Transcript

Chris Lamborn:  And I have an outlook on this whole path, which is starting to look from the customer back. And I think very often in businesses such as ours — you know we’ve mentioned before around some of these technologies have been around for multiples of years, NetApp more than 25 years — you can run the risk of always looking inside out. And I think the key thing that I like to drive here that I did when we were at Nortel when I was at Brocade, and as I’ve expanded into this role from a global channel go to market and our overall program ownership, is around how we really help partners or how we influence partners and how we help partners solve their own needs.

Announcer:  Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast, where you’ll hear leaders of partner programs talk about their greatest challenges and most successful solutions. And now your host, Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates.

Louis Gudema:  Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast where we talk with leaders in software partner programs to learn about what’s working today. I’m Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates, where we help companies grow faster by helping their channel partners market better and grow faster.

Today I’m talking with Chris Lamborn, Head of Worldwide Partner Go-to-Market and Programs at NetApp. Prior to his current position, Chris has had several distribution roles at NetApp, Brocade, Avaya, and Nortel. The partner program at NetApp has received CRN’s coveted five-star rating.

Chris, welcome to the podcast!

Chris:     Louis, thank you and great to be here with you.

Louis:    I noticed on your Twitter profile you describe yourself as an avid outdoor enthusiast and a classic car restorer. And I think one of the pictures is of you doing an iron man. You’re not messing around.

Chris:     No, not messing around. And you know, to be honest with you five years ago I probably wouldn’t have dreamt of doing one. But I kind of, as you get older like we are, you kind of tend to set yourself some clear goals to challenge yourself. Whether it’s in business or whether it’s personally. And I’ve had some dear friends that unfortunately either — well fortunately got cured from cancer or unfortunately got beaten by the disease. And so my wife and I decided to push ourselves. She’s done it several times before, I was a newbie in the territory. So I took a stab at running a half iron man or delivering a half iron man. We didn’t do it by halves. We did it in Whistler and the Whistler decided to treat us to 92 degrees. So it was an experience. One I promised I would never do again.

Sometimes you have to re-challenge yourself, so a month ago I did it again this time in Boulder at 98 degrees and at 5,000 feet altitude. So that was definitely the last time. But I think for me it’s kind of the same as I look at as a business, it’s around how you push yourself to try something different to get to the next type of outcome. So yes, that’s my outdoor and the cause is just to keep me sane.

Louis:    Yeh, I mean actually it’s interesting that you do that. In a way it defies the business stereotype of what companies are looking for because they always say that companies are looking for people who are involved in team sports and not the marathoners or not the individuals, but the ones who can, who want to be on teams and work that way. So, but obviously this has been both, it’s a great cause that you’ve been doing it for.

Chris:     I’ll tell you Louis. You’ve got to have the team piece. Have a look at the start of a triathlon and it’s like a whole sea full of seals going in there. So you definitely don’t feel alone as part of it.

Louis:    Well, that’s true. My wife did a mini-triathlon and that was why she never did it again because of there was so much churn in the water when she was — that first swim — it was not an experience she liked.

So onto business, please fill us in with a bit more of your career path. What brought you to the United States? What brought you to your current role in the channel at NetApp? And how do you think that’s different from your prior distribution roles?

Chris:     So I think what brought me to my current role was an evolution out of running some partner businesses, running distribution, both from a local level in Europe and then at a global level. And really where that stemmed from — to be really blunt — was outside of this industry. You know my kind of basis was as a mechanical engineer working within an insurance business. But what really came to me was about how you enabled third parties to sell on your behalf. How you create an experience that really drives that behavior when they have a choice to make.

And so I think as I started to be fortunate enough to be in some successful businesses was we went through that. As we started to develop a different outlook — and I have an outlook on this whole path, which is starting to look from the customer back. And I think very often in businesses such as ours — you know we’ve mentioned before around some of these technologies have been around for multiples of years, NetApp more than 25 years — you can run the risk of always looking inside out. And I think the key thing that I like to drive here that I did when we were at Nortel when I was at Brocade — and as I’ve expanded into this role from a global channel go to market and our overall program ownership — is around how we really help partners or how we influence partners and how we help partners solve their own needs. And I think for me that’s the key piece.

And you develop as you come along, spending the time with distribution was critical. Because within the distributors you see every part of an organization from a vendor, from a partner, from an end customer, and just solving different challenges every day. And so that gave me a really good insight into what’s required out there, what’s needed out there. And then spending time with customers and partners as part of that progression is key. Moving to the US that was an upside. I actually married a lady who’s based out of here. So it was kind of a single done deal.

