Driving Data Innovation: A Conversation with Riccardo Di Blasio of NetApp

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Trunk tv. I'm really happy to have this next guest on.

His name is Ricardo de Blassio. Ricardo is Senior Vice President and General Manager for American Sales at American Sales at NetApp. Hey, Ricardo, welcome to Tech Drunk tv.

It's great to have you on. Hey, Alan, and hello everyone. It's great to be here.

Thanks for having me. Alrighty. So, Ricardo, as, as we do here at Tech Drunk tv, give me, uh, well, not me, but share with our audience, if you will, a little bit maybe of your background, of your journey Absolutely.

To The present position. Yeah, Be pleasure. So, I had the privilege to lead the business for NetApp in the Americas, which is the largest area for the company since the last almost two years.

But I'm not new to data management and an infrastructure. As a matter of fact, I spent the last 27 years of my life. I don't wanna age myself, but I've been in storage basically all my life, Alan.

And, uh, it became my passion. Uh, I wasn't born with a passion for storage, just, you know, operating at a global scale, uh, for almost more than 25 years. It just became my passion.

It's a great industry to be, uh, I don't know any organization around the world that don't care about data or they don't have their data growing every day, and they don't have the need to organize them, protect them, share them, connect them, right? So, I feel extremely excited. Most of my career has been with a company called EMC that don't exist anymore, been acquired by Dell a few years ago.

Um, then I moved into VMware, uh, still in the infrastructure layer, just one level above. And, um, and then I did backup for many years. And, you know, backup it, it is storage.

That's why it's called secondary storage, right? I mean, what is backup is a copy of the fir of the original, uh, primary data, right? So primary data is what we do here in NetApp.

Secondary data is backup, right? So the, the analyst and the market, uh, categorize the backup companies, uh, as a storage company. And I was the chief revenue officer of a company called Commvault.

And I joined NetApp almost two years ago, as I said, for, uh, a very simple reason. Um, it is by far the company that operate, uh, with the leadership position in the three major, uh, data management and storage protocol file, which is, uh, how NetApp, uh, uh, was born and how we became famous. I mean, NetApp literally invented the, and scale out the, the concept called na, a network attached storage.

This is something that really was, uh, it is NetApp, DNA and, uh, it is still today our blockbuster, what people knows us for, what people like us for, right? So, um, in the world, half of the file storage runs on NetApp. And this information actually was publicly shared by one of our dear customers and friends, Mr.

Jensen, CEO of Nvidia, that during the last edition of GTC, um, you know, saying something nice about NetApp, say, Hey, half of the file in the world runs on NetApp. You know, that was a moment of, uh, of pride for us. However, the company's also very active, uh, in the block protocol, which is the second largest protocol, uh, in the industry, generally, the one you utilize to build storage data networks, that San, which is the other big component of the industry, and the one you utilize when you have, uh, super high performance and need for speed, uh, where even, uh, the fraction of a millisecond matter.

But we also operate in the object storage, which is the third protocol of the industry, which it's what you use for a scale out environment, right? So AI, for example, needs and utilize and leverage a lot of object storage. And, uh, all of this managed by a single pane of Glasgow on tap, which is literally NetApp operating systems.

And what we did in the last few years, we actually mirrored this type of platform also in the cloud. So we're the only operator in aerospace that we have, OEM agreement, first party agreement with, uh, the three major, uh, cloud providers, hyperscalers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Now, clearly I may have a bias, but if I try to be objective, uh, looking backward, the last 27 years that I, of my life that I put into the storage industry, I don't know any other player that not only play in each one of these protocol, but is actually a leader and had that mirrored capability into public cloud.

If I look, you know, the landscape of what you could buy or what you could use as a, as a data management provider, um, maybe that are leader in the block, maybe they only do object, maybe they only do cloud storage. Uh, there's no one else that you can have, uh, you know, a one-stop shop like NetApp. I believe this is a, an unbelievable competitive advantage.

And, uh, still today, two years after I took that decision, I pinched myself every morning because it, it just excited the amount of value you can deliver to our customers and partners. We love it. You know, Ricardo, I've been around the block a little myself, right?

And, uh, and I gotta tell you, one of the things I've learned, there's no substitute for passion, right? If you're passionate about what you're doing, what you are offering, it's contagious. And I gotta tell you, yep.

Listening to you talk about NetApp and your journey here and what NetApp does, you know, I feel like I caught the bug very contagious, very, very passionate, and thank you very much for that. com and it's all laid out there, correct? Absolutely.

Okay. All right. Let, let's turn to this AI space race.

