Insight announcements AI Mastery Unleashed: NetApp CEO Kurian's Roadmap to Competitive Advantage in the New Age of Data
By Insight PR / 23 Aug 2024
Insight and NetApp have partnered together for more than 25 years to help clients simplify how they manage the cloud and unlock the full potential of their data. For the third time in four years, NetApp named Insight as its Keystone® Partner of the Year. The honor recognizes the top strategic sales and marketing approach to driving significant growth of NetApp Keystone, a Storage as a Service solution helping organizations manage data in complex environments.
So, it made complete sense to welcome NetApp CEO George Kurian to Mastery 2024, Insight’s annual conference bringing 800 of the company’s top technologists from across the globe to Phoenix to discuss the latest trends in technology. Insight CEO Joyce Mullen and Kurian took to the main stage to discuss AI’s impact on the business world and how organizations should prepare for a new Age of Data.
Here are excerpts of their conversation (edited in some parts for clarity) …
JOYCE MULLEN: Thank you for being here. We appreciate your partnership. Thanks very much for making the trip to Arizona in the summer.
GEORGE KURIAN: Thanks for having me, it's great. I've been fortunate to work with your team for many, many years. In fact, one of my first visits when I joined NetApp was to Insight.
MULLEN: We are at a fascinating time in our industry, and I’d love to hear your perspective on it. You've been observing it and participating in it for quite some time. Do you think there's ever been a time where there's been more going on?
KURIAN: One of the blessings of working in our industry is that it changes all the time, and it provides the opportunity for reinvention and renaissance in many ways. We've been blessed to be part of many of those trends today. I thought I'd share with you our perspectives on data, cloud and AI, and we're super fortunate to be at the intersection of all of those.
MULLEN: And we want to hear about all that. In fact, I was at a recent Microsoft conference, and I believe it was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang who said he anticipates the IT market would grow from $4 trillion in the next decade to $20 trillion or $30 trillion. What do you think of that?
KURIAN: As you might know, we are in the Age of Data. There has never been a faster pace of the creation of data, and the volume of data is exploding. In 1986, the overall amount of data in the United States was about 3 exabytes in a year. And by 2015, that had grown to 2,000 exabytes in a single year. The pace of data growth is exponential, but what matters more is what you do with the data.
So, let's talk about the big opportunity. You hear about amazing numbers, just like Joyce suggested, there are incredible numbers being proposed. I will just tell you that if we are able to capture even a small part of that, it is going to be transformative to the world at large. You look at automation and efficiency improvements. You look at the ability to derive insights from data. You look at the ability to bring velocity to product development, the ability to work together in new ways. It is profoundly large.
So, you have to be really precise about how you participate in the era of data and intelligence. To win as a business, you have to have four key elements:
- Know what data you need, and what data you have, to build differentiated insight into whatever business problem you are trying to solve.
- Be a real expert in your industry. When the whole world has the AI tools to get to a certain level of productivity and capability, to win in a specific industry requires much more domain expertise because all the easy ground will be taken away by basic capabilities that all models will have.
- Have an agile operating model that allows you to build, test, see what the results are, bring it back, fine-tune it, and keep it ever evergreen. You have to keep updating your models and your data.
- Have an ecosystem, a network of partners that both enrich your understanding of the market by sharing data with you and that become part of the new value chain for your business. Because some of the previous members of your value chain probably don't participate in the world that is to come.
Data. Domain expertise. Agile operating model. Ecosystem. That's what we believe organizations need to succeed in the era that is to come.
MULLEN: How do you help clients manage their data for competitive advantage?
KURIAN: Because we are in the Age of Data, there is more opportunity than ever, but the challenges are also huge. Data is fragmented, and it's growing at an incredible rate. It is because proprietary data is the only thing of value that remains in addition to your understanding and domain knowledge. It is also the thing that is the most under threat. People want to get access to it, people want to poison it, and you want to be able to unify it so that you can succeed with it.
What you need to succeed in this universe is first have a cohesive data strategy and organization. Data needs to be owned by the whole organization, not by a function or a department. To really get insight, you need to unify it as part of the whole organization's remit.
Second, you need an operational model to treat data as a product. Today, data is often the byproduct of a particular business process. You've got customer data in seven systems, and you've got supplier data in four different business processes. So, as your systems evolve, your data changes. As opposed to: You keep data as a product, integrated, clear ownership of a customer record, an employee record, a supply supplier record, and you can evolve your business processes alongside that operational model.
Third, to do that, you need a modern data architecture. It would be glib for somebody to come and tell any CIO, ‘Yeah, just rip and replace every part of your stack.’
What we would tell you is a modern data architecture builds flexibility in the layers of the technology stack where you need it, and integration and evolution in the layers of your stack where you need that. It isn't all about, hey, ‘Rip and replace things.’
We, at the infrastructure layer, believe that an intelligent data infrastructure is what is needed to enable all the other layers of the stack. Because you can unify data, you can apply services to it as the data changes dynamically, and you can make all the other layers of the stack a lot simpler.
That is what is giving us momentum in the world of AI, for example, where you want to unify structured and unstructured data of various types. You want to unify it across cloud and on-prem, you want to integrate services, adaptive data and operational services so that as the data changes, you can catalog the changes and notify applications upstream of the changes to that data so that you can apply security and privacy rules at the point that the data is created rather than as an afterthought.
And then you want to integrate it into the world's most important ecosystems so that you can move from one ecosystem to another as clients are doing, moving from on-prem to cloud.
MULLEN: But, if you think about the hybrid cloud model, why is it that that is the absolute right answer for this infrastructure that you're just talking about?
KURIAN: I think it's because you give people maximum flexibility. What we find is that data science teams want to start with playgrounds or sandboxes very, very quickly, and we provide the means to do that. What we enable clients to do is take a copy of your data, cache it in the cloud, keep a temporary copy in the cloud with all your security permissions built in. They run it, they see that the model works, or it doesn't work. If it works, and they want to scale it, they can then bring it to an on-prem environment that is stood up to scale that model.
MULLEN: Which is also more cost effective in some cases, depending on the workloads. And that comes back to this whole point that, as we move into this new era, the ecosystem gets a lot busier, right? Can you talk about how you're thinking about the ecosystem: What are the elements of it, where you're focusing your efforts, and how can we help?
KURIAN: First of all, when we think about what's required for success, domain knowledge is actually more important now than ever before. I think people think, ‘Oh, the algorithms will replace human judgment, insight, and nuanced understanding of industries.’ I think it's the opposite, and that's actually starting to prove out in the industry.
The second is, as you think about your value-delivery chain, you want to think about data and digital capability being a critical part of your value-delivery chain. Who can augment your data and its value as you deliver it to clients? Conversely, who can bring back insight from the client's use of their data to your capability set? There are some new ways to think about the value chain alongside that.
MULLEN: Well, partners like us should be able to help pull those ecosystem elements together and deliver the right outcome to our clients, and then earn the right to do more.
KURIAN: Absolutely!