Louis:    Okay. So it sounds like a very customer-centric view of the business world and partner-centric and not product-centric, which is a very wise way to approach this. But NetApp is an enterprise with over 10,000 employees. Why don’t you tell people what NetApp provides and who you sell to?

Chris:     Yeh, certainly, and I think maybe for many people on your podcast that’s aimed at software providers, they might be surprised why you’re even talking to somebody at NetApp. Because if you look at NetApp and you know the history and you may not be aware of how we’ve developed and how we’ve transformed into a more software-centric and oriented business. Yes, it was selling storage and creating storage. And when you look at the transformation of NetApp as a business from a traditional storage infrastructure vendor to what now is essentially a data management organization, around taking our software applications and accelerating partner’s capacity to manage that, manage those workloads in this changing environment, on a hybrid multi-cloud experience.

And so wherever they’re going to drive their usage, whatever they want to grab from that data — and we all know, you know, data’s not going away. You have those interesting conversations two, three years ago when everybody said that on-premises storage was dead. And you look at where we are now. And yes, cloud is becoming critical. But customers are trying to understand how to make those transitions at the speed that they need to do. So in simplicity when I explain to people what NetApp does, it enables customers to transform their businesses at the speed that they want to do it. It enables them to turn that data that they have into a monetary outcome to change how their business operates. And to do it in a way that’s efficient, but doesn’t tie them to a single place or a single location. And enables them to go across at that space, and whether it be based around driving security, whether it be based around driving analytics, whether it be based around driving consumption solutions between an on-premises and a public cloud, that’s what NetApp delivers now.

Louis:    Well, it’s an interesting point that you made at the beginning there about that some people might be surprised for NetApp to be on a Software Channel Partner Podcast. But as Mark Andreessen said, and NetApp well demonstrates, software is eating the world. Every company virtually has some or has become a significant software offering. I was just recently talking on the podcast with Larry Hann at APC, which is a hardware company in the power space, but now they have IoT offerings. So now they’re offering software too. So are your customers SMB or enterprise or do you cover the whole range? What size would the companies be that are using NetApp?

Chris:     So you’re looking at the majority of our companies cover from that kind of mid-market, low-end enterprise, all the way through to global customers. Really traditionally we’ve held most of our space within that enterprise and that higher-end enterprise space. But as we’ve expanded and extended into these broader spectrums — particularly around the software, particularly around some of our new solutions — we’ve deliberately taken them to that more mid-market tier, that smaller enterprise. Keeping that application capabilities and competencies. And three months ago, not even three months ago, we launched our new C190 product; and it’s a great intuitive name. But really where that’s driving is into a space that we hadn’t given our partners the opportunity to sell NetApp into before. And really if you think about that software principle, we have customers in that space that want the applications that we deliver. We weren’t necessarily creating an environment where our partners could go out and competitively drive it.

Now our focus was around how to enable them in that space. We’ve delivered new solutions, give them a new space to play in. And so I think that now extends our coverage slightly further down the stack than we were. But I wouldn’t say NetApp’s necessarily a strong player or a focused player into that lower-end SMB, except for where we get into public cloud. And where we have the opportunity with public cloud is our relationships with Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, to enable those public cloud solutions with the same touch and feel as you would get within your enterprise.

Louis:    Well as you were saying, some of those larger midsize companies are pretty significant in size and I’m sure do have some of the same data challenges that an enterprise would. I understand that the channel contributes about three-quarters of NetApp’s revenue. Is there a plan or a goal for that to change much or is that kind of baked in at this point?

Chris:     Yeh, I don’t, so we don’t drive to hit a number. From a NetApp perspective, we very much are a channel-led organization. As well as having just over 80% of our business through the channel, we deliver the majority of our services and our installation services with our channel partners. And so yes, there is an amount that we sell into specific customers, mainly through legacy directly. But what we also take into account and the reality is the majority of the customers we operate with buy a solution. And that solution is a lot more than just what NetApp is offering into that environment. And so any vendor to be successful in a space where customers are looking for outcomes isn’t going to be able to scale or deliver what’s needed by operating independently. And so that’s why, yes, there’s that revenue number. Transactionally it’s much higher into the partners. But because we need to drive and we need to use the partner expertise capabilities and other solutions to deliver that overall solution to the customer.

