Item 1. Business

Overview

NetApp, Inc. (NetApp, we, or us) is the data authority for the hybrid cloud. We provide a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments. Together with our partners, we empower global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data. We were incorporated in 1992 and are headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Customer Business and IT Needs

In a world where technology is changing our everyday lives, digital transformation remains top of mind for executives. When successful in their digital transformation, organizations use technology to create new customer touchpoints, reinventing customer experiences and relationships through business-oriented approaches to data. Additionally, organizations are able to create innovative business opportunities, taking advantage of emerging market opportunities by rapidly deploying new technologies, and to optimize operations, adopting an operating model that provides efficiencies and funds new innovation.

In order to successfully digitally transform, data must become the lifeblood of an organization and be used as a business accelerator. Data-driven digital transformations accelerate business outcomes.

Leaders are under enormous pressure to harness today’s volume of data and apply it to create new value across the entire organization, all with limited time, skills, and budget. Building a data-driven organization is challenging. Data is becoming increasingly:

•	Distributed. Generated and consumed from multiple clouds and on-premises, from organic and partner sources

•	Dynamic. Constantly changing and increasingly cloud-streamed from multiple clouds

•	Diverse. Including analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning capabilities from multiple clouds and on-premises

Thriving in this environment requires a holistic approach to data insight, access and control that is secure, efficient, and future-proof and provides freedom of choice.

To help our customers and partners manage and share their data across on-premises, and private and public clouds, we are:

	•	Focusing on the customer by delivering an exceptional customer experience and becoming their preferred data partner, and

	•	Extending our cloud integration and hybrid cloud leadership through the NetApp Data Fabric and expanding our consumption model offerings to match customer needs across cloud and on-premises offerings.

The NetApp Data Fabric

NetApp delivers a Data Fabric built for the data-driven world. Our Data Fabric simplifies and integrates data management across clouds and on-premises to accelerate digital transformation, enabling our customers to manage, secure, and protect their data at the scale needed to accommodate the exponential data growth of the digital world. The Data Fabric delivers integrated data management services and applications for data visibility and insights, data access and control, and data protection and security.

The NetApp Data Fabric gives customers freedom of choice, enabling the movement of data between clouds and on-premises as business conditions dictate. Customers can easily incorporate new capabilities—AI, machine learning, blockchain, Internet of Things —from any cloud provider to speed innovation and achieve higher levels of operational efficiency to shift resources from maintenance to digital transformation. Secure by design, the Data Fabric helps customers realize new business opportunities while minimizing risk.

Built for the challenges and opportunities of the data-driven world, NetApp products and solutions are designed for simplicity and optimized to manage, protect and secure data. Because the Data Fabric is open by design, we can constantly fuel innovation and flexibility.

Our products, solutions, and services portfolio focuses on customers’ top IT imperatives as they undertake digital transformations. NetApp’s unique approach to managing data holistically enables organizations to inspire innovation with the cloud, build clouds to accelerate new services, and modernize IT architecture with cloud-connected flash.

Product, Solutions and Services Portfolio

Cloud Data Services

NetApp believes that the hybrid cloud will be the dominant model for enterprise IT. Customers are attracted by the speed and scale benefits of the public cloud but need new data management capabilities to keep control of data as it moves beyond the walls of the enterprise. The NetApp Data Fabric enables our customers to manage, secure, and protect their data from on-premises to public to

hybrid clouds, all at the scale needed to accommodate the exponential data growth of the digital world. The NetApp Cloud Data Services portfolio is focused on helping customers inspire innovation with public and multicloud solutions, enabling modern data management applications and services.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

The Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage data management service is based on the familiar and reliable ONTAP data management software, bringing data protection and storage efficiency features to cloud-based storage. Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows customers to build an enterprise storage service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure with the flexibility to pay for only what a customer needs, when it needs it. Whether customers want to move traditional database applications or legacy NAS applications to the cloud, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides the data access, insights, and control along the way.

NetApp Cloud Sync Data Synchronization

NetApp Cloud Sync Data Synchronization provides secure, fast, and automated data synchronization. Whether organizations need to transfer files between on-premises NFS or CIFS file shares, Amazon S3 object format, another cloud provider object store, or NetApp StorageGRID® Webscale appliances, Cloud Sync Data Synchronization moves the files where they are needed quickly and securely.

