CRN Australia recently spoke to global executives from NetApp and Amazon Web Services (AWS) about their alliance and the opportunities it's providing Australian partners.
The interview took place just prior to NetApp's ANZ Partner Executive Forum taking place from November 14-17 in Hayman Island, Queensland.
The company has partnered with AWS since 2012 to deliver joint offerings like Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN), which delivers NetApp ONTAP data management software hosted on the AWS FSx cloud file system.
Cloud offerings are also a focus of NetApp's new Partner Sphere partner program, which was rolled out to ANZ in August.
NetApp said the program enables partners in the digital and cloud transformation market to offer specialised services aimed at customer data centre needs, both on-premises and in the cloud.
We wanted to know how the company's partnership with AWS was developing and the implications for Australian partners.
CRN Australia: What have been the key developments of the NetApp and AWS partnership over the past year?
Stephen Persoglia, ANZ channel chief at NetApp: Over the last 12 months, the collaboration between the two organisations, it can't be faulted.
We have collaborated [with] and educated both customers and partners - over 100 in the last 12 months - with [our] national AWS immersion days, so bringing [together] our traditional on- premise storage partners, educating them on the...NetApp service within AWS and conversely, AWS bringing to us their traditional cloud services migration partners, like CyberCX...and educating those partners on that first-party AWS service.
We've seen significant revenue growth; we have the world's largest FSxN customer in New South Wales, eHealth [NSW]. We have three of the largest customers worldwide in Australia, so we certainly are doing quite well with that service in comparison to the rest of the world.
The success we've seen in Australia...our customers are consuming FSxN in AWS locally as much as all of EMEA in terms of consumption.
If you think that we're a population of 27 plus million, and we're consuming as much as all of EMEA, [with a] population of 350 million. So we are certainly a very forward thinking country and a lot of that success has been through the collaboration we've seen together [with AWS].
We have had our traditional storage partners that have typically sold on-premise really embrace our growing go-to-market, they've got the services sitting within [the AWS] marketplace, where they would have two years ago probably never considered offering migration services to the cloud.
CRN Australia: How does NetApp and AWS help partners take advantage of opportunities?
Jenni Flinders, global channel chief at NetApp: So engaging field sellers; that's what it's all about, right? We call it co-selling [or] co-engagement, and how we bring our alliance partners...into opportunities, it's all about showing the customers the full stack of what is possible.
I think that speaks a lot to the power of the partnership that we have with AWS. So absolutely, it is co-engagement, co-selling and helping build that 'hey, there's a great opportunity in ANZ, right? So why would we not want to get new logos and build additional pipelines?'
CRN Australia: NetApp partner Meridian IT delivers Keystone-as-a-service-based solutions. Can you provide an update on that partnership?
Stephen Persoglia: I'm glad to say that as a percentage of our revenue, it's significant. It's going very well. We continue to work with Meridian; we've just signed on a new partner in WA who has built a Keystone-as-a-service to service smaller commercial customers.
We just closed this multi-million dollar deal with another established partner...who now wants to build an infrastructure-as-a-service. And again, this is quite often replicated via SnapMirror into AWS, so they have an as-a-service offering on-prem for certain workloads and they might do backup or [disaster recovery] into AWS leveraging ONTAP.
Quite often we're seeing customers...they get a big maintenance refresh bill, they want to move to the cloud, but they're not ready to move to the cloud, so they might deploy Keystone on-prem, [with] just a 12-month contract until they get cloud ready, and then we'll migrate those workloads into AWS.
CRN Australia: What are some of the benefits of Partner Sphere?
Jenni Flinders: There was a reason why we brought that to market...traditional partners [are] now seeing more flexibility [and it's delivering] what customers are needing. The environment has changed, so Sphere really brings the capabilities, I would say elevated, to help partners on their journey as well to say 'how do we take more opportunity within the market on the offerings?'
We offer a lot for partners to be able to build additional capabilities and monetise not only beyond the sell, but also before the sell. We actually did a study globally through an independent analyst firm to understand what the NetApp economy is for our partners.
[The study sought to answer] how can they monetise for every one dollar of NetApp sold? How much can they then make on top of services? And [in terms of] the net of economies...if you look at it worldwide and...[if] all our partners reached the one to four-point-five, five dollars in return, you've created a $30 billion net economy globally.
This week [at the NetApp Partner Executive Forum] we're actually going to spend time with the partners talking about how to go beyond just looking at the transaction, but what are you doing end-to-end around the customer lifecycle, and let us help you monetise that, let us help you build those service models.
CRN Australia: How is AWS helping partners develop these added services?
Rianne Van Veldhuizen, ANZ GM of AWS: Our partners, and these are the NetApp and AWS partners, build on top of our solutions. They can add the services, their own services, they're very close to their customers, they have their relationships.
So we are there to fully support them on that journey. And when I said earlier that 10 to 15 per cent [of organisations] are in the cloud, it's still very, very early. We have a lot of enterprise greenfield accounts that we work with that are not yet on the cloud for a number of reasons.
So for us to make it seamless, to make it easy, to make it safe, to make it resilient and give them a great backup strategy is all that our customers are looking for.
CRN Australia: How is AWS improving FSxN in Australia?
Rianne Van Veldhuizen: When customers move into the cloud, one ask is always redundancy and resiliency, right? And that is for us non-negotiable. [For] NetApp and AWS in our partnership, that is job zero for us.
[FSxN] was already available in the Sydney region [and] is now also available in the Melbourne region, which is normal for our customers, because they don't have to worry about that. So they will have a very solid and resilient environment where they can afford to build on.
And you've probably heard about how we're going to think about building this further out. But just to give you the data point over the next five years, [AWS is investing] another 13.2 billion just here in Australia.
CRN Australia: What should partners be considering when it comes to their storage and cloud partnerships?
Stephen Persoglia: The beauty of [the NetApp-AWS] relationship is it provides those partners and customers with the flexibility. So where does it make sense to put the workload? Is it a cloud ready application? If so, we've got a solution for you.
If it's a more of a legacy application, that may not be suited for the cloud, then we've got an on-premise solution for you. It's about putting the right workload where it makes sense. And with NetApp, with our first-party service in AWS, we provide that flexibility for the partners and their customers.
The whole point of what we're doing with AWS is to make it less daunting for [traditional IT partners] to have the same management platform on-prem as they do in AWS managed by NetApp BlueXP.
So being able to replicate from on-prem into the cloud, makes it less daunting for those traditional partners, to to go up the stack and elevate themselves to be both the cloud on-prem and cloud partner.
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