It's About the Workload! It's About the Data! (Hint: It's About the Customer!)

Some of my closest friends told me I was out of my mind when I announced I was moving to a solutions engineering role at NetApp. "You're leaving supporting software-defined data center technologies to support a traditional storage manufacturer?" was the basic gist of the majority of comments. It's fairly understandable - for years, I was indoctrinated to believe that the hardware didn't matter, that everything could be done in commodity hardware, that if it could be done in the hypervisor kernel it was better than everyone else, and ultimately that boiled down to workload centricity - that is, the concept that everything should be built and managed around the virtual machine.

There's a few things to unpack there. First, workload centricity comes from a good place - it's the mindset that you should put the business needs first, that you should build your infrastructure to service what end user applications are being run and manage policies such as performance and redundancy in accordance to workload importance to business missions like revenue growth and continued operations. That's certainly a good mindset, and I'm not going to contradict that.

I'm just going to add to that - the application is important, but what makes the application important? Think of nearly any application that you run. ERP, CRM, e-mail, point of sale, human resources systems, payroll systems - they all revolve around inputs and outputs, interactions between human and computer (and in some cases, simply among computers) where data is written, read, modified, re-read, et cetera to find some purpose. This becomes even more prevalent when you start adding technologies like Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics, using data in new, exciting, dynamic ways to use technology to create closer relationships to our customers and find new revenue streams.

So why did I join NetApp? It's not a traditional storage company as a couple of my friends wrongly believe (and, quite honestly, that I believed when I first started the interview process months ago - so I understand their misconception and want to help undo it!). NetApp is a data fabric company, NetApp is a data management company, and NetApp is a cloud company.

NetApp is pioneering innovative technologies to unify data management and optimize data placement amongst private and public clouds, across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services, to enable simplified, consistent access, tracking, placement and management of Enterprise data, as well as ways to manage and automate infrastructure configuration and scaling. In short, this is as far from traditional storage as you can get - getting use out of data is, in fact, the cornerstone of digital transformation and NetApp is at the forefront, providing a best-in-class solution for any possible manner of data consumption that an Enterprise might need in a simple to manage, coordinated data fabric across a hybrid multi-cloud experience.

At NetApp, as well as in my previous roles supporting major manufacturers, I've realized that sometimes name recognition can be as much a blessing as a curse when it comes to customers (and partners) recognizing our capabilities. I challenge all of my colleagues that support, sell, and manage technology to shed their preconceptions and continually re-investigate what some of the leading minds and companies in IT offer. These companies are evolving and providing valuable tools to achieve business objectives and greater agility in ways that still adhere to important goals of Enterprise-level security, governance, and supportability. Open your minds and learn how they're evolving their offerings for the modern cloud era.

In the interest of having been able to freely speak my mind, I want to end by making doubly clear that my statements and opinions in this article are mine and mine alone; they don't necessarily reflect the opinions of any employers, current or past, nor any product solutions I've supported in the past. Hopefully this disclaimer prevents any misconceptions and prevents any sort of uncomfortable conversations for me.