NetApp Pivots Storage Pitch to AI Buyers as Chief Data Officers Drive Pipeline Shift

Enterprise storage vendor NetApp Inc. is adjusting its go-to-market strategy to reach a new demographic of corporate buyers driven by artificial intelligence workloads, according to comments made by Chief Marketing Officer Gabie Boko in an interview with SiliconANGLE at the NetApp INSIGHT conference (https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/01/data-infrastructure-draws-new-buyers-netapp-ai-pitch-netappinsight/).

NetApp has spent three years organizing its product roadmap and partner strategy around what it terms Intelligent Data Infrastructure. The effort is designed to position traditional enterprise storage as an essential layer for AI data activation rather than back-office maintenance, as businesses navigate sovereign data requirements, cyber resilience demands, and hyperscaler compliance constraints.

The shift in buyer profiles is appearing across the company's incoming pipeline. Following recent keynote announcements, NetApp saw website traffic from net-new names rise approximately 50% year over year, with an increasing share of prospective buyers holding titles such as chief data officer rather than traditional storage administration roles.

To support high-throughput compute environments, NetApp unveiled NetApp Novus, a dedicated storage architecture engineered to supply data to large graphics processing unit clusters operating in neoclouds and AI factories. NetApp Chief Executive Officer George Kurian has tied the architecture directly to operationalizing enterprise AI in production settings.

Rather than forcing enterprises to centralize data inside a proprietary stack, NetApp is designing its architecture to connect to data wherever it is stored across hybrid deployments. Company leadership maintains that as enterprise AI deployments mature, persistent access and data activation capabilities will keep underlying infrastructure central to corporate technology spending.