Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from NetApp with Matthew Hurford

Helping to save lives by processing data faster is at the heart of NetApp's work with the Children's Cancer Institute (CCI), according to the company's managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Matthew Herford.

Herford, who leads the regional business for the data storage and management firm, described to the JS how NetApp's solutions and community partnerships are making an impact both in the Asia-Pacific and for some of society's most vulnerable.

"We've been working with [the Children's Cancer Institute] - they've been a customer of NetApp's for about five years," Herford said, outlining how the relationship has evolved. "They started off buying a whole bunch of on-prem storage products and then they've moved into the cloud. They have a requirement to share information with other hospitals and research agencies, so we've helped in a small way facilitate that. But I think the relationship's become a lot further."

He emphasised that NetApp now also sponsors the CCI's CEO Data Cure event. "NetApp has a culture of giving back and making sure we're part of the society that we work in. This is really just putting our money where our mouths are, and getting as many people from the team involved," Herford said.

Highlighting the importance of the institute's groundbreaking research, Herford remarked, "Mark Howe, who's their director of research, was over in Las Vegas just last week on stage with our CEO talking about what they do, because it's groundbreaking research. When you talk about genomic mapping and personalised medicine, the things that they're really working on are incredibly reliant on data."

Asked how NetApp's solutions are helping the Children's Cancer Institute find a cure for children's cancer more quickly, Herford replied, "In many ways, it's about not getting in the way. There's an awful lot of advanced research going on and our job is really to automate what we do. If we can get out of the way and enable these researchers to focus on what they want to get done, that means making the use of our data services incredibly simple, incredibly seamless."

He shared direct feedback from Mark Howe, who had told him that what would have previously taken days or weeks to integrate disparate data now "takes minutes with NetApp". For Herford, this is what really matters. "That just saves them an enormous amount of time and to your point Tom, they can get on with saving kids and not having to manage data infrastructure."

Turning to the company's broader offerings, Herford described NetApp as building "intelligent data infrastructure". He explained, "Organisations today want to get on with delivering customer outcomes, they want to use AI, they want to use the latest toolsets, they want to hire the people with the right level of skills and they don't want that barrier of entry into managing data." Herford believes that much of today's so-called digital disruption is "centered around moving from an analogue based system to digital based systems".

"What NetApp does, and what we have done for 31 years, is pioneer innovation in the data storage management space," he continued. "We're allowing organisations to run the workloads where they want to actually run them - that may be on-prem, it may be in a cloud, they may move from Google Cloud to Azure to AWS. Our data services span all of those multi-clouds and we simplify it by having the same data security, the same APIs, the same integration points to allow organisations to simplify that rather complex multi-cloud environment."

Herford revealed the current focus for NetApp's product development is block storage, an area in which he said the business is "very focused on making sure we can capture". He acknowledged, "Sounds a bit nerdy, sounds a bit techy, but NetApp I think has been known as a NAS company. If I ask customers, what do you know about NetApp? They'll say, 'Oh, you guys are amazing at file storage, at NAS storage.' But we're also incredibly good at block storage. We've got 20,000 customers worldwide using us for SAN-based workloads. So we're looking to make sure we can bring the same innovations, the same productivity, the same cost savings into those SAN workloads."

NetApp is also responding to the surge of interest in artificial intelligence. "We're also very focused on making sure we can help customers with their AI. We're seeing huge growth in AI - it's the hot topic. But to do AI properly, one of the things you need is access to the right data and the quality of the data," Herford said. He went on, "Not only having the right storage and enabling customers to perhaps test AI models on-prem and then perhaps burst up into a public cloud environment to do other work or other testing or productionise that AI workload, but also making sure data classification services are running across their data stacks."

In the Australia and New Zealand market, Herford explained the company employs about 200 people, and has also grown through acquisition, notably of Canberra-based InstaCluster. "They do open source as a service. If those customers are trying to figure out how they run Kafka or Redis or want to move from Oracle to Postgres, that's what that team does," he said. Across the wider Asia-Pacific and Japan region, NetApp's headcount is closer to 700 or 800 people, with major engineering teams in Bangalore and other Indian centres. As Herford put it, "The presence in the APAC market for NetApp is incredibly important, and probably closer to home, the ANZ business is known as an innovation centre for NetApp."

He went on to explain that products such as its Keystone suite have roots in the local market: "We have a whole range of consumption-based models, for example, that I was actually involved with at NetApp 15 years ago. They've now become the Keystone product suite, so organisations have got a lot of flexibility in how they consume that multi-cloud world."

Summing up NetApp's approach to working with enterprise customers, Herford said, "They can contact us directly but we also are a partner organisation. We've got a broad set of partners with capabilities that extend what we do, and if you take the storage elements of what we do, and we're experts in that domain, any of our partners can deliver end-to-end solutions for organisations - integrate NetApp into an outcome, which is what customers are looking for."

Herford concluded, "We're excited to be here, we're growing quickly. We really focus on that product set on-prem and making sure we can deliver the most innovative flash-based solutions, and of course connecting that up into public cloud."