NetApp SaaS Backup for Microsoft Office 365

SaaS Backup for Microsoft Office 365 service is a complete software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that enables organizations to protect Office 365 data in the event of accidental deletion, data corruption, or malicious intent. Using SaaS Backup for Microsoft Office 365, customers can back up, find, and recover email, calendars, contacts, tasks, site collections, sites, lists, and file data.

NetApp Cloud Backup

Cloud Backup is NetApp’s solution for backing up and archiving data to the public or private cloud of the customer’s choice. Based on NetApp AltaVault™ technology, Cloud Backup streamlines backups while reducing cloud storage costs. Supporting backup and archive to AWS, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Platform, StorageGRID Webscale, or another cloud, Cloud Backup protects data quickly and securely. Cloud Backup ingests data from the customer’s backup software, deduplicates and compresses the data to save on transmission and cloud storage costs, caches the most recent backups for fast recoveries, and vaults all of the data to the cloud quickly and efficiently.

OnCommand Management Software and Management Integration Tools

The NetApp OnCommand® storage management software portfolio incorporates a broad range of data management tools for NetApp and multivendor storage. These products enable customers to maintain control of their data regardless of where it resides in a hybrid cloud environment, to drive efficiency using software management tools designed to work together, and to gain flexibility.

NetApp OnCommand Insight management software delivers consistent insight across the data center, so organizations can monitor, manage, and optimize hybrid IT multivendor storage, compute, and switching infrastructures.

NetApp Private Storage for Cloud

NetApp Private Storage for Cloud is a family of enterprise storage solutions that lets customers use multiple industry-leading clouds and maintain complete control over their data on dedicated storage systems from NetApp while achieving the flexibility of the cloud for application and compute resources. In this approach, customer data resides on NetApp storage “next to” rather than “in” the cloud provider’s environment. The customer-owned NetApp system is co-located in data centers managed by our partner Equinix, which has data centers located next to major networks and in close proximity to major cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer.

Cloud Infrastructure

NetApp Cloud Infrastructure is a portfolio of offerings that helps customers build cloud-architected data centers to deliver cloud services for innovative applications in either private or service provider models. To accelerate digital transformations, customers are building clouds to accelerate new services and developing innovative, cloud-architected infrastructures that manage data and services as one integrated resource, supporting both public and private clouds.

FlexPod

Backed by one of the most successful alliances in the industry, FlexPod® has become the converged infrastructure of choice for many of the largest enterprises around the globe. FlexPod is a portfolio of pre-validated designs and integration that combine the

Cisco Unified Computing System integrated infrastructure and NetApp storage components to reduce risk and accelerate the deployment of data center infrastructure. Today, customers and partners can choose from more than 100 validated application and infrastructure designs. The portfolio is validated with leading hypervisors, operating systems, systems management tools, and cloud management platforms for major enterprise workloads such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Openstack, and Docker.

NetApp Converged Systems Advisor

NetApp Converged Systems Advisor (CSA) targets key challenges in the data center operations lifecycle. An on-premises agent combines with cloud analytics to validate, monitor, and optimize the deployment of FlexPod infrastructure. This tool simplifies key tasks for administrative support with an automated review of over 100 best practices, component support updates, and resilient design requirements. With continual remote monitoring and notifications, NetApp CSA helps administrators prevent gaps in system supportability and more easily protect their investment in mission-critical data center infrastructure. These capabilities simplify lifecycle management, improve productivity with infrastructure support, and facilitate the management of infrastructure.

NetApp HCI

The NetApp HCI enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure is the cornerstone of a private cloud strategy solution capable of transforming and empowering organizations so they can move faster, drive operational efficiency, and reduce costs. It can easily run multiple applications with the predictable performance demanded by enterprise customers. Compute and storage resources scale independently to avoid overprovisioning and can be deployed in minutes with a turnkey cloud infrastructure that eliminates the complex management of traditional three-tier architectures.