Look, everything's AI today. It's disrupting, it's changing, it's forcing us to take, you know, take a hard look at everything we're doing. NetApp recently came out with this AI space race report where you uncovered, or, you know, dived in a little bit into how data silos, legacy systems, and outdated infrastructure are really just bottlenecks and roadblocks, stalling progress, especially when we get to the large, you know, to add scale type of, of installs.

But at scale operations, you know, when you're a one two person team playing around with the ai, it's fine, but when you wanna really scale, you, you need, you, you can't fly with the eagles when you're standing with turkeys, right? So talk to us a little bit about the report, what some of the findings were and, and what, you know, what, what can our audience at home take outta this? Absolutely, Alan.

I mean, I think, you know, you hit the nail on the head a couple of times. So I mean, uh, uh, it's a table stake that a h AI is here to stay. And, uh, it may be a bad word, but at the end of the day, the amount of money there are gonna be spend by enterprise organization around AI in the next three to five years is mind blowing, mind blowing.

And, you know, the report and the, the earning you, you hear from, you know, NVIDIA or, or companies like Tropic, you know, what's going on, the amount of, uh, you know, what recently Oracle did, uh, with, uh, with OCI, this is just the beginning, uh, of, to me, I mean, what do I know? But, uh, it, it is one of the, the most secular moment, uh, not only in the IT industry, but as a, as you know, as a mankind, uh, that, you know, we would experience in the next few years. So now back to our, uh, our industry, data storage is an important gateway or roadblock for AI implementation and deployment.

You know, I heard a great analogy recently. If you think about ai, where computing and GPUs, what NVIDIA does is really the engine of the car. Well, storage will be the gas tank equally important, or the battery if we want to utilize an electric car analogy.

And why is that? Because, uh, you're not gonna be able to implement a large language model, uh, or a specific AI model if your data are not in order. You gotta have your data in order, you gotta have your data able to talk to the new AI platform.

Uh, so why we believe we are extremely well positioned at a NetApp, because, uh, back to what I said before, the ability to be a leader, not only a player, a leader in every single major storage protocol in the industry, and having, and, and doing that since the last 35 plus years, we are the, the one managing the majority of the legacy application. The one that if not properly managed, if not having the right data in order, will be playing as a blocker for AI adoption. A lot of the Fortune, uh, hundred, we are still in the Fortune 100, uh, that are right now, uh, implementing real massive AI workloads, massive ai, uh, models.

Uh, they leverage a lot of NetApp in order to make that journey faster, cheaper, more efficient, but more important, secure. And so, uh, we feel extremely privileged. The amount of, uh, of traction that we are seeing from, uh, the new AI models and what that would mean for us is, is actually, uh, incredible.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, uh, an interesting thing, Ricardo, I, as you would imagine, I talk to a lot of people about AI and how it's affecting their business, and maybe it's because it's still new and we haven't really created baselines yet.

Or maybe it'll always be this way, I don't know. But when you, when you go from organization to organization, from company to company, from team to team, even within the same company, you get a lot of different, it's almost like evolution gone wild, right? Like a Cambrian explosion of, I'm gonna try it here, I'll try it there, I'll do it this way here, I'm gonna do it that way there.

And, and so there is no one size fits all kind of solution. There's no one size fits all philosophy, if you will, right? I think we're still in this tremendous age of experimentation, even at the Fortune 500, fortune 100 level.

I think a lot, a lot of managers that I speak to are saying, look, I'm just encouraging my people to use it. They're gonna make some mistakes. There's gonna be some failures, but there's gonna be a lot of learning, and there's gonna be a lot of great things.

So we want 'em to use it and try it. I'm wondering what you are seeing you speak probably as much or more than me even, uh, what, what key factors are they prioritizing as that infrastructure baseline for people to experiment in? What are they, you know, what are they giving, what toolbox, if you will, are they giving their players?

What environment platform are they giving their people to work on in, in scaling these AI initiatives on, you know, what kind of infrastructure? Yeah, I mean, I could not agree with you more, Alan. So we are clearly in the early adopter, uh, stage of the typical, uh, Ian, uh, uh, curve.

Um, the reason why I mentioned the Fortune 100 right now, you know, to really implement real AI use cases, you need a lot of resources. Uh, not only financial resources, you need people, you need time, right? You need, so there's only very few companies in the world that can have that type of, uh, gravitas and, and, and scale.

But, you know, innovation has been always, you know, that way if there's a lot of similarity, if you remember right, you and I, we've been around that long. When Cloud came out 15, 18 years ago, it was exactly the same trend. I mean, became a bad SW that you were not cool if you were, didn't have a cloud project, uh, in your IT department.

