I've been invited to join the NetApp A-Team! The A-Team is described as "a select group of our most passionate customers and partners who evangelize the benefits of NetApp solutions." We are advocates for NetApp's technologies. I'll share what I find interesting and valuable about NetApp's offerings. In return, I have some exclusive access as part of the A-Team to review some of their in development solutions and provide feedback from my point of view as a technology partner.
I work with a lot of different and often competing vendors in my Consulting Engineer role at RoundTower, so an obvious question is: does "advocate" imply exclusivity? The answer is no as that would be cheerleading and not advocating. @sammoulton and NetApp pick A-Team members for their independence, depth of familiarity with the industry at large, and their credibility. I wouldn't be a credible advocate if I suddenly stopped talking about other vendor technologies that I am also impressed by and enthusiastic about.
All that said, I've worked with NetApp technology as far back as 2006 in a customer role. I moved into a consulting/sales role in 2014 and I've implemented and worked with numerous customers on their own NetApp deployments and seen them succeed and benefit from their use of NetApp.
As a long standing infrastructure and storage manufacturer going all the way back to 1992, I look at NetApp as a bellwether in the space. They both push the industry forward while simultaneously being pushed to change themselves based on competition and other industry forces. Their are echos of ideas NetApp pioneered as well as former NetApp people distributed throughout the industry.
Looking forward, the on-premises infrastructure vendors such as NetApp have had to respond and transform to the challenge presented by public cloud. There is clearly a space for hybrid cloud implementation and NetApp's data fabric vision addresses that. At the same time, newer technologies such as NVMe storage, persistent memory technologies, and highly dense flash such as QLC present new opportunities and new potential. It will be interesting to see how NetApp continues to respond and bring implementations to market to address those new opportunities. As a newly minted A-Team member, I am honored and excited to watch this space and see where NetApp and our industry goes.