Enterprise CIOs are being forced to seek alternative solutions to their traditional IT architectures because of the pressure to support business transformation coupled with the rapid pace of technology evolution, data growth and a continuing war for talent. Meeting the needs of the business requires them to dramatically simplify by standardizing and consolidating their IT architecture and to connect their internal IT environments to capabilities delivered by infrastructure or Software-as-a-Service providers. This allows them to not only deliver the speed-and-scale economies of service providers to their lines of business but also to manage their IT portfolio efficiently.

In addition, IT organizations need to change their mind-set and accountability from an "operator" model to a "broker-of-services" model to enable new approaches to data governance and integration, risk management and control.

Leading IT organizations are not standing still but rather are working with their providers of software, systems and services to think differently and to develop new approaches, technologies and service offerings to accommodate their needs over time.

At NetApp, we have steadily enhanced our comprehensive systems and software portfolio to provide organizations of all sizes with the ability to radically simplify their IT environments while building in the flexibility to rapidly respond to real-time business priorities. Increasingly, we also help our customers to simplify and integrate their disparate hybrid cloud IT environments into a coherent architecture that accelerates their ability to deliver value and capability to the business.

--George Kurian, executive VP, Product Operations, NetApp