NetApp in ANZ will surpass EMC's revenues locally next fiscal year according to managing director Peter O'Connor.
"We are already seeing some of our larger enterprise customers switching from running VMware on EMC kit to NetApp gear," he said.
NetApp marketing director Roger Mannett, a storage veteran of 20 years' experience, said the reason for the switch from EMC kit to NetApp was better functionality. If anyone should know, it is Mannett, who was previously in charge of storage at Telstra and saw EMC's share of storage at the telco decline dramatically in favour of NetApp.
While EMC is expected to continue to be the leader overall globally, NetApp is already ahead in revenues in Germany and is knocking on the door of being number one in the UK.
O'Connor was speaking at a Net App conference yesterday (25/03) where the company announced its new global branding. This will increase NetApp's exposure to broader audiences and is the biggest awareness campaign in the company's history designed to accelerate new-account acquisition and deeper account penetration.
The NetApp revenues locally right now are split three ways: Telstra is about a third, and the top 30 enterprise customers who are mostly financial customers comprise another third with the rest with the channel.
NetApp will change these ratios this fiscal year commencing in May to focus more on the channel and this is expected to increase to at least 50%. Its main channel partners are DiData, Commander and XSI Data Solutions but more are in the pipeline including Data#3 and Fujitsu. To this end, the company has already commenced education programs including a channel enablement team.
The government market is one of NetApp's targets with defence its biggest customer to date. The company is hiring and has increased head-count to 120 over a 20-month period and will take on about 50 more people in the next 12 months. New hires previously have come from storage vendors, HDS, EMC and Symantec.
Mannett said, "IP storage is the way to go and this will only accelerate as there are lot more benefits gained using IP storage rather than fibre-channel. Another factor to consider is there are not many good fibre-channel people around and there are plenty of IP people."
Clarification: An inadvertent error was made in the original version of this story which has since been corrected. Please note that Roger Mannett is the Marketing Director of NetApp, Australia & New Zealand.