Louis:    And I want to ask you about that or talk with you about that in a few minutes about how your partners collaborate and work together for the customer. A few questions before we get to that. How many partners do you have and what’s the profile for an ideal NetApp partner?

Chris:     So we transact with just over 4,000 partners a year, and it’s been a stable number. As you imagine the partner environment over the last two to three years has changed dramatically. Combination of acquisitions, combination of organizations not being quite as successful as they had been before the market trends changed, and new born in the cloud partners coming on board and into new spaces. And so we’ve seen a fairly stable piece within partners. We’ve had some new specialist partners joining with NetApp once we were able to launch and take to market our cloud solutions, really gave us an opportunity to open up to a new type of partner — Born in the Cloud partners — not looking to sell hardware. And it kind of comes back to my, you wouldn’t expect them to speak to NetApp. But again, these partners that are buying off marketplaces, building consultancy services to take into market space.

And so when we look at some of the adaptions we’ve done as a business, as we’ve done within our programs, it’s really been around how do you as an organization transform at the same rate that the market needs. And the partners are transforming at the same rate that customers are changing and the customers needs are changing. Whilst maintaining as you politely shared at the beginning that five star capability and competency of a program.

Louis:    So these changes that you just described that are going on in the partner space, in the channel space, you’ve also at NetApp made major changes to your partner program just in the last year. You call it the Unified Partner Program. You’ve said that partners want simplicity, consistency and differentiation. In a moment I want to ask you about each of those. But first, what drove those changes? What prompted those changes — which were pretty significant — in your program?

Chris:     Yeh, and I think that reality is, as I said very early on, looking at what the customer’s asking of partners. If you think about it, things have moved on from customers wanting a product to customers wanting a consumption experience. From IT being as a cost center to IPT being as a service center. Partners making money from selling a product to partners really making money by building out services.

And so as a vendor we have a responsibility to adapt and change to continue to drive top of mind, continue to be the partner of choice, vendor of choice, for our partners as they go through those transitions. And so we spend a lot of time every year listening to our partners: partner listening environment, partner surveys. Getting feedback on what’s working, what’s adapting. What isn’t necessarily hitting the mark in the same way that it used to.

You know we’re fortunate enough you have the likes of KeyBank releasing surveys, putting NetApp as a vendor that’s most friendly to do business with from a partner environment. Putting NetApp as most profitable in for partners. And you have to be able to maintain that. And as the market changes, we took some clear decisions. How do you enable a partner who really shouldn’t be concerned around where their workload’s going to sit as long as it’s on NetApp to earn money, to be profitable, irrelevant of whether that’s in the public cloud or they’re putting an on-premises solution in place. And so things like that is really what we had to adapt to. And to be very open with you, it’s a continual evolution. This market isn’t going to stop changing.

So any vendor that sits and goes, Great, we’ve got an award on our program, we’re done for the next two to three years, will have a rude awakening. And so that’s why I see this as a continual progression. Increasing simplicity, making it easier for partners to earn where they can earn. Increasing the predictability, which is a challenge sometimes when the world around you is changing rapidly, but being consistent. And being open with partners. You know, I think one of the challenges vendors sometimes have is being able to set a very clear strategy for your partners that aligns to your company’s strategy that delivers it. And with the NetApp data fabric or essentially managing that data, irrelevant of where it sits, we stuck by that strategy for more than three years. We came through saying we were going to drive the cloud experience. We’ve delivered on that, we’ve continued to enhance that space. And I think that’s what helps you with partners to be able to drive it. And it helps me from a program point of view, drive something that’s predictable.

Louis:    Yeh. You could have added speed in there as a fourth consideration. I know that you’ve done a lot to speed up the payments to the partners, which I’m sure they appreciate, especially with the changes in some cases from selling, to the subscription and services models. But let’s go to those three that you’d talk about. Simplicity, consistency and differentiation. So how have you changed your program to provide simplicity?

Chris:     So I’ll be open with you, I had a very interesting review with part of the team a little while ago. And we were talking about onboarding partners and bringing partners into the NetApp fold, bringing users into the NetApp fold. And it used to take us — and I was quite horrified by this — six weeks to bring somebody into the fold. So you’ve got a great person who really wants to learn more and to do more and you go, It’s okay. It’s a bit like saying I’m going on vacation in Europe for a while, I’ll be back at the end of the month and then we’ll talk about it.

