Unlike some of its competitors, who concentrate on sales quota system, Network Appliance (NetApp) has introduced the 'Get Successful' program to help its partners draw a business plan by way of exchanging information around key business trends.

How do you plan to generate more business for NetApp from the Indian sub-continent?
NetApp's top priority is to grow its market share, diversify pathways and increase efficiency. We need to reach out to our customers through different pathways and not the traditional ones.

Customers are getting dependent on IT in a huge way which has further opened opportunities for outsourcing. We are looking at more ways to go to market and the manifestation of all that is the NetApp partner program.

We have created a new field portal and through it are offering our partners access to a lot of confidential information, which was not the case earlier. This was necessary since we wanted them to have access to our tools.

Surajit Sen Director-Channels, Marketing And Alliances, Network Appliance

Another initiative that we have undertaken is in the form of campaign express. Through this we are allowing our partners to build marketing campaigns on their own around virtualization, consolidation and other related solutions. The infrastructure for running the program is being provided by NetApp and we have opened this up for all our 50 partners.

In addition, we have introduced 'Get successful' program through which we are looking at those solutions that have maximum uptake in the market. This will help our partners to build a business plan aside to enabling them.

Hence while other vendors work on sales quota system, NetApp helps them build manpower, skill sets, certification or alliances by sharing information around areas that will drive business for our partners.

How is NetApp planning to enhance their partner relationships and alliances?
In 2008, NetApp introduced the authorized professional service partner program (APSP). While most technology players are keen on building services business, NetApp believes in delivering services through partners and has no intention of becoming a services company.

This program enabled our partners to deliver services built around our technology to their customers. It was relevant for the channel since it gave them the potential to earn margins on services.

We are now building on the program, starting with few solution areas and covering few partners. Earlier, we were focusing on virtualization, backup and recovery, development environments, messaging and collaborations and will now continue to add solutions further to enable our partners to offer services based on our technology.

Recently, we announced a new partner program and changed the VIP Partner program to Naya Partner Program. This was done in view of the fact that the VIP partner program was focused on reseller partners only.

But we also have global system integrator partners, service providers, hosting service providers, shared service providers, cloud service providers. Hence we resolved to create an umbrella program that will cover all our partners including tier one partners, tier two partners, distributors, resellers, large system integrator partners.

Does NetApp plan to target the mid-tier enterprises, since it has till now been focusing only on the enterprise segment?
We initiated focused on the mid-tier enterprises in 2008 and adopted a three-pronged strategy in order to achieve our goal. In the first place we have adopted a product strategy and bundled our 2008 product series with solutions called the NetApp Solutions Bundle, which allows partners to configure and design solution very easily for customers.

In addition, we introduced partner program simultaneously to support these partners to go to market. Finally, we recruited new partners and enabled them by providing them with requisite training.

Which key technologies/solutions will Netapp focus on?
The first is the shift towards Ethernet storage. Traditionally, fibre channel has dominated the data center. With the advent of Fibre Channel over Ethernet and 10 gigabit technology, the industry is moving towards Ethernet-based storage since the customer gets the reliability and performance of fibre at the cost of Ethernet.

The second trend is storage efficiency of the data centers. We are driving the storage utilization up by a combination of various technologies like thin provisioning, de-duplication, thin replication, thin cloning which will help drive utilization by 80 percent.

Besides virtualization and cloud computing will be the other thrust areas for us.

Pooja Sharma
(poojas@cybermedia.co.in)

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