What's Up with Tech?

Inside NetApp’s Intelligent Data Infrastructure For AI-Ready Enterprises

• Evan Kirstel

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What happens when only 30% of your data fuels decisions and the rest sits idle? We dig into the shift from traditional storage to intelligent data infrastructure and reveal how that change powers AI, real-time insights, and rock-solid resilience across industries. Cesar Cernuda President of NetApp walks us through exabyte-scale growth, why outcome-driven design beats tool-first thinking, and how to prepare data so AI actually delivers measurable impact.

The sports arena offers the clearest stress test. From the NFL’s international push to a historic regular-season game in Madrid, we break down what it takes to deliver a flawless fan experience: seamless ticketing, instant replays, and real-time stats that don’t stutter under peak demand. Behind the scenes, teams analyze player workload and strategy with the same rigor financial institutions apply to transactions and healthcare providers bring to critical care. The common thread is a platform that moves data quickly, protects it continuously, and scales without drama.

Security now sits at the center. If data is the new gold, then ransomware is the modern bank heist. We unpack practical defenses: immutable backups, anomaly detection, automated responses, and policy-driven controls that travel with your data across hybrid and multicloud. Then we get tactical about AI readiness. Don’t haul data to AI and hope. Prepare data for AI with clear lineage, smart placement across clouds, and governed access that enables rapid experimentation. Cap it off with a leadership playbook: define near-term outcomes, run tight measurement loops, and invest in a platform that won’t crumble when milliseconds matter.

If you’re ready to turn raw data into competitive advantage, hit follow, share this with your team, and leave a quick review telling us the one data problem you want solved next.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody. Super excited to explore how intelligent data infrastructure is helping organizations stay agile, secure, and ahead of the curve with NetApp. Cesar, how are you?

SPEAKER_01:

Evan, my pleasure to be here with you.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, wonderful to have you. Thanks for taking the time. For those who may not be familiar, how do you describe NetApp these days and your role and mission within the company?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, look, you know, we've been 30 plus years of experience company. We work with our customers, helping them, you know, historically to store their data nowadays, not just storage. We help them to manage their data and to build the intelligent data infrastructure so they can really take advantage of all the data that they have for the new world, especially in the AI space. And under pressure of the company.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. And of course, we both lived in the world of IT and big data infrastructure for decades. But today it's so much more than just technology. It seems to be really about staying ahead these days. What's changed fundamentally over the last few years?

SPEAKER_01:

Look, I think there's no doubt that we're living on the era or the age of data. I was reading actually even some data points going back to data that probably you're going to enjoy. The answer is yes, that's a lot. Right? That was back in 2010. If you think about how much we generate five years later in 2015, that was approximately 18 exabytes. So we move from 2 to 18. Then you go and say, okay, um how much we generate in 2020 five years later. So the numbers that I have there was 50 exabytes. So we move from 2, 18 to 50. You know how much we did from 2020 to 225? 175 exabytes. Wow. So we are certainly living the age of data. And the most interesting thing, once I share these numbers with you, is your audience, our customers, companies in general, they're only using 30% of the data that they have. So the real opportunity and challenge for all of us is hey, how do I take advantage of all this amount of data to improve customer satisfaction, to improve my profits, to improve the way I deliver my services, to make better decisions. And in a way, that's what we do at NetApp. Help our customers to build that intelligence infrastructure.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic mission. And your customers are in the thousands and thousands, or really who's who of the enterprise, including some major sports organizations. I thought given the time of year, it would be fun to talk about those organizations like the NFL, the 49ers. Maybe talk about how your data infrastructure helps those teams operate more efficiently, not just sort of on the field, but off the field.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, response. I mean, we we have presence in more than 100 countries worldwide. You know, as you know, we serve mainly, you know, enterprise companies. And we have a lot of SMB customers through our partners, right? Manage service providers. But um, you know, it's true. The last, you know, actually for the last many years, we've been working with NFL. But it's true that we've been way more vocal about the partnership with NFL and 49ers lately. And I always said there's no difference. I mean, you know, NFL, what they're looking for is saying, hey, how can I take advantage by building and telling that infrastructure to serve better my fans? Um, I don't know if you know these numbers, but NFL has approximately what 340, 330 million of fans worldwide. 220 million of them are in the US. So one of the big discussions we've been having with NFL is how do we help your fans, your followers, to really have you know an interactive um um relationship with you. It's not just hey, I want to watch a game. I mean, probably you and me, you know, certainly me, used to watch, you know, 30 years ago what I was watching the NFL games on TV. Nowadays, we have different ways to watch those games, right? And the experience that we're demanding is very different. You want to have data, you there's real-time data that you want to get, right? So the way we live sports is very different nowadays than it was 30 years ago. And that's thanks to data, and how do you build that infrastructure for that data?

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing. And speaking of the NFL, I heard uh you guys uh supported the NFL's first regular season game in Madrid in Spain. Wow, who would have imagined that uh a major milestone? And you you talk a lot about the fan experience. Uh, how does that fan experience look and how do you help uh create that behind the scenes?

SPEAKER_01:

That's a great question, Ivan. And uh the first thing that I'll say is probably you can tell from my accent that you know I'm foreigner, I'm Spanish, right? So I was hosting that game in Spain. I was in Madrid for the first time ever, um, with um the NFL Commissioner and you know, both with the commandments and Miami Dolphins. So um two moments for proud of me. One was hey, um, as a Spaniard, hosting that game in Spain. I'm saying hosting because NetApp was the you know sponsor, partner of the NFL bringing the game in Spain. Um, and the second thing was, you know, hey, being at NetApp and making that possible with our technology was a great, great, you know, sense of pride as a net app person, right? Um, look, this is you know, this is what is going on. NFL is trying to go and you know become way more international, as I shared before. Um, it's not just Madrid. We were with them in Berlin this year in Germany, we work with them in London, we have been with them in Dublin in Ireland, but also in Sao Paulo in Brazil. And the goal that NFL has is to bring the same kind of experience to their followers in less international games than in the local games that they have in the US, right? And that requires technology, and that requires from the same ticketing, you know, for example, system. So, hey, what is my experience buying a ticket and making sure that I'm able to go and enjoy the game, you know, to hey, having the same type of data analytics and experience for the followers. So um, hey, I was there, I was live, and I can tell you um it was fascinating to see our Real Madrid Stadium, Santiago Bernabéo, hosted for the first time there an NFL game. So um, and it was a renewed stadium, so all good. It was a great experience. And I was proud to have NATA being the sponsor there and been the partner.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, what a fun and unusual experience that must have been. And yeah, and analytics aren't just for the fan experience, it's also for transforming how the teams operate more efficiently as well. Um, and that's all data. What's sort of happening behind the scenes with various NetApp solutions?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, think about the following. There's many things that, of course, teams do, and I always put the analogy in both ways, right? A team at the end of the day is a company as well, right? And and uh, you know, many times I get the questions hey, what companies can learn from the sports teams, right, on technology. At the end of the day, you know, in the case of NFL or you know, some of the you know, 49ers or other NFL teams, the way they're training their data, you know, is we want to make sure that we learn from the data to make better decisions. Let's talk about you know the own players, the activity level. How can we help them to be more productive? How can we help them to optimize their performance? What type of data can we collect to help them to do a better job in the next game? You know, you know that you know, NFL um football looks like it's a very kind of hard, heavy, you know, touch game, but it's super strategic game. So data is at the core on any decision, on any of the runs, any of the things that they're doing, they need data to analyze and to make sure that hey, they can move one yard, that ball, or 10 yards for the first down, right over the next down. So, what we try to help them is to make sure that the data is prepared. This is one of the most important things, even you know, today everybody's talking about AI. Everybody, every single company, forget now sports, everybody in every single board. Hey, we need AI expertise. Every company says, how do we take advantage of AI? The most important thing that I can share with everybody is you need to prepare your data for AI. Right? Remember what I said, all these exabytes, only 30% of the data we're using it. What do we do with this? All this unstructured data. How do we make sure that we prepare the data for AI? I always say, make sure that you bring AI into your data, and not the other way around. So you don't spend millions and millions, and then you don't really know what you're gonna do with that data. I think in the case of sports, in this case of NFL, they have a very clear, you know, plan of say, hey, this is the way I want to use the data. These are the outcomes, and what we're helping them is to prepare the data, create that intelligent infrastructure so they can have the outcomes.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. And big sporting events seem to be the last bastion of live real-time uh uh events. Um, so the technology needs to perform flawlessly under pressure of that live event. How do you think about um building trust, you know, whenever second counts and outages are are simply uh uh you know cannot be allowed in any event?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's you know, and we're talking about NFL, and we're talking about you know, 49ers or football, think about Formula One, which you know that we are also quite active, right? Um Formula One, a millisecond is key. So if technology can help any team, any single millisecond, that might be being the winner versus being number two, right? Um, so certainly what you need to have is that trust partnership, and that's what we in a way uh aim to. And you know, I think the the saying we earn that might not come across as humble, but we are a 30 plus year history, 34 years history company, as you know. Um, you know, we serve customers across the globe. And one of the things that I feel the most proud about is our you know level of customer satisfaction. And that's be that's beyond trust, even that's beyond trust of saying, hey, how do we protect our customer investments? How do we make sure that our technology has the performance that they need, the scalability that they need? Because probably we have said this for many, many decades, but or several decades, but nowadays I think everybody will agree that probably the most important asset that any given company has is their data. Of course, it's our employees and it's our customers. But everybody says that the new gold is the data. And guess what? That's what we do, help customers with their data.