So you know, the team actually picked it up themselves and now in less than two minutes, you’re fully on-boarded at NetApp. So you want to talk about an experience and starting to change somebody’s perception. And not only that, you now start to receive proactive engagements based on your persona that helps you drive through that process. Not forcing you down a route, but saying here’s the routes that you can take depending on where your opportunities are, depending on where your focus areas are. So you look at simplicity in that way.

You also look in simplicity around things like program rebates. We used to run, as many vendors do, the traditional model that says come claim for what you believe you’ve earned. And that’s not the way to engage with partners. So we’ve made it really simple. Our deal-based rebates against our net new business that is all claimless now. So you as a partner, within all the tools you engage with NetApp, whether you’re putting a deal registration in, whether you’re creating a quote can see the status of a customer. You know what you’re going to earn, you know what you’re going to be eligible for, and you’ll be able to go straight onto your partner dashboard and see that you’ve been paid against that and not have to claim a thing.

Louis:    That’s great. Okay. The second thing, consistency. How have you adjusted the program to provide better consistency? What does that mean?

Chris:     Well, I’d say with that we haven’t adjusted a lot to be consistent. There’s an anomaly there isn’t it? You know we’re talking about consistency and adjustments. What we have done is been consistent with the market changes. And so when you look at that and you say, now we have partners coming from different spaces with different priorities. We can’t sit there and treat every partner like we did three or four years ago as far as what we need them to do to come into our program, or how we recognize that business. And so what we’ve done is we’ve merged our service provider business into our overall unified program. We’ve engaged within the public cloud space, which took a lot of work working with the public cloud providers to be able to recognize the business that partners do through them on NetApp, within our overall Unified Partner Program.

And the key thing within this as well is being consistent to our strategy. NetApp’s very clear around where we’re driving within the hybrid multi-cloud space, within the data fabric space. And so we reflect all of our initiatives and all of our investments directly to those. So there should be no surprises for partners when they look to understand where it is. And yes, we make some slight adjustments as we go along the way, but more to be relevant to their market needs as opposed to anything that’s changing on our side.

Louis:    Okay. And let’s talk about the third one then: differentiation. And as someone who’s in marketing, differentiation is central to success. But what does it mean for you in terms of your partner program?

Chris:     So for me, differentiation comes across two sides. One being able to differentiate our partners, their size, their scale, their focus areas. And for their own recognition, so that they can, they have an area to aspire to. And we did that. We introduced a new global star level, which is very much around our high-quality partners with capabilities both from a business point of view and technical point of view across multiple geographies, multiple countries globally. Very much being able to differentiate four or five partners globally from our overall partner ecosystem. Key thing for that — and where I believe any differentiation, whether it be that, whether it be our new digital transformation business capabilities, our public cloud business capabilities and our private cloud business capabilities — is to help customers understand who to go to.

A customer doesn’t want to come to a vendor and say, I’d like to know which one of your partners is best qualified to sell us C190. What a customer wants to know is, Which of your partners does NetApp promote to help me solve my business challenges? To help me solve my digital transformation? To help me take down that journey? Because ultimately whatever the product that goes out at the end of it, that’s just the delivery arm of the solution that we’re able to offer.

And so that’s where that differentiation comes in. Where are the business is that they’re focused in? What are the industries they’re focused in? And also how can we identify those partners where they really step above the rest from a global perspective.

Louis:    You mentioned earlier about partners working together to provide joint solutions. How do you encourage that at NetApp in your partner universe? And do you run into issues with how partners feel about working with other partners?

Chris:     I wouldn’t say it’s for everybody. And the reason I say that is you have different partners, and globally you have different partners that have different priorities. You know you have a set of partners who are very focused on delivering 90% to 95% of their customer’s needs and they do a great job of it. They build out managed services businesses. They go and deliver a number of various consultancy services and can drive a phenomenal job with that. But as you start to look at, you know, the buzz’s, the digital transformation, IoT, whichever space you look at, there’s such a wide need of knowledge and such a broad requirement of various products. Whether it be endpoint security, whether it even be down to RFID, whether it be security and surveillance, whether it be going into automation and robotics. There’s so many elements to a solution now that there’s very few partners that can or do want to or have the desire to build out the competencies across all of them.

So what we are finding is we have internally two groups at NetApp. And one which is part of a program called Fuel by NetApp, which is a team of individuals which come from the service provider world, which we hired in. And their role is actually to go and help partners build out their consumptive business practices. There’s no product conversation there. This is around how do we help you build out consumptive businesses. At the same time we have a team of industry specialists. What’s their role? Their role is to go with partners looking to build these types of solutions to help them create industry-specific solutions and we had a partner that’s just had a phenomenal opportunity that’s being installed at the moment. There was five different partners involved in the same customer. And the reason being is because each of them had very specialist areas, and what we did is we became the orchestrator and some of the glue.

