Leading the Fueled by SolidFire program has been a crazy ride over the past 4 1/2 years, but as they say, the only constant thing in life is change. One of the things that's changed is the evolution of the Fueled by SolidFire program into Fueled by NetApp, along with celebrating the first anniversary of NetApp's acquisition of SolidFire®.

By evolving our program to Fueled by NetApp, we are expanding the solution portfolio available to help hosting service providers and enterprises build their own cloudlike infrastructure, and once again expanding how we can help our prospects and customers achieve their technology-driven business outcomes.

A Little History

In 2012, months before SolidFire had even launched its first all-flash storage array to the market, the idea had already been generated for the Fueled by SolidFire (FBSF) program. The original intent was to create a program for service providers similar to ones offered by the large storage companies that were dominating the market at the time. We thought we could just offer such a program and then focus on more product-related issues. However, after listening to the challenges that our four beta customers faced, we realized that a standard run-of-the-mill program was not going to meet their needs. That was when we decided to do things differently from everyone else.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of one of those typical service provider programs knows that they are unwieldy, complicated, boring, often product-focused, and usually designed to promote the agenda of the storage company and not that of the service provider.

To help our customers be more successful when deploying our SolidFire systems, we created the Fueled by SolidFire program to answer business-related questions like:

  • Can I make money from flash?
  • What kind of margins can I make with flash?
  • Will flash allow me to follow my typical margin models?
  • Where is the cloud market heading enabled by flash?
  • How are other service providers deploying flash?
  • What services should I deploy with flash as a core component of my infrastructure?

Based on the experiences of the FBSF team as former product managers at leading cloud and hosting service providers, we evolved the Fueled by SolidFire program to be business-centric, consultative, and focused on answering today's version of the same kinds of questions we saw years ago. We designed the program to help our customers profitably build and deploy their infrastructure services based on real-world data and market understanding.

The Fueled by NetApp Service Provider Program

The rapid pace of the journey to the cloud for traditional IT organizations has changed how infrastructure vendors like NetApp are approaching their go-to-market strategies. The evolving IT landscape is changing the types of products and solutions that service providers are demanding, as well as the consumption models of how they want to buy them. As part of this transition, NetApp recently formed the Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) product group, which includes a portfolio of software-defined, node-based storage technologies that are leading the wave of next-generation storage architecture. As part of the reinvention of NetApp, the Fueled by NetApp (FBNA) consulting program has been expanded to include all of NetApp's NGDC portfolio products. And its mission has been broadened to continue to answer all of the business strategy and go-to-market questions that our next-generation data center customers are asking.

Technology Driven Business Outcomes

The future of IT, the cloud and hosting market, and technology vendors are not forcing datasheets with speeds and feeds into an unsuspecting market; rather, they are fostering understanding of how to address a service provider's customer business goals. The Fueled by NetApp program helps our prospects and customers by aligning technology and product discussions around the understanding of why customers are considering deploying certain services or looking to achieve certain goals, and then applying our large portfolio of NGDC solutions to help them figure out how to do it.

The experienced Fueled by NetApp team is excited to have this expanded responsibility so we can continue to drive real-world cloud business strategy discussions as we build our NGDC practice.

If you are a cloud and hosting service provider, or an enterprise building your own cloudlike infrastructure, we can help you figure out your next-generation data center strategy and build a plan for FBNA to help you achieve your next-generation technology-driven business outcomes.

Learn more about the Fueled by NetApp consultancy program at netapp.com/serviceprovider, or contact your local sales representative and take the next step in realizing the benefits of a consultancy program designed by service providers for service providers.

NetApp Inc. published this content on 28 July 2017 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein.
Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 31 July 2017 10:39:22 UTC.

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