NetApp StorageGRID Webscale Object Storage Software

NetApp StorageGRID Webscale is a software-defined object-based storage solution that provides intelligent policy-driven data management. StorageGRID Webscale provides Amazon S3 API compatibility and acts as the foundation for global data availability anytime, anywhere to facilitate nonstop operations. Configurations can be designed for resilience to one or multiple simultaneous failures and even for resilience to entire site losses and regional disasters. StorageGRID Webscale is suitable for single data centers or multi–data center deployments with many sites across the globe.

Storage Systems and Software

Our storage systems and software portfolio enables customers to modernize their IT architectures with cloud-connected flash to free the resources necessary to fund transformation by deploying highly efficient flash storage that scales from the edge to the core to the cloud.

All-Flash Arrays

Flash plays a key role in customers’ digital transformation efforts as they seek to gain advantage through greater speed, responsiveness, and value from key business applications, all while lowering total cost of ownership. All-flash array technology is the de facto choice as customers seek performance and economic benefits from replacing hard disk installations. With a highly differentiated and broad portfolio of all-flash and hybrid array offerings, NetApp is well positioned to enable customers to accomplish this transition.

NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) systems address enterprise storage requirements with high performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data management. Built on ONTAP data management software, AFF systems speed up business without compromising on the efficiency, reliability, or flexibility of IT operations. As an enterprise-grade all-flash array, it accelerates, manages, and protects business-critical data and enables an easy and risk-free transition to flash. Designed specifically for flash, the AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, capacity density, scalability, security, and network connectivity in dense form factors. With the addition of a new entry-level system, the new AFF A-Series family extends enterprise-grade flash to midsize businesses and to fit any budget.

SolidFire® all-flash arrays are architected from the ground up to be the storage foundation of next-generation data centers with scale-out highly available, easy-to-control all-flash storage with guaranteed performance. NetApp SolidFire enables customers to reduce cost and complexity by safely consolidating mission-critical applications onto a single storage platform, increase productivity with deep infrastructure integrations, and dynamically scale storage resources to meet business demands.

NetApp EF-Series all-flash arrays deliver fast, consistent response times to accelerate high-performance databases and data analytics. Designed specifically for mixed-workload environments, including big data analytics, technical computing, video surveillance, and backup and recovery, the EF-Series provides leading price/performance, configuration flexibility, and simplicity in a compact package to help organizations make decisions faster, more actionable, and more secure.

With our all-flash array portfolio, NetApp is enabling customers to modernize IT architecture with cloud-connected flash and free the resources necessary to fund transformation by deploying the industry’s leading flash storage solution, which scales from the edge to the core to the cloud.

Hybrid Flash Arrays

NetApp hybrid flash storage serves customers who want the option to deploy the speed of flash storage where they need it while using more affordable hard disk drives (HDDs) to address capacity requirements. NetApp FAS hybrid flash arrays are created for shared, consolidated environments running SAN and NAS workloads that require rich data management, enterprise-grade capabilities, and easy cloud connection. NetApp E-Series hybrid flash arrays are built for dedicated, high-bandwidth applications such as data analytics, video surveillance, and disk-based backup that need simple, fast, reliable SAN storage.

NetApp ONTAP Storage Operating System

ONTAP 9 is the next generation of the industry’s leading enterprise data management software. It combines new levels of simplicity and flexibility with powerful data management capabilities and storage efficiencies. With ONTAP 9, customers can build a hybrid cloud that is the foundation of a Data Fabric. ONTAP 9 provides flexibility to design and deploy a storage environment across the widest range of architectures—engineered systems, software-defined storage (SDS), and the cloud—spanning flash and disk infrastructures. AFF systems running ONTAP 9 are optimized specifically for flash. ONTAP 9 also enables FAS hybrid storage systems to deliver flash-accelerated performance that is balanced with HDD economies.

NetApp ONTAP Select

NetApp ONTAP Select offers robust enterprise storage services that are deployed on the customer’s choice of commodity hardware. It combines the best of the cloud, in terms of agility and granular capacity scaling, with the flexibility, resilience, and locality of on-premises storage.

NetApp FlexArray Storage Virtualization Software

NetApp FlexArray® virtualization software enables FAS8000 systems to virtualize existing Dell/EMC, HP, Hitachi, and NetApp E-Series arrays, creating a single storage management architecture that overcomes the limitations of existing arrays, expands the capabilities of customers’ IT infrastructures, and delivers the benefits of software-defined storage.

