Businesses making thorough use of data can create a feedback loop between themselves and their customers. Storage and data management vendor NetApp Inc. has placed itself inside this loop, hoping to win customers by helping them serve their own client base in a virtuous data cycle.

“We’re using data constantly to better understand, ‘what are our customers’ needs?'” said Jean English (pictured), senior vice president and chief marketing officer of NetApp Inc. “We use data and analytics every day.”

Parsing customer feedback and data carefully, 25-year-old NetApp decided to pivot from simple storage to data management. The company’s customers have evolved to view the contents of storage — data — rather than storage itself as valuable. NetApp is striving to deliver technology that makes the data-driven dream a daily reality in these businesses, English explained during an interview at NetApp Insight Berlin in Germany. She spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Data thriving, surviving and resisting

NetApp incorporates customer data into its business and marketing models. The company increasingly seeks to customize marketing experiences for different types of consumers. These may include personalized content-type marketing on social media platforms. Culling their responses and bringing them back to to product developers helps NetApp hone it’s offering, according to English.

“… How do we use that full circle loop of learning to get better and better at how we engage our customers in ways that they want to engage with us?” English asked.

All of this makes for good in-the-trenches training for a company selling data management, English stated. NetApp has ambitions of becoming a thought leader — not just a vendor — to data-conscious enterprises. It is seeking to suss out best practices of companies getting the most benefit from data. It’s found that data-driven businesses put data at the center of decision making in and out of the information technology department. It is not, she says,”some one-off or side project.”

NetApp has completed a survey with International Data Corp. to discover how businesses can be data “thrivers” as opposed to mere “survivors” or “resisters,” English said. The results are helping NetApp fine-tune its focus.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight Berlin. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp Insight Berlin event. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE