Too much data, too little insights? NetApp attacks that dilemma

 At NetApp Insight 2025, CEO George Kurian delivered a powerful and poetic message — one that blended history, technology, and vision. "Data," he began, "comes from the Latin word datum — meaning a single fact, an observation, the truth." In that single word lies the story of human progress: our capacity to record, share, and analyse information to generate knowledge.

But as Kurian reminded his audience, the story of data today is entering its most consequential chapter yet — one defined by AI-driven intelligence. The keynote set the tone for the company's journey forward as an era of intelligent data infrastructure blossoms, where storage evolves from passive repositories to active enablers of knowledge and business transformation.

From Blue Space to Green Shrek: Data ‘On Tap’ 

Kurian framed NetApp's evolution through a 30-year lens of co-innovation. From pioneering the world's first network file system to unifying storage across file, block, and object types, NetApp has consistently redefined how enterprises manage data. The company's creation of the hybrid cloud data fabric — integrating on-prem and public cloud environments — positioned it as the trusted data custodian for modern enterprises, as he captured.

That trust, Kurian emphasised, has been earned through "big moments" shared with customers. He cited NetApp's collaboration with the European Space Agency in mapping the Milky Way and discovering a billion new stars, its role in the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility's nuclear fusion breakthrough, and its partnership with DreamWorks Animation, the creative force behind Shrek. In each case, massive, mission-critical datasets were managed by the company with speed, precision, and reliability — attributes that have become synonymous with ONTAP, the world's most widely deployed storage operating system.

 Making Data Ready for AI straws

The central message of the keynote was clear: data alone is not enough. The real challenge — and opportunity — lies in transforming raw data into AI-ready knowledge.

Kurian drew attention to a startling statistic: in most AI projects, 80% of the time is spent in data preparation — discovery, classification, synchronisation, and governance — before any model is trained. The fragmented, copy-heavy approach of traditional data pipelines makes AI projects costly, insecure, and error-prone.

"The raw data generated from enterprise applications is not AI-ready," he noted. "It's very hard to transform that raw data securely, efficiently, and simply."

NetApp's answer: a unified data platform that simplifies the entire AI data lifecycle. Built on the company's trusted ONTAP foundation, this architecture harmonises data storage, transformation, and retrieval — whether structured, semi-structured, or unstructured — across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Composable, Contextual and AI-able

At the heart of NetApp's announcement is a redefinition of what enterprise storage can do. The unified data platform brings together file, block, and object storage, unites metadata operations across data formats, and integrates AI-driven retrieval of vectorised data.

Kurian described it as "a single, unified data model that brings together all the disparate sources of data into a common taxonomy." Unlike centralised big data systems that rely on repetitive copying and transformation, NetApp's distributed architecture enables near-data computation — "bringing AI to your data, not your data to AI."

He spelt it out in finer details – sketching how three foundational innovations power the platform.

The First one: High-performance, disaggregated data infrastructure – built for composability and scale, uniting storage and processing within a single trust boundary. Second, an active metadata engine – embedded in ONTAP, automatically harvesting and synchronising contextual information about data as it changes, and third is the AI-ready processing capabilities – enabling discovery, classification, guardrails, and transformation of raw data into vector embeddings — securely, efficiently, and without duplication.

Kurian underscored that this was not a clean-slate reinvention but an evolution rooted in NetApp's heritage. "We're not throwing away what you've built with us," he said. "We're building on trusted foundations — proven, secure, and hybrid by design."

Co-Innovation in Action: AWS and NVIDIA

Echoing NetApp's philosophy of partnership-led innovation, the keynote featured leaders from AWS and NVIDIA, both underscoring how co-engineering defines NetApp's competitive edge.

In a video message, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, lauded the 12-year collaboration that has produced services like Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, described as the first fully-managed cloud service offering an ONTAP experience natively on AWS. Garman highlighted how these joint innovations "let customers connect enterprise data with leading AI models and AWS AI services — scaling without constraints."

Kurian built on this message, promising that NetApp and AWS would continue to co-innovate, enabling customers to "unlock the full power of their data as knowledge."

Equally symbolic was the exchange with Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. In a conversation punctuated with mutual admiration, Huang called the partnership "a dream come true," noting that "AI is reinventing computing — and together with NetApp, we're reinventing storage." Kurian also stated that their joint work was the "fusion of accelerated computing and intelligent data platforms," enabling enterprises to manage multimodal, unstructured data coherently across every cloud.

 Bring it together, Boil it together

Kurian positioned NetApp's vision, stating that in the AI era, data is not just the fuel but the foundation of intelligence. To harness it, enterprises must unify not only their data storage but their metadata fabric — connecting data relationships, lineage, and governance into a single knowledge graph.

"The NetApp Data Platform," Kurian said, "enables you to do for your organisation's data what Google did for the internet's data — harmonise it, unify it, and transform it into knowledge to power your business."

With features like federated control planes, intelligent data agents, and AI-ready vectorisation, the platform represents a full-circle evolution — from data management to knowledge orchestration.

From Custodian to Alchemist

Insight 2025 NetApp's event marked a shift for NetApp and its new definition of enterprise intelligence. Having once defined enterprise storage, they have pivoted drastically, using AI pipelines, active metadata, and unified governance. NetApp has transformed into a company that is no longer just a guardian of data, but a company that believes it transforms business. 

This approach is deeply relevant in markets like India and APAC, where hybrid cloud adoption and unstructured data growth are accelerating. Enterprises here face the same challenge Kurian outlined — too much data, too little insight. NetApp's unified platform aims to address that imbalance and turn it all into a competitive advantage.

 The Future- In the Oven Already

Towards the end of his keynote, Kurian talked about what NetApp has done over the years. "Every great journey", he said, "is accomplished in partnership." NetApp has always kept in step with its customers, and at times gone even quicker. From space exploration and movies to AI and clean energy, NetApp has done it all. Like data, NetApp has moved from solitary pieces of information to comprehensive intelligence, which is helpful in all aspects. 

At Insight 2025, George Kurian went beyond presenting a product roadmap. He proposed a new idea that unified smart data is not only a corporate asset but also a human advantage.