Now a couple of the partners had long-standing relationships. Several of them didn’t. But when I talk partners, and this is again this evolution: you know if we spoke about partners four or five years ago, maybe even three years ago, we’d be talking about a reseller. We’d be talking about a value add reseller. We’d be talking about a service provider, an integrator. Partners don’t label themselves like that anymore, vendors do. Vendors still label partners like that, so they kind of fall into it. But partners have evolved. And this is where you’ve got to look at what’s the function, what’s the driver that they’re delivering. And that’s what makes a different conversation when you bring partners together. Because what you’re not doing is trying to compete at labels. You’re competing at capabilities, competencies and investments.

And particularly in today’s space, when you talk about AI, there’s a lot written about a shortage on knowledge, a shortage on data scientists to enable a lot of these solutions to be built. So that forces the need for alignment. And so part of our role is identifying those partners with the strongest capabilities to deliver in these spaces and enabling other partners to join forces to go together to market.

Louis:    I was talking with Alyssa Fitzpatrick at Microsoft, one of the heads of their channel program, and she’s driven some major changes to their program in the last two or three years. And on the podcast she talks about how they had to be agile. They got feedback from the partners. Some things they like, some things they didn’t like so much. They had to adjust as they went based on that feedback. So how are you — I know you’re talking to partners all the time and you mentioned that — but what sort of analytics do you look at when you’re evaluating your program? How are you measuring the success of the changes that you made in the last year?

Chris:     I think it’s on, and I think it’s key and Microsoft’s probably a very good example of where they’ve driven this and had the ability to be agile and driven change frequently. So they’ve done a great job. Where we look at it and how I look at it is around that two pieces. That user journey: so I actually track the individual partner users from the point that we first onboard them all the way through their NetApp experience. And what I mean by that is I know when a partner individual has gone to one of our 85 Partner Academies in the Americas. I know what date they went, I know what sessions they attended. I know what quotes they created. I know what trainings they’ve had. And so if you start to pull all this together, you start to give a persona-based information source to our channel managers to go out and help progress individuals. But it also means you can start to see what’s working because you start to see when they log in to some of our ‘get successful enablement campaigns’, you start to see how long they spend in there. And so we take all of that analytics and we adjust what we’re building.

So we’ve gone from — similar to yourself, podcast — we’ve gone from running podcasts and webcasts and longer video training to podcasts and short term videos. Because what did we find: that’s what people listen to more, that’s what they read more, and ironically, you know you track it, an individual will actually spend more time enabling themselves in a total sum when they’re small snippets than if you got them to sit down to the same thing in one long session. And so you take that and you go, great, that’s how we adapt our enablement. When I look at the program: yes, you look at the traditional to go what’s influencing outcomes? But that’s where it’s much more around sitting down with partners, understanding their different types of sales environments and understanding what’s influencing them because they know what drives their business much better than any vendor could ever do.

To the point, to your point before, being agile, being willing to make that change in a world which isn’t used to changing that fast.

Louis:    You haven’t talked much about marketing. And have you been making many changes to your through partner marketing programs as part of these changes to your overall Unified Partner Program?

Chris:     So I think marketing is an encompassing piece. You know when I talk about programs and you kind of come down to terminologies, I look at program as the partner experience. And from the marketing perspective, we spent a lot of time enhancing last year, through our partner hub, the experience of an individual but also the experience of an organization. And so by creating concierge services, by creating prebuilt campaigns that partners can either just go and take self-define self-promote and deliver on their own free of charge. Or invest in concierge and agency if they wanted to from our side or work directly with NetApp through funded marketing and lead generation programs to drive that forward. We also spent a lot of time refining our lead-to-partner process. How we create leads, how we prioritize leads, coming back to differentiation to the right partners for the right type of opportunity and how we take that out to market.

And so I think you know marketing, I find an interesting environment because there’s an assumption as a vendor that just because you create material it shall be used. And I think some of the challenges that partners have is outside of the large partners, many partner organizations, their priority is actually creating their own brand and putting their own business into market, not necessarily aligned to a vendor. And so I think part of the step is towards the concierge-type services, which helps enable them to get the most from what you’re delivering. We work very heavily with our distributors. Our distributors work really closely with many partners to help them through that deployment and return phase. And they’ll be more as we look through this year around how we can help partners educate themselves in some of the marketing areas which maybe they don’t have the skills and the capabilities today.

