With over 50 employees on its payroll and presence in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and, soon, Seville

Why did NetApp decide to bring its business to Spain and under what circunstances did it do so?

NetApp decided to open an office in Madrid in 2000 as part of its European strategy of being present in every country with a solid private sector in need of cutting edge storage technology of the kind offered by NetApp for the efficient and cost-effective management of its data.

We started with a small office before moving to the one we use now at calle Rosario Pino, 14. We started out with a small team of technicians and sales representatives working closely with our partners.15 years later we've become a premier company here in Spain.

 

What kind of investment has the company made in Spain in these last years and how many jobs has it created?
We cannot give an exact number on how much we've invested in Spain in these last 15 years, but we can say that our company's strong commitment to this country is reflected by our many different NetApp offices. In addition to our headquarters in Madrid, we're present in Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia and soon in Seville too. Meanwhile we've also opened a Lisbon office.

Aside from this direct investment, NetApp has also invested in our partners, many of whom have large professional groups exclusively dedicated to NetApp.

 

What are the company's main milestones in Spain on this 15th anniversary.
If we remember that, like all US technology companies, our company doesn't do R&D in Spain, so the jobs created are called 'customer-facing' jobs, which means they are market and client-oriented: sales, consulting, support, marketing and other services. Being directly present for our clients is very important to us and that is why we have opened offices in many parts of Spain aside from Madrid, where our Spanish headquarters is located.

Throughout these 15 years we've reached numerous milestones. Some are related to the implementation of new technologies and others to the expansion of our presence geographically. The most notable technological strides we've made are the launch of the first storage devices combining NAS and SAN architectures in 2002, deduplication software for primary and secondary storage in 2007 and AltaVault cloud back-up in 2015. Economically we made a significant investment in human resources in 2008 in Madrid and Barcelona, which helped double our turnover.

 

What is your competitive edge in your market?
Our Clustered Data ONTAP technology is an added value that other providers don't have. It can grow horizontally with the needs of the client, working as a single storage unit and allowing maintenance work to be done without service stoppages. (Before, when you wanted to change something in a storage system, you had to stop it).

Another of our pioneering innovations has been in efficiency, not just in relation to data processing speed but also because our technology requires less disk capacity to manage the same amount of data.

Now big companies tend to use what is called the hybrid cloud, which consists of a combination of your own cloud in a local service provider and with hyperscale clouds, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. For these companies what makes us different is the flexibility and transparency in data transfer between different clouds that we offer, allowing data to be moved between them almost as if it were on your own system.

 

What kind of clients do you serve?
We serve a very wide range of clients, from large Spanish and international companies to medium-sized businesses and some small ones too; clients whose service is highly data-dependent.

We couldn't directly reach some small and medium businesses and now we do it through service providers. It's a different channel, because we don't see the clients, but it is giving our business a lot of coverage and we are very proud to know that they are enjoying the benefits of our technology.

 

What are your future plans in Spain?
Our short-term goal is to be the second leading provider in the Spanish market for external storage.. Our position will also help us continue our sustained double-digit growth and the exponential expansion of our workforce.