Authorized Professional Service Partner Program Gains Traction in Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore

Singapore – March 24, 2009 – NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that partners across Asia Pacific are benefitting from the Authorized Professional Service Partner Program to help them sell more services and ultimately, influencing their bottom lines. According to Gartner[1], the worldwide storage service market in 2007 was worth about US$27 billion, with nearly US$10 billion in hardware support services, excluding hardware and software sales.

The Authorized Professional Service Partner Program encourages partners to sell and deliver their own brand of professional services for NetApp® data center solutions by utilizing NetApp best practices, tools and methodologies, comprehensive training, and implementation backup support. The program strengthens channel partners’ role as trusted advisors for customers by providing a complete solution set to deliver maximum value for enterprise data centers.

NetApp partners in Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and Singapore who have signed up for the program are seeing increased satisfaction from customers, improved client relationships and an expansion of their solutions to help bring new storage virtualization offerings to the market.

“Storage solutions have become more complex” said SS Lim, MD, PTC System. “You need the knowledge and expertise to help customers with the problem, leveraging NetApp service resources we now have the capability to help customers in design, project management, implementation and data migration”.

“Being an authorized partner in the program, we follow the same best practices from NetApp’s professional services teams, and we have exclusive access to NetApp’s methodologies, tools, knowledge and resources,” said SS Lim, Managing Director, PTC System, Singapore

Available to VIP Program partners, the Authorized Professional Service Partner Program is designed specifically for channel partners to provide them with an industry-leading professional service business proposition with compelling enablement resources focused on increasing the productivity and effectiveness of customer data centers. Partners who meet authorization requirements can do the following:

  • Sell and deliver partner-branded professional services with their sale of NetApp technologies
  • Specialize in one or more NetApp solution areas for deep market specialization
  • Gain access to comprehensive hands-on training and proven service delivery methodologies and best practices
  • Offer value-added services that strengthen customer relationships and increase revenue opportunities

The Authorized Professional Service Partner Program encourages partners to offer value-added services that not only strengthen customer relationships but also help transform their data centers in new ways that enhance their business. Partners stay in control of their customer relationships while delivering strategic value-added services that are tailored to NetApp products and solutions. Partners who want to achieve Authorized Professional Service Partner status can participate in one or more solution areas of their choice. Each solution area has its own clearly defined training path that helps technical teams achieve success.

As part of the program, participating partners receive secure access to the same solution-based service delivery tools, templates, and methodologies used by NetApp Global Services professional service teams. In addition, the program offers access to the NetApp Storage Design Studio application. This information-rich tool can be a key differentiator for partners in terms of productivity gains and customer satisfaction, enabling partners to design, deploy, and document from one source. This reduces manual tasks and eliminates margins for error, resulting in customer-quality deployment documentation within minutes.

“At the end of the day, our partner community wants to deliver services for their customers that extend our data center products and solutions,” said Loh Ching Soo, Country Manager, NetApp Singapore. “The single most important benefit we can offer partners is the opportunity to simply and effectively get more engaged with our customers. Opening up additional services opportunities is one of the best ways we can make this happen for our most trusted partners.”

For more information on the Authorized Professional Service Partner Program, please visit www.netapp.com. Partners must be members in good standing of the NetApp VIP Program to qualify.

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

Press Contact:
Celia Chua
Priority Consultants
Tel: 6338 1006
Email: celia.chua@changemandate.tech

[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Storage Professional and Support Services, 30 July 2008