What happened to all those growth projections the past couple years? The warehousing of relented employees to keep competitive?
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Now, that's a lot and I am sure he's exceeding expectations
Why people believe those projections? When GK took over the ceo, his goal was to increase netapp market share .5% per year.
NetApp's approach to growth is broken in multiple ways. At a high level they aim at too low of a TAM and add too high of a price. They keep trying to develop in the NetApp only ecosystem which at best is 12-13% install base. The new features largely only run on the latest version. I have to believe 50% of customers at best are running a latest version of ONTAP, so you're talking 6% of customers who can take advantage without an upgrade, which they're not doing for a reason. Half of those customers at best don't want a single vendor solution like Astra, I have to imagine that's more like 80% but go with 50%, so now you're at 3%. Now look at Astra there are 11 ranked vendors. Astra is better then some worse then others, so if they're in the fat middle, you have maybe a 10% chance, so now you're down to .3%. Now the customer has to be in the market for the solution, if we assume any given customer is willing to change a given thing 10% of the time, you're down to .03%.
Then look at price. When I see NetApp quotes sometimes it blows my mind. Especially when they show a TCO and their costs for competitive solutions are often multiple times what those solutions actually cost.