NetApp Annual Innovation Awards Recognize Enterprise-Customer Excellence in Transformative IT

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 3, 2014) - NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP)

Rob Salmon, President and Head of Go-to-Market Operations
"Our visionary enterprise customers are successfully navigating through the most complex period in IT with the help of NetApp and our partners. We are proud to recognize their inspiring achievements that have resulted in transformative business changes in their organizations."

Enterprise IT organizations are transforming operations to deliver more value to the businesses they underpin. This transformation is creating unprecedented amounts of complexity in enterprises as they evaluate technologies such as cloud, social, and big data analytics to achieve the success their businesses demand.

To manage this complexity, enterprises turn to NetApp and other industry leaders to devise approaches, implement technologies, and provide service offerings that accommodate the immediate needs of business today and its needs in the future.

With its annual innovation awards, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) recognizes winning enterprises that teamed with NetApp and its extended ecosystem of software, systems, and service partners to flourish in this time of complexity and to achieve success on their terms.

NetApp will honor the winners of the Innovation Awards program tonight during a distinguished awards ceremony at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

NetApp thanks everyone who submitted achievements to the 2014 Innovation Awards program. Over 100 high-quality global nominations from more than two-dozen countries were submitted. Submissions were made by a wide range of industries and organizations, including enterprise service providers, healthcare, financial services, government, media and entertainment, energy, and education. Award category information can be seen on the Innovation Awards website.

2014 NetApp Innovation Award Winners

• Go Beyond -- Symantec 
• Innovator of the Year
  • Americas -- ION Geophysical Corporation
  • Asia Pacific -- ING Vysya Bank Limited
  • Europe Middle East and Africa -- Orange Business Services
  • U.S. Public Sector -- State of California Natural Resources Agency
• Pioneer -- Boerse Stuttgart AG
• Visionary Leadership -- Qualcomm Incorporated

Supporting Quotes

• Samir Gaertner, Director, System Technology, Boerse Stuttgart AG
  "As the leading exchange for securities derivatives in Europe and for corporate bonds in Germany, Boerse Stuttgart is Europe's leading exchange for private investors. We need to execute our customers' orders with the utmost speed and cost efficiency. With a shared infrastructure based on the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP operating system and NetApp and Cisco's converged infrastructure, FlexPod, we now handle twice as many business transactions and 2.3 billion quote updates a day. Our data center costs have been reduced by 65%, which has enabled us to grow and invest in other areas of the business."
  
  
• Sandeep Kaul, Head of IT Service Delivery, ING Vysya Bank Limited
  "ING Vysya Bank is a growing premier private sector bank with over two million customers. We had to scale up to meet growing business demand and our heterogeneous storage solutions were aging, so we turned to NetApp. NetApp OnCommand and enterprise FAS storage systems allowed us to consolidate over 90% of our business-critical banking applications and reduce time to market by 50%. Working with NetApp we have been able to focus on IT to meet business demands and improve IT reliability and performance while saving capital."
  
  
• Bill Menger, Director of High-Performance Computing, ION Geophysical Corporation
  "At ION, our goal is to help oil and gas companies better understand the earth's subsurface through innovative seismic data processing and imaging solutions as well as seismic data library coverage in key geologic basins around the world. As part of our growth strategy and to better support client demand within, our team needed to move an entire high-performance-computing environment into a new facility. Using NetApp's operating system -- clustered Data ONTAP -- and FAS storage systems, we were able to transition our data to the new data center without disruption to operations."
  
  
• Axel Haentjens, Vice President, Cloud Computing, Orange Business Services
  "Orange Business Services, a global IT and communications services provider, understood early on how the power of cloud computing could transform our customers' business operations. Putting cloud at the core of our strategy, we developed a full range of IT infrastructure solutions, with storage being a key part. We wanted a long-term and experienced partner, and we chose to put NetApp as a centerpiece of our cloud offerings, as they embraced our aggressive business model and allowed us to scale quickly. The technology and partnership from NetApp has been key to our success in the cloud."
  
  
• Norm Fjeldheim, Senior Vice President and CIO, Qualcomm Incorporated
  "Our enterprise IT organization is continuously challenged to provide the infrastructure needed to meet the complexity of the changing IT environment and give us a competitive advantage in the marketplace. We turned to our extended team and trusted partners like NetApp to devise approaches and implement technologies that will meet our needs now and in the future. NetApp's expertise and collaborative approach in helping us achieve our desired outcomes has already enabled us to produce higher-quality products ahead of schedule."
  
  
• Tim Garza, Director of IT, State of California Natural Resources Agency
  "We manage California's natural resources and depend on real-time data and systems to make informed decisions in the management of critical resources and respond quickly to natural disasters. As state agencies grappled with resources, California State CIO Carlos Ramos proposed a visionary strategy to meet growing demand with fewer resources through a shared IT service model. Our agency embraced this vision and transformed to a shared-services cloud-computing model built on industry technologies that utilize clustered Data ONTAP. This enabled us to consolidate 28 siloed data centers and decrease overall capital and operational expenditures by 45% and 35%, respectively. Now we are able to operate at the speed of business without technology being a constraint."
  
  
• Sheila Jordon, Senior Vice President and CIO, Symantec
  "The efficiency of our customer global support organization is critical to the success of our business and of our customers. We worked closely with NetApp and their partners to create an on-demand software-defined data center based on a NetApp FAS shared storage infrastructure, clustered Data ONTAP, and OnCommand technologies. Since implementation, we reduced the time to build data center environments from days to minutes and experienced significant improvements in overall operational efficiency, performance, and scalability."
  
  

2014 NetApp Innovation Award Judges
The NetApp Innovation Awards program relies on a prestigious third-party panel of international judges for the four main categories. These judges determine the award winners based on their outside expertise and critical, unbiased assessment of real-world deployments at customer sites.

• William Barnett: Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
• James Henderson: Professor of Strategy and Head of Programs and Innovation, IMD
• Rich Karlgaard: Publisher of Forbes, author of The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success, panelist on Forbes on Fox, and columnist for Innovation Rules
• John McArthur: President of Walden Technology Partners and strategy consultant to IT executives

Additional Resources

• Explore NetApp Customer Stories
• View Past Award Winners
• Follow NetApp on Twitter
• Join NetApp on Facebook
• View NetApp videos on YouTube
• Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, Data ONTAP, FlexPod, and OnCommand are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.