Too much data, too little insights? NetApp attacks that dilemma

Bringing AI to your data, not your data to AI. At Insight 2025, CEO George Kurian encapsulates the company's evolution from traditional storage to AI-ready intelligence. Also, he unveils the unified data platform for the AI era, powered by partnerships with AWS and NVIDIA. He also underlined areas like context, composability, AI-ready vectorisation, unification and orchestration.

- By Thomas George

At NetApp Insight 2025, CEO George Kurian delivered a powerful and poetic message — one that blended history, technology, and vision.

“Data,” he began, “comes from the Latin word datum - meaning a single fact, an observation, the truth.” In that single word lies the story of human progress: our capacity to record, share, and analyse information to generate knowledge.

But as Kurian reminded his audience, the story of data today is entering its most consequential chapter yet — one defined by AI-driven intelligence. The keynote set the tone for the company's journey forward as an era of intelligent data infrastructure blossoms, where storage evolves from passive repositories to active enablers of knowledge and business transformation.

FROM BLUE SPACE TO GREEN SHREK: DATA 'ON TAP'

Kurian framed NetApp's evolution through a 30-year lens of co-innovation. From pioneering the world's first network file system to unifying storage across file, block, and object types, NetApp has consistently redefined how enterprises manage data. The company's creation of the hybrid cloud data fabric – integrating on-prem and public cloud environments – positioned it as the trusted data custodian for modern enterprises, as he captured.

That trust, Kurian emphasised, has been earned through “big moments” shared with customers. He cited NetApp's collaboration with the European Space Agency in mapping the Milky Way and discovering a billion new stars, its role in the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility's nuclear fusion breakthrough, and its partnership with DreamWorks Animation, the creative force behind Shrek. In each case, massive, mission-critical datasets were managed by the company with speed, precision, and reliability – attributes that have become synonymous with ONTAP, the world's most widely deployed storage operating system.

MAKING DATA READY FOR AI STRAWS