NetApp Celebrates Customers Who Unleash the Power of IT With Annual Innovation Awards Event

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 12, 2013) - Organizations that succeed in today's business and public service environments embody an innovative spirit that inspires them to leverage IT to achieve remarkable results. During this year's ninth annual Innovation Awards, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) will honor select customers who unleashed the power of IT to accelerate business and operations. With the NetApp^® Data ONTAP^® architecture, the world's #1 branded storage operating system,* these customers have been able to innovate and take advantage of disruptive technology trends like the cloud, to drive agility throughout their organizations. The result is the ability to respond quickly to business and situational changes and remove IT constraints.

"For more than 20 years, NetApp has pushed the boundaries of innovation with a single goal in mind: customer success," said Rob Salmon, executive vice president of Field Operations, NetApp. "The Innovation Awards allow us to shine the spotlight on our customers and recognize their accomplishments. I always look forward to this time of the year because I love celebrating how customers are achieving phenomenal business results and making a difference in their industries and communities with solutions built on NetApp."

NetApp will honor the winners and finalists 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 2013 Innovation Awards program. Over 130 global nominations were submitted by customers and partners this year. These nominations validate the fact that IT agility can remove the constraints of IT and enable customers to attain strategic and competitive advantages. Customer submissions came from a wide range of industries and organizations, including healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, terminal operations, energy, government, and education. The award categories address the positive business and operational impact of IT: Pioneer, Go Beyond, and Visionary Leadership. In addition to these categories, the top nominations were judged in a special Innovator of the Year category, which recognizes one winner from each of four global geographies: Americas, APAC, EMEA, and the U.S. Public Sector.

2013 NetApp Innovation Award Winners and Finalists

Innovator of the Year -- Americas
WINNER:  Turner Studios
FINALIST:  Apache Corporation

Innovator of the Year -- APAC
WINNER:  SoftBank Telecom Corp.
FINALIST:  Netmagic Solutions

Innovator of the Year -- EMEA
WINNER:  Chiesi Group
FINALIST:  Tiscali

Innovator of the Year -- USPS
WINNER:  The IlliniCloud (nominated by NetApp partner CDW)
FINALIST:  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Go Beyond
WINNER:  Kommunale Informationsverarbeitung Baden-Franken
FINALISTS:  Esurance, PeakColo, Thomson Reuters

Pioneer
WINNER:  Sauber Motorsport AG
FINALISTS:  Jack Wolfskin, PNI Digital Media Inc., Western Oregon University

Visionary Leadership
WINNER:  DP World's London Gateway (nominated by NetApp partner Dimension Data)
FINALISTS:  Centene Corporation; Delek US Holdings, Inc.; National Institute for Space Research-INPE

Supporting Quotes

• Ugo di Francesco, CEO, Chiesi Group

"Chiesi Group is an international pharmaceutical company that manufactures and distributes pharmaceutical products in over 60 countries. Innovation is the main driver for growth, and in 2013 our investments in R&D are mainly focused on respiratory diseases and special care. Every new drug must go through rigorous approval procedures to ensure high-quality standards of the product so that it can be prescribed to patients all over the world. With NetApp, we developed a virtualized private cloud which helps us operate faster and experience significant efficiency gains while maintaining the security we need."

• Bob Post, Head of IT, DP World's London Gateway

"London Gateway will be the UK's first 21^st-century major deep-sea automated container port and Europe's largest logistics park. Situated on the north bank of the River Thames, London Gateway provides unrivalled deep-sea shipping access for the world's leading businesses to the largest consumer markets in the UK. The port's location, with its superior operational systems and service, ensure ships load and unload as fast as possible, making London Gateway a world-class asset for the UK. London Gateway Information Technology, with Dimension Data as a partner, implemented a data storage and management solution for the mission-critical operational systems to ensure maximum availability, scalability, and uptime based on NetApp technology."

• Jason Radford, Cloud Architect, The IlliniCloud

"IlliniCloud delivers state-of-the-art cloud services built on NetApp to school districts throughout the state of Illinois. NetApp Data ONTAP enables us to scale to multiple data centers and petabytes of capacity while servicing more than 350 customers. With participating members experiencing 30%-60% cost reductions and increased performance, school districts are able to cut IT spending and free up funds to focus on other important educational projects."

• William Schmitt, CEO, Kommunale Informationsverarbeitung Baden-Franken (KIVBF)

"KIVBF is one of the most important IT service providers for about 550 cities and counties in the southwest of Germany. As a full-service provider, KIVBF offers IT solutions to the local authorities based on a central IT infrastructure. In evaluating the future, we decided to offer our services through a virtualized data center by using a cloud-technology approach. With NetApp as our single storage platform, we now have a trusted community cloud, based on FlexPod^®, that enables self-service delivery, broad network access, a high degree of scalability, and productive use at a rate of 99.95% for our clients. This is the first public data center in Germany of its kind."

• Magnus Frey, Head of IT, Sauber Motorsport AG

"The Sauber F1 Team relies on NetApp to accelerate innovation within our cars and provide us with a competitive advantage against teams with far more resources. Our FlexPod solution is at every race with us, collecting data from the car's 100 sensors that is analyzed in real time and used to make adjustments to the car on the fly. FlexPod's efficiency and small form factor helped us shrink our IT footprint and power consumption by 50%, which has dramatically reduced costs. At our headquarters, NetApp MetroCluster provides always-on access to data that our engineers need, essentially allowing our team to put a modified race car on the track almost every other week."

• Amane Kito, Senior Vice President, CISO, Information Systems Unit, SoftBank Telecom Corp.

"SoftBank Telecom turned to NetApp to help transform IT from a cost center to a profit center and as a result developed a range of internal and external cloud services that have helped fuel our growth. We have reduced storage requirements by more than 50% and the time to implement 1,000 virtual desktops from 1 week to 1 day. But most importantly, within days after the devastating 2011 earthquake in Japan, our revamped IT infrastructure enabled us to quickly deliver several of our cloud services to impacted businesses, public agencies, and relief organizations to help them maintain operations while the country worked to rebuild."

• Craig Heyl, Senior Vice President, Turner Studios

"The Turner Studios Sports Central system must handle a massive volume of digital content generated from broadcasting over 40 different individual sports and 6,000 individual events during the year that create more than 27,000 hours of live footage. With a NetApp storage foundation, Turner Studios is able to log and view this content in real time to feed editorial for live broadcasts, websites, mobile services, multimedia platforms, and on-demand services around the world. NetApp clustered Data ONTAP enables a shared storage environment that allows for content from multiple events to all be accessed by Turner Studios' producers and editors simultaneously, enhancing overall performance and scalability."

The NetApp Innovation Awards program distinguished itself by relying 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.

NetApp 2013 Innovation Award Judges

• 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, 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

• See past award winners online.
• Read more about NetApp's distinguished panel of judges.
• Learn about Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2
• Follow NetApp on Twitter #InnovationAwards13
• Get the latest on NetApp culture
• 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 MetroCluster 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.