NetApp Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) has hired IBM Cloud marketing veteran Jean English as chief marketing officer (CMO). The move comes as CEO George Kurian strives to accelerate the storage company's all-flash and data fabric (i.e., hybrid cloud) strategies.
NetApp delivered stronger-than-expected quarterly results last week, apparently boosted a bit by improving channel engagements. The company's all-flash storage business has helped to jumpstart partner and customer conversations. But there's plenty of additional work to be done. NetApp's overall revenues remain flat to slightly down.
On the branding front, English must help NetApp to stand out in the crowded flash storage market, while communicating the company's continued value as more customer workloads shift to public clouds. English's background includes global and country-level strategic planning, branding and positioning, product and solutions marketing, integrated multichannel marketing, digital marketing and commerce, and sales channel enablement and optimization, NetApp says.
English deserves credit for her IBM Cloud marketing efforts, which helped the IT giant to differentiate from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Although AWS and Azure are still considered runaway market leaders, IBM's cloud has at least been part of CIO-cloud conversation over the past year or two.
