NetApp, a global data storage and solutions major, expects India to emerge as its largest market in Asia, riding on the country’s strategic advantage of economic strength and young population. The firm, which completed 20 years of operations in India this year, will continue to expand partnerships and headcount in the country, CEO George Kurian tells FE’s Rajesh Kurup. He also says that with the reduction in the degree of uncertainty across geographies, the IT industry is expecting a “mild recession”. Excerpts:
Do you see uncertainty looming large on the macro-economic front? How is NetApp positioning itself?
Compared to a year ago, the degree of uncertainty has reduced quite a bit due to a slowdown in the pace of interest rate increases across many parts of the world. I wouldn’t say the business sentiments have accelerated yet, but the confidence has started to get better.
We want to be where our customers are headed and that could be the intersection of data, cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We see customers wanting to build hybrid cloud architecture and we are well-positioned in that market. Customers are building technology stacks using open source and modern tools.
The IT industry is expecting a mild recession, but not a full-blown one across the world. Your comments?
We are seeing a mild recession, and our expectation is that if things don’t get worse, it should bring all the countries out of it. One wild card will be countries that are heavily dependent on China.
There was a slowdown in the growth of public cloud last year? What led to this?
There was a slowdown in growth of public cloud last year, as it had a phenomenal growth during the previous 2-3 years of the Covid period. This was because every business needed to externalise its IT as their customers were not working from offices. So, cloud was the answer. Last year, we have started to see the slowdown of optimisation, and this led to a slowdown.
How is India as a market growing for NetApp?
India is not dissimilar to rest of the world, and it is a fast-growing market with a global significance. It is one of our top countries in Asia, and Asia contributes about 15-18% of the total revenues. In the next five years, we believe India would be the number one contributor in the Asian region as we are determined to double our business in the next couple of years.
The talent pool here is unbelievable, and Bengaluru is the single largest development centre for NetApp. I don’t see that changing. The next step is to be the largest in Asia. Overtime, it will be single largest market other than the US and Germany for NetApp.
What are the new technologies that you see emerging across the world?
After AI and Generative AI, modern applications like kubernetes (an opensource container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management) and opensource application patterns are growing across the world.
NetApp has 3,000 employees in India. How do you see it growing?
Overall, the number of employees has grown significantly since we started. More importantly, the scope of work we are doing in India has grown much more in terms of breadth and complexity. We have all functions and processes in India and the employee count should grow as our businesses continue to do well.