MC Interview: We will double our India business in the next couple of years: NetApp’s George Kurian

Edited excerpts:

IT deals for the top IT services firms have already started to recover amidst macroeconomic headwinds. How is the demand scenario shaping up at NetApp? Is there a revival expected? You alluded to the point of landing soft, but how is it looking?

As we discussed in our earnings call, we continue to see the progression of our business in a positive direction every quarter of this year. And our previously issued financial guidance assumes that we will grow in the second half of the year, year-on-year, regardless of the macro (environment). Broadly speaking, we’ve seen signals of the largest corporations in the world, which were probably the most cautious early in the cycle, starting to buy again. It isn’t a massive trend yet, but there are signs for optimism. In the largest businesses, we are starting to see progress on big strategic projects.

Since you already have Fortune 500 accounts from India itself. At the company level, how is tech spending shaping up within the existing client pool?

All of the clients will prioritise strategic projects at a time when … their businesses are under stress. You’re always going to bet on things that drive revenue growth. What we see with generative AI, for example, is the opportunity to also drive productivity. And so, I think those will be two areas that we’ll continue to see a focus on from a spending (point of view). We are plugged into the application and business process transformation projects that are a part of that focus—either to drive revenue growth or cost savings.

What’s the roadmap for NetApp’s generative AI and AI strategy and investments?

We see three areas of focus for AI. The first, which we have had for a long time, is to use AI to make our products and services better. So, we’ve integrated AI capabilities to make our systems more efficient at managing large amounts of data, monitoring the use of power in our systems, and so on. And that should continue. Gen AI gives you a more natural language interface on top of all of that intelligence; it has been a part of our own products and roadmaps for a long time.

The second is to help our customers use Gen AI tools to improve their business. And there, we are engaged with a range of technology providers such as NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, to build what we think of as the best data infrastructure for AI. As we said, AI relies on data, and we have the best data infrastructure for AI.

And then the third is to use Gen AI to make our business more productive. So, everything from software development to customer service and support to, you know, marketing content, they’re all part of our kind of investments.

Can you share some use cases that you’re seeing both internally and externally of generative AI, or PoCs at work?

Clearly, software development is an area that a lot of our customers and us are looking at, to use tools like GitHub Copilot, or other types of digital pair programming tools to make our software development much more efficient. The second is customer service and support, where you can enable customers to search and find answers to questions they may have in a much better way, using AI tools. And so I give you those two things in common.

You had mentioned that you see India becoming one of the largest markets in Asia eventually. Any timeline for that?

We typically see that happening over a five-year period. That’s the aspiration. We’d like to double the India business in the next couple of years, and It will probably take us about five years to get there.

What is the revenue contribution from India?

We don’t break that up. You can get a rough sense… Asia is in the mid-to-high teens as a percentage of our total revenue. And India, as I said, is neither number one nor number four, but it’s in that range. So, you can do the math.

Thomas  was in India a few weeks ago for Google Cloud…how often do you meet him? What conversations are you two having, given the whole Gen AI hype and all the macroeconomic changes that are happening?

Thomas lives nearby, and we are a very close family. We have a tradition of having Saturday dinner together, the two families. We try to keep the discussion more focused on personal things than topics like Gen AI. We typically do not discuss anything that NetApp is doing with Google, and Google is doing with NetApp, for respective competitors on each side. Obviously, we don’t discuss those topics. We generally compare notes on big things, on big trends, and see what’s common sense versus not so common sense.

From an overall Generative AI perspective, do you see it becoming a revenue contributor immediately for customers as well? Or is it a longer trend and is mostly at the PoC stage? What’s the trend globally and in India?

I think it’s proof of concept right now. Over the next 12 to 24 months, it will go from proof of concept to more scaled production use cases, probably more in the 18- to 24-month range. I think that there are some really easy, low hanging fruit. And then there are some more complex things to overcome. The low hanging fruit are things like you’ve got a legacy tech environment, and I want to modernise that. That’s easy to do, or generally easier to do than some of the more sophisticated ones.