era of intelligent data infrastructure?
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Gabrielle Boko13:17
Feedback, I think, is more than a gift. It has to be something that you do all the time. I think even just the three pillars that I just gave you, two of them actually completely changed since we rolled it out. We redefined them, we reconnected them, and we got down to what the customers really wanted versus what we thought they wanted. So I think that's part of it. We took the feedback, we listened, and I think that's also why we have that lovely third pillar, which is solutions, which is really based on AI workloads. It really is based on partner solutions and partner workloads. What are they on the front lines deploying? We want our architecture, our data infrastructure, to be able to support that.
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Rob Strechay14:10
In Italy, in the EU, it's not only sustainability obviously, but there's also governance and sovereignty. That's a big thing. Are you seeing that NetApp has had a fantastic long relationship with the US federal government in being secure and being able to do compartmentalized and being sovereign, I guess you could say. Do you see that as a benefit to your customers and that having that experience being brought to you and how fast you can roll out services to your customers?
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Paola Menon14:45
This is actually a very good question, an excellent question, because this gives me the opportunity to say that we already have solutions that are powered by NetApp for our digital trust services. For example, certified email is a way of securely transmitting a document that has a legal proof and that is a highly regulated environment. So imagine for a public institution that has to keep that information and data for multiple years. Basically, what we can do and what we have been doing with NetApp was actually providing a service that is reliable, that is stable, that gives all the proof that the government needs. We are under many audits, many regulatory evolutions where laws change, but we know that we can adapt the technology to the need of our customers. We are also looking at other digital trust services to be expanded to different countries with different regulatory frameworks.
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Rob Strechay16:19
Gabby, last question for you. Looking ahead to the future, what are some key trends that you're seeing and what's your advice to customers and other businesses for how they can stay competitive?
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Gabrielle Boko16:29
Oh, that's a big question. Thank you for the really big question at the end, and only in five letters or less. No, I really think that the whole point to a roadmap is to create a moment and an idea, and then to have access to really smart people, smart partners, and smart advisers that can help you really formulate that. I view that as the future of intelligent data infrastructure. I view that as the future of how we're going to help our customers. So my advice is to start a conversation and help them chart a roadmap. As far as I'm concerned, AI is just the beginning. I don't know what comes next. We didn't know what came next after cloud, but I think that we are well prepared to have that conversation. So I'm here, we're all here, we're listening, and we'll help you go where you want to go.
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Rebecca Knight17:28
Great note to end on. Gabby, thank you so much. Paola, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of the Cube's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2024. You're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.