Tech Insight: Steve Manley, NetApp

What’s the next big disruptive play in technology and what impact will it have?

Third Platform technologies and solutions are accelerating the need for organisations to think differently and fail fast in order to stay competitive. The application economy is flourishing and data underpins this to drive cost efficiencies, new revenue streams and better customer experiences. It’s not only critical transactional data that requires storing and sharing; now, organisations are collecting other masses of data (typically unstructured) such as social content, clickstream data or audio and video data to help drive that next piece of innovation. It will be exciting to see the culmination of innovative products and services available in the market powered by valuable data no longer held in silos. Connected things, robotics and blockchain technology are just some examples of multibillion-dollar investment areas that will continue to create fierce market competition in 2017 and beyond.

What innovative technologies do you see emerging in your solution categories in 2017?

As IT architectures evolve to accommodate new cloud infrastructure and new applications, a wider dynamic range of storage technologies will emerge. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is one of the architectures that has so far addressed the demand for simplicity and reduces the need for administrative resources to manage storage. Expect the next wave of HCI solutions to deliver the flexibility and scalability needed for building web-scale infrastructure. This includes the ability to adapt the ratio of compute to storage, enabling the upgrade of compute independent of storage, and scale in an easy and cost-effective manner. Other storage technologies such as archive-class storage and massive persistent memory are next in line for adoption. Customers will be looking for easy and accessible data management services to enable simple deployment of these emerging technologies.

Is the ICT regulatory and legal environment getting easier or harder?

The explosion of data in today’s digital economy has resulted in a fundamental shift from using data to run the business, to recognising that data is the business. With data being so valuable to enterprises, it has become the new currency of the digital age. This pace of innovation is no doubt a critical competitive weapon; however, ICT regulations or laws typically cannot keep up. We are continually discovering new ways of using and sharing data as part of the innovation cycle. As a result, it is important that organisations ensure best practice in managing and protecting their data, even when regulations and laws lag behind. Given that cloud technologies typically act as a catalyst and accelerator for innovation within organisations, it’s also important to adopt a data fabric strategy that enables control of where the data resides and the ability to seamlessly move it to where it needs to be located.

With over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and always passionate about finding a better way to drive success for customers through technology, Steve Manley is responsible for defining the business strategy and direction of NetApp across Australia and New Zealand.