Technology partnerships have many faces. Some are rightly derided as “optical deals” or “Barney deals,” and others basically boil down to reselling. With multicloud causing serious migraines, tech partners vying to win customers had better serve up stronger medicine. The solutions they bring to market must come with pieces glued together and the value-add spelled out.

NetApp Inc. is surviving as a storage company in 2018 largely through deep partnerships — especially with cloud providers, according to Bruce Shaw (pictured, left), senior director of global alliances and industry solutions at NetApp.

“Three years ago, the smart people out there said the cloud is going to kill NetApp,” he said. Today the company holds down healthy partnerships with cloud providers and others on tech’s leading edge, such as graphics processing unit maker Nvidia Corp. In the multicloud world, a company must gauge a partner holistically, he added.

“The value question is no longer the primary driver of what you’re going after; when I say value — just pure revenue stream. You want to look at, obviously, the evolution to an ecosystem,” Shaw stated.

Shaw and Keith Norbie (pictured, right), senior manager at NetApp, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and Alan Cohen (@ascohen), guest host and industry executive, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed NetApp’s top partnerships and what makes for a salable technology solution today. (* Disclosure below.) 

iPhone-ing the data center

NetApp has split itself up into three business units — basically, cloud-focused, hyperconverged infrastructure, and larger back-end things revolving around its ONTAP operating system. In turn, it is tailoring solutions for all three segments and choosing partners accordingly.

“The key factor for the new alliance model is that the context shifts depending upon the market you’re trying to reach,” Norbie said.

For the AI market, Nvidia is king, for instance. NetApp has put together validated designs with VMware Inc., including verified architecture for VMware Private Cloud.

“So the entire thing around multicloud sort of requires that you have strategies for things that are in current data centers that just have to become more cloud-like in their functions and their functionality,” Norbie said. This is the idea behind the NetApp-VMware partnership.

“We want to make it as fast as possible and as easy for a customer to be able to turn it on and start using it similar to your experience buying a new iPhone,” Norbie concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. NetApp, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE