Partner education at the core for NetApp and Dicker Data

Supporting the partner ecosystem in achieving business growth is one of the top priorities for NetApp in A/NZ this year. 

NetApp A/NZ technical solutions specialist Chris Gondek highlighted a few of the core business growth areas in the next year include unique offerings in AI, Machine Learning and large language models. 

“The key driving activities in market today all have one thing in common, and that’s business data,” Gondek said.  

“Whether the conversation is around consolidation and access to get ready for AI or understanding workloads for cost optimisation through to ongoing security and protection, all of these conversations eventually come back to the data infrastructure that lays the foundation for these data activities and conversations.  

“NetApp is the intelligent data infrastructure company, and Dicker Data understands the value and importance or our capabilities, and how these will help our partner businesses to succeed in 2024, especially with the mass activation of AI in the enterprise.” 

Gondek highlighted NetApp’s strong partner focus with distribution partners acting as an extension of its business, leading towards being a Diamond sponsor at Dicker Data’s TechX this year.  

“TechX is a key opportunity to connect with our partners to help make them successful. It’s a one stop shop for partners to put together their own portfolio of offerings with our technology combined with our strategic alliances that are also serviced by Dicker Data,” Gondek said.  

During the event, NetApp will showcase its technical innovation through live demonstrations at its exhibition booth. 

“As we like to make things exciting and engaging, we tend to gamify our activities, so there will be plenty of prizes on offer. Our core priority is to educate our partners on how we align our intelligent data infrastructure portfolio to their go-to-market strategy, to bolster their services while rewarding partners with the highest levels of partner program incentives,” he said.  

NetApp helps partners capitalise on new market trends with continuous innovation in the form of key product portfolio capabilities, positioned to help with emerging technologies, across multiple infrastructure environments with its ‘omnipresence’, Gondek said.  

“We do this without compromising or sacrificing the things that never change, but become increasingly complex in these situations, such as data protection and security, governance, risk and compliance,” he said.  

“In some scenarios, new market trends increase risks at a never-before-seen rapid pace. We consider this when innovating with new opportunities.” 

NetApp key new technological developments are strategically around block-based workloads and its AI solutions, partnering with the likes of Cisco, NVIDIA and Lenovo.  

“These solutions put our partners and Dicker Data in a leading position to have conversations about how they can support these workloads with the right intelligent data infrastructure solutions,” he said.  

Evolving and emerging cyber law in Australia will impact how every company conducts business ‘responsibly’ in the digital economy with further scrutiny placed on governance, risk and compliance, Gondek said.  

“New technology only accelerates these conversations and so partners need to be thinking about how to leverage new technology such as AI to assist with ever increasingly demanding regulations at the speed and scale businesses will demand,” he said. “There will be more and more dependency on AI to address these challenges and the intelligent data infrastructure to support it without compromising on the existing requirements.” 

According to Gondek partners should select a vendor that is conscious of their business and provides a rewarding partner program with a meaningful go to market strategy.  

“NetApp is proud to be a partner driven business in Australia and New Zealand and our rebates are unmatched, with a dedicated partner team and strong distribution with Dicker Data supporting us,” he said.  

“Our portfolio is uniquely positioned in areas where there is literally no competitive solution available, like our unmatched support for VMware environments on-premises and in public cloud, we’ve got a compelling story for our partners to take to market with their supporting products and services.” 

Intelligent data infrastructure is the key to addressing many of the ongoing challenges in today’s business climate, Gondek said.  

“We are hearing from our partners, customers and prospects that the changes in licensing of VMware is now having a major impact to their business and accelerating several evaluation activities not seen since the rush to remote work solutions brought on by the covid pandemic,” he said.  

“This is happening while businesses are also rushing to understand how they can leverage AI technology to improve their customer experience and find new revenue streams or improve overall quality.  

“Trying to do these two activities while also maintaining security at a time where things have accelerated to the point where most businesses are overwhelmed by the multitude of technology offerings and matching speed of emerging cyberthreats and cyber laws is exhausting most business resources, and not allowing them to innovate.  

“Intelligent data infrastructure is the solution to address these challenges, allowing customers to keep innovating.” 

According to Gondek, data protection and disaster recovery remained the most misunderstood and under appreciated topics.  

“We are still hearing unfortunate stories of permanent and irrecoverable data loss scenarios that just shouldn’t happen,” he said.  

“The simplest fundamentals of understanding that your data is the record of transaction, the evidence that some work has been done, the intellectual property and innovation engine that all leads up to the ‘lifeblood’ of your organisation is now more important than ever.”