Louis:    You and I, before we started to record, were talking about something. I was saying that one reason that I decided to do the podcast was I saw a lot of white space in the channel. Not nearly as much content created around the channel as there is around many other areas of marketing or business rather. And yet, as with NetApp, a huge majority of sales are driven through the channel globally. And we’re also talking about how few channel technology companies there are that are creating PRMs and such because Jay McBain at Forrester has identified I think it’s 106 channel tech companies, but in the marketing technology space there are thousands. You had some thoughts on that. Why do you think that this space that you work in and that so many companies drive their business through doesn’t get more attention in terms of technology and thought leadership and content and so forth?

Chris:     So I’d say there’s a couple of pieces I think on the ‘doesn’t get as much attention’, and you know we were talking about this white space, there’s not many solutions out there. I think part of the challenge is, if you look at from a vendor perspective, we’ve seen a lot of consolidation. So you could turn around and you say there’s X number of technology vendors out there, the reality is within each one of those technology vendors — whether it’s somebody selling a solution or whether it’s a PRM vendor — they’ve acquired multiple other technology delivery companies in that space. And so you start to look at this consolidated solution, and I come back to that word solution, where customers — not necessarily looking for a one-stop shop — but customers looking to get best of breed and to have interaction and interface and to get a solution out there. And so in the same way that NetApp acquired SolidFire, has acquired cloud solutions within our portfolio and expanded on that IP, you’ve got other vendors doing the same and into the technology services environment exactly the same thing happening.

And I think you’re right, there is some white space there. We are seeing some emerging and different technologies coming into the market space, which is exciting. And I think it comes back to sometimes our industry’s been a little bit of a laggard to adapt when it comes to engaging with partners or customers in the way that they engage today. And I think that’s changing rapidly. And I look at how NetApp’s adapted and how we look at personas and how we drive into that space with partners. And I think you’ll start to see, as I am, companies coming in with the software application experience that may not have been used in the channel.

I was talking to a technology supplier only last week and they actually have an application that’s used within the retail environment using alliances. And we sat down and looked at it and it’s a perfect match for our space, but they’ve never even seen themselves being positioned here. And so, you know, we’re working with some up and coming companies like that to really give a little bit of a different and a future-looking outlook. So that, especially in the exciting pieces where we look at a lot of our cloud applications, you start to look at the alignment of those and integrating things so that that experience becomes — I’m not going to name brands of cell phones — but I think if you look at the cell phone market, you probably can use one hand and name everybody that’s left. But the reality is on any one of those, there’s at least a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand applications that are being used. So actually the value, yes, there’s a value in what brings it together, but what you can work with, what you can integrate, what you can optimize, that’s where the opportunity is.

Louis:    Yeh. Well, those became platforms. So what should I have asked you that I didn’t Chris, what keeps you up at night?

Chris:     I think the challenge I have most is at the speed of which we’re seeing markets transformed, at the speed of which partners are looking to transform: How do we help partners transition ahead of the market? How do we add value to partners? Let’s be blunt, partners have a choice out there. How do we continue to make business simple to engage with and how do we ultimately enable partners to make money? Because if people aren’t profitable, there’s no reason to keep driving something. And so you look at that and I have a picture up on my wall at home, which is a really bizarre set of four scales because everything’s around balancing it. And it’s all about being able to maximize each of those areas so that the different types of individuals can drive the outcomes they’re looking to determine.

We’ve had some phenomenal success in this. We’ve had the market responding to it. We’ve had analysts saying the same, but every day is a new day. And in the same way that I like to take on new challenges personally, I think for me the personal challenge when it comes to this is ensuring that we’re always the technology solution of choice, the partners to solve their customer’s needs in a way that they need to and they can build their businesses.

Louis:    Chris, how can people contact you?

Chris:     You can either contact me through Twitter, through LinkedIn, chris.lamborn@netapp.com or if you just want to come through to channel at NetApp, trust me, it finds me.

Louis:    Okay, great. So thank you for joining us today, Chris.

Chris:     Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Louis:    As I do with all guests. I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book in appreciation.

Chris:     Fantastic, can’t wait.

Louis:    It also has received some awards, I will humbly say.

Chris:     I’ve got a nice flight to Tokyo so it will do me good.

Louis:    Okay. Okay, great. And thanks to your communications team for reaching out about you being on the podcast.

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