NetApp and VMware are glued at the hip, according to Maria Olson, the vice president of global alliances for the storage vendor. The executive stopped by theCube during the recently concluded VMworld 2013 conference to share her take on the rapidly changing IT landscape.

Olson tells theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that cloud computing, mobility, Big Data and converged infrastructure are among the core pillars of NetApp’s channel strategy. She says that partners are aligning themselves with her company because its storage solutions offer “huge differentiation” through integration with third party offerings.

Asked to elaborate on the role of partner solutions in NetApp’s go-to-market strategy, Olson explains that “the number one thing that actually sells NetApp storage products are the application workloads that go out there. So the work that we do with SAP, the work that we do with Oracle, the work with Microsoft, the work with VMware is actually how we go to market. Partnering is so core not only from a channel perspective inside of NetApp but also from a technology alliance standpoint.”

Olson reveals to John that her day-to-day work involves planning and executing global sales initiatives in collaboration with big name partners. She adds that customer-facing events such as VMworld, which NetApp attended every year since its inception in 2004, constitute an important element of the company’s go-to-market approach.

On the technology side, the storage vendor has over 1,000 engineers and product management specialists working on partner integrations. This talent pool is what enabled NetApp to create Clustered Data ONTAP, which Olson says enabled cosmetics giant Revlon to slash energy costs by 72 percent. Enterprise IT is moving faster than ever, she concludes, and organizations are reinventing consumption models to increase the value of their existing technology investments.