VMblog:  If you were giving a VMware Explore attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say?  How would you describe the company?

Jonsi Stefansson:  In today's world, data is the most important asset a company has. NetApp's core business is delivering intelligent data infrastructure, enabling customers to keep their data fast, protected, and secure regardless of data type or location. What sets NetApp apart is the deep, long-standing innovation partnerships we have with the companies our customers rely on to run their business, including VMware, NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and the leading public cloud providers. NetApp goes beyond marketing brochure-level partnerships and my team is responsible for new, innovative integrations that make it faster, easier and more secure to manage data for our customers, on-premises or in the cloud.

VMblog:  What made your company sponsor VMware Explore this year?  Why is this a must sponsor event for your company? What key challenges are companies facing today? What examples can you cite?

Stefansson:  NetApp's sponsorship of VMware Explore this year reflects our commitment to supporting the more than 20,000 customers who leverage both NetApp and VMware in their environments. We're thrilled to be back at VMware Explore this year. It's always a very important venue for us to meet with VMware customers and partners and announce the latest solutions we've been developing with VMware all year.

This year is a little different though, with the acquisition by Broadcom, the VMware portfolio has changed, and customers are adjusting to the new subscription models and pricing. This event is a pivotal opportunity to showcase how NetApp solutions can optimize compute, memory, and storage resources to achieve a better total cost of ownership of VMware environments.

We feel it's important to be here to share our latest joint VMware solutions with customers, but also listen to them on what they are experiencing as we take this feedback straight into our joint engineering roadmap discussions with VMware.

VMblog:  Talking about your product solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?  What sets you apart from the competition?

Stefansson:  NetApp's unique benefits for customers comes through our ability to help customers cost-effectively and easily manage, share, protect and secure all of their data, regardless of data type and regardless of location. This gives them efficiency and predictability in IT operations which translates back to speed and competitive advantage for their business. We back this up with guarantees on flash efficiency, high availability and ransomware recovery, three areas that we find are very important for every workload today.

In addition, NetApp supports a wide range of alternative virtualization solutions on-premises or in the cloud, and we can help customers develop a blended strategy if they wish. Most customers we talk to love VMware and want to stay on VMware but are seeking guidance on how to most cost-effectively adjust to the new VMware by Broadcom subscriptions. We have specific offers here to help them right now. This is what we find is top of mind with CIOs we talk to everyday.

VMblog:  Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings?  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?

Stefansson:  What attendees will see and hear from NetApp this week is the combined benefits of moving to the latest, NetApp all-flash storage systems as well as NetApp's first-party managed cloud storage services to help optimize the total cost of ownership for the new VMware subscriptions on-premises or in the cloud. These solutions can help customers take control of where and how their data is managed, shared, protected, and secured.

Wrapped around these core offerings, NetApp is showcasing our Cloud Insights Solution which can quickly and easily deliver a detailed analysis of a customer's current compute, memory, storage utilization and performance, regardless of whether or not they use NetApp today. We can provide customers a detailed, documented recommendation to consolidate, refresh, and optimize their compute, memory, and storage to get the lowest cost and highest value of their new VMware by Broadcom subscriptions.

The key message we're bringing to every VMware customer is that as they plan and execute their IT strategy for the new VMware by Broadcom subscriptions, their compute and data infrastructure is something they have fully in their control to drive down costs now and in the future. The key for customers is to be proactive.

VMblog:  How does your company work with VMware?  Where do you fit within the VMware ecosystem?

Stefansson:  VMware is one of our longest-standing and most important strategic partnerships, we've been working with VMware since they started as a company over 20 years ago. And today we share over 20,000 joint customers worldwide. From day one, the value of NetApp for VMware customers is to offload the data management that every workload needs and perform these functions within storage. We provide optimization capabilities, helping make VMware software and the workloads they support more cost-effective, protected, secure and easy to manage for customers.

Whenever I look at partnerships, I tend to separate them into what I call the "marketing brochure" partnerships and the ones that are delivering jointly engineered innovation for customers. NetApp's approach to global strategic partnerships like VMware includes deep joint development and integration, which takes time and sustained investment. This goes beyond just product but all the way through the joint support organizations and how we work collaboratively with the joint partners in the market that our customers rely upon as well.

VMblog:  VMware Explore has typically been a launching platform for new products.  At VMware Explore, will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, can you give us a sneak peek?  Or, have you launched anything new recently that you can spotlight for us?

Stefansson:  For the past 20 years and through the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, we have kept a strong focus on a jointly engineered solutions roadmap with VMware and we like to use VMware Explore events as a platform to announce our new solutions to the market.

At this year's event, you can expect more news from NetApp about how our offerings can optimize the cost, simplicity, and flexibility for VMware hybrid cloud environments. These updates will address the evolving needs of VMware customers and are designed to help organizations maximize their infrastructure investments.

These updates build on enhancements NetApp recently introduced to support VMware environments including BlueXP workload factory, which automates the planning, provisioning, and management of cloud resources for VMware and other strategic workloads, optimizing deployment and performance. Additionally, NetApp updated its BlueXP disaster recovery service to include support for VMFS datastores, providing guided workflows for designing and executing automated disaster recovery plans. These updates reinforce NetApp's commitment to supporting VMware environments and enhancing data management across hybrid cloud infrastructures.

The overall message to VMware customers is NetApp and VMware are working together as closely as ever to help customers get the most value and cost-efficiency of their new VMware by Broadcom subscriptions, on-premises or in the cloud and can help them start now.