Customers Use Agile Data Infrastructures to Fuel Business Success

NetApp Recognizes Visionary Customers with Annual Innovation Awards Event

SUNNYVALE, Calif.-June 21, 2012-A culture of innovation provides businesses with the technology, products, people, and services that allow them to outpace, out innovate, and outperform the competition to achieve remarkable results for business.

During this years eighth annual Innovation Awards, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) honored a few of the exceptional visionaries who joined in the journey with NetApp to show that IT can be foundational to business success. The award winners have one thing in common: They had the vision to think differently to achieve results that are remarkable. NetApp announced the winners and finalists of the Innovation Awards program on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, during a distinguished awards ceremony at The Tech Museum in San Jose, California.

Change is hard. The Innovation Awards are about recognizing people with the courage to think differently about how IT can drive business, said Dave Hitz, founder and executive vice president of NetApp. These role models show what is possible, and hopefully they will inspire others to follow.

Dave Hitz discusses the business impact and game-changing innovations customers and partners achieved as well as the importance of having a culture of innovation. View Daves video blog post.

NetApp thanks everyone who submitted achievements to the 2012 Innovation Awards program. The over 200 global nominations that were submitted by customers and partners validate the fact that an agile IT foundation can deliver great outcomes for business success. Customer submissions came from wide-ranging industries, including healthcare, financial services, entertainment, energy, and education, each highlighting new and innovative ways to impact business. The award categories address the business impact of IT: Efficiency Innovation, Flexibility Innovation, and Visionary Leadership. In addition to these categories, The Innovator of the Year category recognizes one winner from each of four global geographies: Americas, APAC, EMEA, and U.S. Public Sector.

2012 NetApp Innovation Award Winners and Finalists

Innovator of the Year-AMERICAS

WINNER: Mercy Healthcare System

FINALISTS: Blackboard, Symantec Services Group, Yahoo! Inc.

Innovator of the Year-EMEA

WINNER: T-Systems Austria

FINALISTS: Eden Project, Nelt CO. D.O.O.

Innovator of the Year-APAC

WINNER: Oxigen Services India Pvt. Ltd.

FINALISTS: Suncorp Group, Volkswagen India Pvt. Ltd.

Innovator of the Year-USPS

WINNER: Iowa Workforce Development (nominated by NetApp partner IP Pathways)

FINALISTS: Illini Cloud, Fairfax County Public Schools

Visionary Leadership

WINNER: Teradata Labs

FINALISTS: Revlon, Verizon Digital Media Services

Flexibility Innovation

WINNER: Verizon Communications Inc.

FINALISTS: Geometric Limited, Pima County, Trafford Council

Efficiency Innovation

WINNER: ING DIRECT

FINALISTS: Taylor Morrison, Transplace

Supporting Quotes

Andrew Henderson, CIO, ING DIRECT

ING DIRECT Australia implemented an efficient storage capability that has given the business a competitive edge in the retail banking sector by enabling ING DIRECTs frontline developers and testers to bring new banking products to market faster. We were able to accelerate banking application testing and refreshes from six weeks to one day by leveraging NetApps on-demand private cloud.

Gary Bateman, CIO, Iowa Workforce Development

Iowa Workforce Development executed a cost-effective virtualization project leveraging NetApp storage, which saved our state government agency $6.5 million annually and accelerated the deployment of 1,500 virtual desktops across Iowa in less than six months. The scalability of our storage infrastructure is instrumental in reducing storage needs by nearly 50% while improving public services to Iowas employers and workers.

Joe Shields, President and Owner, IP Pathways

IP Pathways focus has always been to partner with companies that consolidate and simplify data storage and management, while optimizing the user experience for business needs. In collaborating with NetApp weve created a relationship that supports innovative award-winning IT deployments for our customers.

Jeff Bell, Former COO, Mercy Healthcare System

Mercy Healthcare built a state-of-the-art data center and implemented a flexible cloud infrastructure to effectively deploy an Electronic Medical Health Record for storing and protecting patient information and, in the future, to support smaller clinics and healthcare systems. With the help of the NetApp FlexPod architecture, we have saved over 40% of storage space, reduced power consumption by 50%, and now provide rapid access to and data protection for 1,742K patients.

Rahul Sharma, Assistant Vice President, IT Network Operations, Oxigen Services India Pvt. Ltd.

Oxigen was successful in achieving business goals to save costs and increase capabilities by implementing storage efficiency, deduplication, thin provisioning, and server virtualization features using NetApps storage infrastructure. Since implementing our new data structure Oxigen has saved 40% on storage efficiency and 20% on cost savings.

Scott Gnau, President, Teradata Labs

Teradatas storage foundation is a key part of our ability to handle challenging data warehousing and analytic workloads while improving performance and allowing for uninterrupted operations. The integration of NetApp E-Series storage solutions contributed to our growth in 2011 and helped our customers make the best decision possible, enabling them to outperform and outmaneuver their competition.

Erwin Schuster, Sr. Consultant, Enterprise Architecture and Strategy, T-Systems

To better serve T-Systems multinational corporations and public sector institutions, we are deploying a reference cloud in

LINK:	http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/press-releases/news-rel-20120621...
	See more stories from netapp

Most recent headlines