NetApp Honors Customers With 2015 Innovation Awards

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 6, 2015) -

Rob Salmon, President and Head of Go-to-Market Operations, NetApp
"NetApp customers are providing greater business value to their organizations by successfully transforming their IT environments with NetApp technology. We are proud to have teamed with these visionary companies, and we recognize their extraordinary achievements in IT and in business."

The annual NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) Innovation Awards recognize the companies that are leveraging technology to make IT dramatically more proactive, productive, and essential to the business. These organizations and individuals are thinking differently about what is required to compete in the future, and they rely on NetApp and its partners to help define and fulfill their visions.

The winners will be honored during an awards ceremony at the NetApp Insight^® event in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 13, 2015. NetApp Insight is the company's annual technical conference for storage and data management professionals. The year's event offers a unique opportunity for customers and partners to learn about the trends and technologies that are shaping the future of storage and data management. The theme, "Building Data Fabric Together," showcases NetApp's vision for the future of data management and the solutions that help customers innovate faster in the hybrid cloud.

2015 NetApp Innovation Award Winners
Go Beyond - Citrix
After deploying NetApp all-flash arrays into their software development process, Citrix reduced storage latency up to tenfold, in the range of .3 to .5 milliseconds -- which ensured highly reliable, and consistent automated test execution and allowing the developers to increase the pace of building more automated tests.

Pioneer - Nexon Asia Pacific
Nexon identified a need in the market for hosted infrastructure, business continuity, and backup provided as a service to their customers and introduced the Agile Business Cloud (ABC) powered by NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP^®. The ABC product suite is largely responsible for fueling 30% year-over-year growth for the company over the past three years.

Visionary Leadership - CoreLogic RP Data
With NetApp flash technology, CoreLogic RP Data enhanced the customer experience by enabling access to accurate, real-time property data and by accelerating product offerings to financial institutions for faster and better-informed decision making.

Innovator of the Year - Exceptional nominations are judged in this category, which recognizes an honoree from each of the three global geographies. The winners for 2015 are:

• Americas - eBay
   eBay deployed NetApp all-flash systems to support critical platform functionality, including databases and business intelligence.
  
  
• Asia Pacific - ING DIRECT
   ING DIRECT reduced time to market by 50% by streamlining the dev/test-to-production environment with FlexPod^® technology while increasing the availability of data.
  
  
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa - Virdata
   Virdata, a Technicolor Company, provides businesses with cloud-based connectivity, monitoring, management, and big data analytics services for any asset, device, and/or application to design genuine experiences and to create real-time hyper-personalized services. Virdata offers enterprises effective tools to use data from different sources and to experiment with new forms of data collection points such as sensors, connected devices and connected "things."
  
  

2015 NetApp Innovation Award Judges
The NetApp Innovation Awards program relies on a prestigious third-party panel of international judges. To determine the award winners, these judges use their outside expertise and critical, unbiased assessment of real-world deployments at customer sites. This year's judges were:

• Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group
  Peters is an ESG practice manager and senior analyst who is focused on storage systems.
• Deborah Perry Piscione, principal and cofounder, Vorto Consulting
  Piscione is an innovation process expert, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a New York Times bestselling author.
• Bruce Rogers, chief Insights officer, Forbes Media
  As the chief Insights officer for Forbes Media, Rogers is responsible for managing the Insights division. He also oversees the Forbes Insights content channel on Forbes.com.

Supporting Quotes

• Barry Assaf, Director, Nexon Asia Pacific
  "Nexon Asia Pacific is delighted to be recognized as a pioneer in IT by NetApp. Our data management partnership with NetApp has contributed to our 30 percent year-on-year growth and to our ability to deliver innovative solutions to our customers."
  
  
• Ben Issa, Head of IT Strategy, ING DIRECT
  "ING DIRECT is ecstatic to be receiving the APAC Innovator of the Year award. This is the second Innovation Award received that recognizes our transformational IT journey over the years, thanks to the success we have been able to achieve when partnering with industry leaders like NetApp."
  
  
• Adrian Jansz, Head of Information Communication and Technology, CoreLogic RP Data
  "It is an honor to receive this Innovation Award! At CoreLogic RP Data, we believe that better data and better analytics enable our customers to make better decisions. Leveraging data management expertise at the forefront of the industry from NetApp has enabled us to make this a reality."
  
  
• Kurt Jonckheer, COO, Virdata
  "Powered by NetApp and OpenStack, Virdata consumes significantly less storage, power, cooling, and data center space, enabling efficient collection, analysis, and presentation of petabytes of device data for hybrid IoT deployment models. IoT combined with Big Data will change business forever and we are very pleased with NetApp endorsing our technology-leadership and Spark powered Big Data value proposition. Combining our solution with NetApp offers Virdata more flexible and cost efficient deployment models for IoT and real-time Big Data services."
  
  

Additional Resources

• Visit us at NetApp Insight.
• Learn more about the Innovation Awards.
• Follow NetApp on Twitter.
• Join NetApp on Facebook.
• Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn.

About NetApp
Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. To learn more, visit www.netapp.com.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, and Data ONTAP, FlexPod, and NetApp Insight 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. A current list of NetApp trademarks is available on the web at www.netapp.com/us/legal/netapptmlist.aspx.