NetApp's Stephen Persoglia talks up upcoming partner program changes

The theme for 2026 for NetApp is best summed up by one word - “consistency” - according to Stephen Persoglia, the company’s Melbourne-based director of partners and alliances.

Persoglia said that while NetApp plans to “evolve” its partner program at the start of May, the changes aren’t a wholesale overhaul, owing to a desire for a “predictable, profitable and consistent partner program”.

“What we are looking to change with the partner program is more automation of rebates and incentives,” he explained.

“Right now, there is still an element of human touch in order to make sure that a box is ticked, a deal register is approved, a pre-approval is done for a partner to earn a particular rebate - that will be largely automated, which is a fantastic thing, because then you're not prone to human error.”

Persoglia also said that there will be some other “slight tweaks” to the partner program – such as removing a particular incentive that wasn't utilised so the company can increase other incentives in play – as well as an expansion of the local team.

“For me, locally in ANZ, we're looking to grow our partner team. At a time where we see our competitors shrinking their partner teams, we're actually growing ours,” he told techpartner.news.

“I've got a new hire in the US and I'm advertising right now for that same role for the southern region.

“Those resources have been hired to improve the partner experience for the smaller partners that we have onboarded. I want those smaller partners to have the same partner experience that some of our larger, more well established partners experience today.”

The moves follow on from a ‘refresh’ of the company’s partner capabilities late last year, which introduced a set of 16 solution competencies that cover AI, cloud transformation, cyber resilience and data infrastructure modernisation.

Since NetApp refreshed its competencies and certifications in its Partner Sphere program, there are now close to three times more NetApp partners who are certified to distribute and sell NetApp’s AI solutions than the year before.

Persoglia said that those competencies were brought in to encourage partners to upskill and enable themselves on areas important to both customers and NetApp.

“We require those competencies the higher up the chain they go," he stated.

"We have an approved tier, a preferred tier, a prestige tier - in order to be prestige, you've got to have a number of those competencies, and they can pick and choose what they want to do based on what their go to market is or what their customer vertical is that they target."

Persoglia said that the biggest recent change for NetApp – where he has worked since late 2015, having also previously held roles at Oracle, Avaya and Nortel - has been the entry into a new segment of a market.

“NetApp has always been known as a premium enterprise data management vendor and we had a price point that suited that enterprise, but a number of years ago, we widened the portfolio and embraced QLC, or capacity flash, to reduce the price point and brought those enterprise features down to products at a price point that’s palatable to SMB, mid-market and commercial customers,” Persoglia told techpartner.news.

“Our new distributors [of] Ingram Micro and Dicker Data have been instrumental in bringing us into those new conversations with those new partners to allow us to attack that new customer segment - customers like local councils, K to 12 schools.

“Enterprise is still the biggest revenue contributor and we're still incredibly strong with state government, federal government, higher education, utilities, but we’re growing exponentially in that commercial space as well.”

Persoglia conceded, however, that there is “concern from a lot of partners” around the current shortage supply of NAND memory and how that’s going to play out for their customers.

“There is opportunity as well for our partners [though] to work with their customers and help them optimise the environments that they have using various observability tools, attempting to mitigate costs by understanding where there is a cold storage that's sitting on expensive arrays and helping them navigate through [something] that is not going away anytime soon,” he explained.

"The cost of virtualisation has impacted our partners and our customers, so being able to look at their infrastructure layer, look at their virtualisation environment, understand what licences are being used, what licences aren't being used, and optimise those costs is something we can help our customers and our partners do.

“I'm reading that this is probably going to be a challenge for many quarters to come [and] these chip manufacturers, there's only a handful of them. They are shifting their manufacturing towards servicing these AI data centres. What I have heard is that they are now building new factories to deal with the supply shortage, but I wouldn't expect those factories to be up and running immediately.”