SPEAKER_00:

And the security of that data is now missing critical for every organization at the C level. That really didn't used to be the case. How do you think about keeping customers protected and resilient in this really tough cyber environment?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you're you're spot on. I mean, look, um most of your audience understand technology quite well. But this is something that I like to tell many of the CEOs and BDMs that are not necessarily technology driven. I say, hey, the bad guys have been there forever. You know, our generation was used to go to a bank where basically you see these, you know, armor cars, trunk, you know, moving money with all these people with guns, right? And that was normal because hey, they need to protect that money that was going from this place to this other place, right? And you will come in into a bank and you have a metal detector or gun detector, and there's somebody with uh armor, you know. And we said that's normal because we we're born with that and we have lived with that, right? And if we watch those movies, and you know, um uh from many years ago, you see those people coming and rubber in banks and all those things. Nowadays, if the new gold is called data, we shouldn't be surprised that people is trying to steal data. And then you have all these cybersecurity threats, right? All these threats that are coming, you know, in the new age of data. Well, our job and our commitment has been, and it is, to make sure that we are the most secure, you know, um company on the planet storing, protecting, you know, um the data of our customers. We don't do that, meaning, as you know, we provide the technology, so they're the ones having that in their own data centers or in the hyperscalers or in our service, you know, many of our customers that are service providers, but what we have is the right technology to make sure that the data is protected, and also that we can have the right systems and alarms for our customers to protect any potential change that's happening in their data. So we can go and say, let's go and block this at potential attack, or hey, we're offering ransomer protection, et cetera, et cetera. So that's for us a maximum and is one of the biggest commitments and differentiations that we have as a company.

SPEAKER_00:

Amazing. And of course, so many interesting insights and lessons from your work with the NFL about staying connected and agile and competitive. But what can other industries that are a little more mundane, perhaps, uh like healthcare, you know, finance, manufacturing, what can they learn from the that model?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's actually, I was telling you before, I get this question many times, right? Hey, what can we learn? You know, and I will say you can learn both ways. And look, I think sports, um, you know, sports is interesting because sports at the end of the day, there's a piece of it which is an enterprise. I mean, you have offices, you you have data of your own business, you have an accounting system, you have applications, etc. But it's true that then you have some specifics which are very much depending on the type of sport, uh, for their own needs. I was telling you before about Formula One, right? Speed. Hey, how do I ensure that the data that I have is processed and I have real-time information because I need to make decisions real time. Well, think about financial services or healthcare. Hey, healthcare, you're talking about lives. So that's real mission. That's a real mission critical application, right? Financial services, hey, you want to go and do a wire transfer, you want to make sure that you make the right decision with it. I mean, that's a mission critical application, and you want to do that real time. You don't want to go and do a, you know, go to a cashier, you're gonna go and do these transactions. Oh, let me go and wait to get an answer, try to find your data, and this might take me hours, right? I mean, you're gonna have it real time. You want to click a bottom and get the information real time. So, you know, people don't, probably business people don't know that NetApp is behind many of those transactions. Um, and um, the truth of the matter is um we are behind of many of those transactions because that data is stored and is managed through and with our technology by, of course, our customers. So, what I'll say is hey, some of the scalability thing, some of the speed that this, you know, um the sports industry has been challenging us, right? Uh, we have brought some of those learnings to the enterprise or customers of the healthcare system or you know, on financial service can take advantage. And likewise, you know, hey, some of the learnings that we have had in other industries, we have brought it as well to the sports as an industry to improve the performance and you know, reliability.

SPEAKER_00:

Well done. So as we head into 2026, we're all in sort of planning and thinking mode. Um, given your you know massive uh experience at both Microsoft and NetApp, any any lessons on leadership or innovation or uh strategy you think enterprises should prioritize as we head into next year?

SPEAKER_01:

You know, um I'm glad that you're asking me 226. Many times people say, hey, how do you see the world in 10 years from now? So look, don't ask me that question. But I have no doubt that data is gonna be core. And there's no doubt that each one of us, as business leaders, right, as CEOs, presidents, you know, executives of companies or board members, we need to challenge ourselves in a way of saying, hey, how do we make sure that all this new data that has been generated is playing in our strengths? In other words, instead of being overwhelmed, right? I'm using probably the right word, overwhelmed by an amount of data say I'm look, I'm not part of this transition. You need to be a player, not a victim. And that means you need to step up and say, what is gonna be my strategy and how I'm gonna go and build that strategy. Don't be overwhelmed from all these companies, all these people coming to all of us, hey, I'm gonna fix your life, and this is what I'm gonna do because AI is the new chapter, and this is what you need to be doing. You need to prepare yourself for AI, and everything starts. Prepare your data, then make sure that you decide what are the type of projects you're gonna go on work on the next 12 months or six months, right? Um, to take advantage of AI. And then, hey, as you prepare your data for all those workloads, have a good plan with measurements so you can measure the project you're making and the impact that AI is in or in your organization. Um, my experience is that many of the failures that I've seen on some of the AI plans have started off hey, I brought the data to AI versus preparing my data for AI, which for me goes back to you need to build an intelligent data infrastructure where you can have the right building blocks, you know, with the right platform. And we talk about the NIDA platform in this case, where customers can take advantage and really um um get ready for the AI world.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, wonderful sentiment sentiment, wonderful advice and insights. Thanks so much for joining and just sharing a bit of the mission. Much appreciated, Cesar.

SPEAKER_01:

Raven, thank you so much and congratulations for the great you know problem that you have and what you do. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Appreciate it, and thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing this episode. And be sure to check out our companion TV show now on Fox Business and Bloomberg at Tech Impact.tv. Thanks, Cesar. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Remain safe. Bye.