NetApp puts EMC in the A/NZ Bullseye
NetApp puts EMC in the A/NZ Bullseye
June 5, 2007: NetApp’s Australian managing director Peter O‘Connor says they’ll be snapping at the heals of EMC within 18 months, after celebrating an average A/NZ growth rate of 50 percent at the close of fiscal year 2007.
For Australia / New Zealand the market is seemingly perkier than trends occurring elsewhere. Just last week, CEO of NetApp Dan Warmenhoven announced NetApp’s fiscal year 2007 results and projected a 6 -7 percent downturn in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2008, warning the company had been far from immune to the “March macroeconomic spending slowdown.”
But on the Australian / New Zealand front NetApp is consolidating its local success and has now put EMC in its sights. “We had 50 employees in Australia 12 months ago, now we’ve got 90,” says O’Connor. “We believe in 18 months we will pass EMC in terms of revenue.”
When Graham Penn, storage analyst at IDC was asked if this was a realistic expectation he replied, “Forecasting market share is difficult. It will be difficult (for NetApp,) simply because of the sheer size of EMC.”
Of course with clients like Telstra on board, NetApp is also sporting some of the largest storage users in the region. “We have the third greatest penetration in Australia, of any country,” says O’Connor. “Our model is different here in Australia, by way of which the business has evolved. It is also heavily skewed by Telstra.”
Covering a number of different businesses, Telstra sits on about 7 petabytes of storage. “Telstra continues to be on our biggest customers, not just in Australia but also in the world,” adds O’Connor. “They are also one of the biggest storage users in the world.”
However for as much as NetApp has moved to address the storage needs of some of Australia’s largest organisations, O’Connor admits there is still plenty of room to grow. “Outside of banking, insurance and telcos, we haven’t really spread our wings,” he says.
Perhaps the results can also be attributed to the fact the Asia Pacific region appears to be more inclined to purchase disk-based protection storage solutions than North Americans. With results quoted from a recent NetApp and Symantec co-funded study from Forrester Research, 31 percent of APAC respondents said they were more likely to adopt the disk-based protection solutions, compared to just 21 percent of respondents based in North America.
Mark Heers, director of marketing and alliance for NetApp ANZ, says NetApp has noticed a definite shift toward disk-based data protection solutions in the region. “We attribute this to the challenge that many IT managers and CIOs face, which is to improve business processes and make everything ‘do more’, whilst at the same time, maintaining data security and compliance and reducing enterprise-wide costs.”
It seems NetApp may also be planning a crusade on the software front. “Once we take the finger out of the dyke on some of these companies, they start to buy up more of our technologies,” says O’Connor.
Off the back of the local growth, NetApp has been busy restructuring its Australia and New Zealand offices to meet the parameters of a changing storage environment. “The pace at which NetApp is expanding in A/NZ means it’s critical we have a solid structure in place that allows us to continue to meet our customers’ storage and data management needs,” says O’Connor.
This restructure involves a number of changing roles and new offices in Perth, Brisbane and Wellington. Scott Morris has been bumped up to the role of director, partner and public sector sales while Michael DeLandre has been appointed national systems engineering manager.