But I remember the majority of the people at that time, I had no clue what cloud, how to use it. You know why? Because the drive never comes from infrastructure.

Infrastructure is an enabler. The drive come from the use cases. You know, when iPhone came out in 2007 for the next couple of years, everybody was still an epic camper utilizing Blackberry when the, was the switch when App Store started to be percolated with apps use cases.

And so once the use cases, the apps became mainstream, of course you needed an iPhone in order to better visualize, visualize that app. It's something that would've not been possible with Blackberry. So let's say that we are, like in 2007, 2008, when AI technology, air avail are available, the use cases are not there yet for everybody.

So the market, it's not mainstream. Uh, the early adopter, I personally see myself are a lot of government around the world, particularly in the NATO block. Uh, you know, very often, like any technologies, the military area, the defense area is always an early adopter, uh, of, uh, technology was the same for internet in 1995, was the same for, uh, uh, many other for the cloud and for many other technology.

And then you need a little bit of cooking time before that goes into the mainstream. But it's not a matter of if, you know, the amount of benefit that we are already observing with AI driven model, uh, are, uh, second to none. I mean, uh, we're talking to some of our pharma clients or, uh, companies that are in the genetics, um, to develop a new drug, pre ai, meaning up to three, four years ago, you needed something like 20, $25 million four years time, and a huge amount of people.

Uh, now with ai, you can shorten that cycle to 18 months. The FDA is not ready for that speed, but eventually they will, because as you know, legislation and administration, they always have a lag time, right? Compared to innovation, right?

So it will come and, uh, and there's a lot of great things that, uh, our current administration are doing, you know, towards the, uh, the AI project. Uh, uh, Stargate clearly is the, the big mm-hmm. One.

So I'm particularly, you know, as a, as an operator in this industry, as a player of NetApp, I feel that we are, uh, at the beginning of, uh, of an incredible new era. And a company like NetApp is perfectly positioned to monetize a lot of that hero. Excellent.

Got another question for you. I, I've heard NetApp folks at NetApp use the term intelligent data infrastructure, right? And that's a NetApp product in the essence, right?

Why is that critical? Why is that critical for ai? Absolutely.

So the reason why we came out with this term that, that a lot of other companies copy that, and we feel very proud, you know, I mean, someone copy you, it means that you're doing something The sincere form of flattery. Exactly. Um, look, store and managing information, data, digital data, uh, without putting them together and getting the band the business outcome out of it, it's not really something that is a big of a differentiation.

Um, I think what we are able to achieve here on NetApp, uh, and you know, that's really the main value we deliver to our clients and partner every day, is not only to be a, a bulletproof, uh, uh, rock solid, uh, infrastructure that store organize, manage, secure their data, but we're actually capable to provide the, the lo the, the logical content of the data. Not only the physical storage of the data, and that logical, that semantic content of the data is often utilized to build better analytics, to provide better information, to provide better KPIs. That's why we came out with, uh, how to make data intelligent.

And so, uh, what we build effectively is a platform, which is a plethora of different products and products line that if orchestrated together under our operating system on Tap, are capable to deliver value, deliver intelligent data value for our end users. I love it. Ricardo, I could probably talk to you for another half hour, an hour easily, but unfortunately we keep these at 15 minutes and we're probably at 25 already.

So I, I, I have to pull the plug, but you know what, actually, NetApp has their user conference coming up soon. No, Indeed. Absolutely.

Uh, we are, uh, two weeks away, a little bit more than two weeks away. Uh, uh, October 14 in, uh, uh, last Vegas as every year. This is the reunion with all of our, uh, users, partners, friends, analysts, uh, people from the industry.

Uh, this year is gonna be big. We have a lot of announcements that will be revealed during that week. So we really looking forward, uh, to have, uh, all of our, uh, clients and partner from all over the globe.

We actually look forward to have you, Alan, in Vegas today. I, you know what, I'd love to, unfortunately, so we're part of FU and our six five media team will be there with Daniel Newman and, uh, pat Morhead. Awesome.

But, um, I personally and the text on TV team won't, we should talk about that. We'll talk off camera, but even if we're not there, I, I'm gonna make you promise me right here in front of all these people. As soon as that's over, you're coming back on, we'll talk about that and we'll continue this conversation about scaling ai.

It will be my honor and my pleasure. Thank you for having me here Today. I'm gonna hold you to that.

Ricardo DeBlasio, senior VP General Manager, north Amer or America Sales for, uh, NetApp here on Tech Drunk tv. Ricardo, thank you. Thank you for watching.

We'll be back more here on Tech Drunk tv.