NetApp is a leading provider of enterprise data management and storage solutions. The company’s three operating business units are products, software maintenance, and hardware maintenance. NetApp transitioned from a data canter storage firm to a company with software data management solutions for multi-cloud environments.  The Integrator had an exclusive interview with Maya Zakhour, Director Channel Sales – Eastern Europe, META, Iberia & Latin America

Tell us about today’s Partner Summit Awards.

We are delighted and ecstatic to have our META region partners with us today. Today we are celebrating and sharing our success with them. As a result, we are sharing information with them about our partnership programs and tools, as well as how we can help our partners to better serve their customers. I would like to emphasize that this is a deflationary market within an inflationary economy. Today, IDC will walk us through the regional market trends. We will share the key areas of opportunity with our partners. We are in an interconnected ecosystem, and within it, we have partner-to-partner relationships as well as OEM-to-OEM relationships, and we are trying to figure out how our partners can collaborate with us to build a better architecture. We know that only when we have the confidence of our partners we can perform well in any market.

What about regional and global collaborations with hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon?

Today following the summit with our partners, we are attempting to decouple our alliances from a solution approach and to assist our partners in understanding the hybrid cloud. We have divided it further into opportunities based on cloud and artificial intelligence.

We are concentrating on the consumer’s journey to the cloud. This is not the cloud era, nor is it the mobile era. It is the era of ubiquitous and ambient intelligence. What is happening in these two points? This is, of course, on the cloud as data, and what you generate as data, as well as how it is changed even when you look at your processors or when you build the IT component, to serve physical and virtual interaction for the end user. We associate it with ambient artificial intelligence, which includes Metaverse, as well as anything that connects end users to physical touch, such as home automation systems and computers.

So, to summarize, at today’s partner summit, we have two panels, one focusing on our relationships with VMware and AWS. This is done to optimize and assist our customers and partners in better understanding how they translate messages for their customers.

We also have another panel that is more focused on Microsoft and Cisco. Some people asked me how they connect because Cisco doesn’t have a journey to the cloud. However, guess what? We have an inter-site. This website is in collaboration with Microsoft and NetApp. We serve as the orchestrator, transporting customers to the cloud and analyzing their data.

What are your channel partnership strategies?

Every year, we hold executive round table meetings for our partners. Our partners are also taken care of by our advisory boards. We recognize the need to simplify our partner programs, so we will launch a new partner program in 2024 to guide our partners through the changes we are implementing, primarily in terms of incentives. The strategy today is to invest in our strategic partners. We assist them in developing specific competencies to attract customers. So, we are telling our partners that if they have this competency, they will make this much money. They would ultimately be more profitable, and they know that they are an essential part of this P2P transaction. We want their support, and we reciprocate it.