Network Appliance (NetApp) that is focused on products for enterprise customers, is quietly working on adjunct areas relevant to its overall storage strategy.
Out of the company's 1200-strong engineering team, a few hundred engineers are working on areas that are part of the company's non-core product portfolio.
This division was started two years ago by industry veteran
Jay Kidd, who is senior VP and GM, emerging products group at the company. Jay Kidd spoke to
Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News about the activities of his division, storage trends and where the market is heading.
What is your role at NetApp and how different is the division's activity from that of the core engineering team does?
Until two years ago,
NetApp was structured as a functional organization. All of engineering was in one group and while all of marketing was in another.
This resulted in a situation where in if we wanted to start something small, say a three-person engineering project within a 1200 people engineering team, it was very difficult to start. So we decided to create a small organization that would work on small and emerging businesses into a separate structure that would report to the executive staff at NetApp outside of core engineering.
I joined two years ago to create this new division. We acquired two companies- Decru and Alacritus that are outside of our core storage engineering activity. Decru is into data security and encryption of appliances while Alacritus is doing work on Virtual tape libraries. Half the development teams of these companies are in Bangalore.
So we formed this organization called emerging products group. It is really a portfolio of businesses within the company. I have managers who completely own the business for encryption appliances or tape libraries and small medium business systems. By keeping it outside of the large scale enterprise business of NetApp We were able to focus on it and understand what unique requirements the groups have and fund them differently than how core groups are funded.
