Want India to become our largest market in Asia, says NetApp CEO George Kurian

George Kurian, CEO, NetApp

NetApp is bullish on India and expects it to be the global data storage and management services firm's largest market in Asia soon, CEO George Kurian has said, reiterating the global tech players' belief in the Indian economy despite macroeconomic headwinds.

“I would like India to be our largest market in Asia. That is dependent on the Indian economy continuing to grow and our business continuing to be dynamic and our team continuing to drive for full market leadership,” Kurian said at a media roundtable in Mumbai on September 26. “We are very confident about India's opportunity to grow as an economy.”

Strategically and demographically, and with the entrepreneurial roots widely prevalent in the Indian population, gave them the confidence that India would continue to grow at a pace that outpaced other Asian markets, he added

Kurian told Moneycontrol that this target for India is likely to be achieved over a five-year period and the company would like to double the India business in the next couple of years. At present, India is one of the top three markets for NetApp in Asia.

He also pointed out the India's rich public dataset built through its strong digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar and UPI.

Kurian said that India stood out in terms of its economic strength and its prospects were very strong relative to many parts of the world.

“We see that in the emerging multipolar geopolitical landscape, India offers a balance, independence and neutrality, and also imbalance against some of the countries in the world that want to kind of exert control in ways that are probably not as helpful,” he said.

From a macro economic standpoint, Kurian said the challenges they saw a year ago were beginning to stabilise.

“We are especially hopeful for a soft landing in the US. I think the interest rate increases have slowed down now and we're starting to hopefully see a balance of gradual price reductions, and a stable economic landscape,” he said.

Within that, IT spending was being prioritised for things that drive the business. “And we'll talk about how NetApp is pivoting to help clients accomplish those objectives, both in the public sector and private sector,” he added.

The company is now also increasingly working with public sector customers and various governments and expects this segment to grow further.

Overall, NetApp is seeing a good headroom for growth especially with technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and most recently AWS making big investment announcements to set up data centres and cloud services in the country.

In May, AWS announced that it would invest $12.7 billion to build cloud infrastructure in India by 2030.

For NetApp, it has its largest data center outside the US in Bengaluru. The company has an employee base of around 3,000 in the country.

On generative AI opportunity

NetApp has partnerships in place to offer generative AI capabilities including with Google Cloud, wherein customers can use its Vertex AI offering to build summaries of their data stored in NetApp's storage. Simultaneously, these tools can improve efficiency of customer experience teams and legal contract management teams of client companies internally, Kurian said.

He added that deploying generative AI has also led to improvement in productivity of software development teams by 20-25 percent to up to 50 percent reduction in time needed to complete tasks.