NetApp recently announced the acquisition of Spot, a cloud optimization startup. While NetApp has been dealing with the COVID-19 shift in business as best it can, it’s good to see them not letting up on their series of smart acquisitions. Much of the company’s recent acquisitions have been to serve their efforts in “turning the battleship” from their traditional market in enterprise storage into its emerging market with the cloud and data management.
Overall, I think NetApp is managing this transition about as well as can be expected. Their Data Fabric vision for data management is more than just lip service and seems to be informing their portfolio and their acquisitions. Spot’s cloud optimization services definitely play into this strategy. With a large amount of current customers still managing the transition to the cloud, the ability to offer a service to continually optimize storage and compute in the cloud will be a big asset and selling point for them going forward. NetApp is always going to have the challenge of proving its value to customers once they’re in the cloud. The public cloud providers have no dearth of services available to customers. For NetApp, they need to complement these by adding value to their customers, solving their problems, and saving them time. Spot definitely meets that criteria and should help bridge the gap with their current customers.