NetApp SnapCenter Backup Management Software

NetApp SnapCenter® software is a unified, scalable platform for application-consistent data protection and clone management. This software simplifies backup, restore, and clone lifecycle management with application-integrated workflows. Leveraging storage-based data management, SnapCenter enables increased performance and availability and reduced testing and development times.

NetApp SnapMirror Data Replication Software

NetApp SnapMirror® software is a cost-effective, easy-to-use unified replication solution across the Data Fabric, replicating data at high speeds over LAN or WAN. SnapMirror delivers powerful data management capabilities for virtualization, protecting critical data while providing the flexibility to move data between locations and storage tiers, including cloud service providers.

NetApp MetroCluster Business Continuity Software

NetApp MetroCluster™ software is a solution that combines array-based clustering with synchronous replication to deliver continuous availability and zero data loss. MetroCluster enhances the built-in high availability and nondisruptive operations of NetApp hardware and ONTAP storage software, providing an additional layer of protection for the entire storage and host environment.

NetApp SnapLock Data Compliance Software

NetApp SnapLock® software delivers high-performance disk-based data permanence for HDD and solid-state disk (SSD) deployments. Part of our proven NetApp ONTAP storage software, SnapLock helps provide data integrity and retention, enabling electronic records to be both unalterable and rapidly accessible.

SANtricity Storage Operating System

The SANtricity® operating system performs management tasks while the storage remains online, with complete read and write data access. This capability enables storage administrators to make configuration changes, perform maintenance, or expand storage capacity without disrupting I/O to attached hosts. For application environments, including backup and recovery, technical computing, video surveillance, and big data analytics, NetApp E-Series and EF-Series storage arrays with SANtricity software offer industry-leading performance, reliability, and ease of use.

NetApp SolidFire Element Operating System

NetApp SolidFire Element® OS is the storage operating system for the next-generation data center, providing all the features demanded from primary storage, including enterprise-grade reliability, all-flash performance, and secure multitenancy, in an innovative, automated architecture that delivers on-demand scalability, with guaranteed predictable storage performance. With Element OS, SolidFire systems can host a broad range of performance-sensitive and business-critical applications.

Professional and Support Services

NetApp and our ecosystem of partners deliver a full portfolio of professional and technical services that enable customers to gain the end-to-end expertise and insight needed to succeed and accelerate digital transformations. Our services experts help organizations create a Data Fabric strategy, aligned to their business strategy, to drive innovation and deliver improved business results across cloud and on-premises environments. We collaborate with our customers to accelerate digital transformation with the right expertise to envision, deploy, and operate NetApp data management solutions. NetApp Services experts deliver proactive and predictive intelligence for optimizing the way organizations manage their solutions throughout the data lifecycle.

Our professional services team and certified services partners deliver the expertise needed to accelerate transformations and realize greater business value from technology investments. NetApp professionals and partners help to determine the right technology roadmap to meet business requirements, so customers can respond rapidly to changing business demands. Our proven methodologies, validated designs, and best practices are geared to ensure desired outcomes.

Operational Support Services ensure our products operate efficiently and benefit from the most up-to-date software to help customers minimize downtime for systems running business-critical applications. Our services organization also delivers actionable intelligence for managing and optimizing data management solutions with proactive and predictive technology.

Active IQ® builds on NetApp AutoSupport® with powerful machine-learning capabilities, artificial intelligence, and more deployment options. Cloud-based analytics provide predictions and recommendations based on peer comparisons and community learning. Active IQ simplifies and automates operations with predictive, self-healing care.

Sales, Principal Markets, and Distribution Channels

We market and sell our products in numerous countries throughout the world. To increase visibility of NetApp in the broader IT segment, we continue to make investments in our multi-year branding and awareness campaigns.

Our diversified customer base spans industry segments and vertical markets such as energy, financial services, government, high technology, internet, life sciences, healthcare services, manufacturing, media, entertainment, animation, video postproduction and telecommunications. NetApp focuses primarily on the data management and storage markets. We design our products to meet the needs of our broad customer base – from large enterprises to midsize customers.

NetApp uses a multichannel distribution strategy. We sell our products and services to end-user business customers and service providers through a direct sales force and an ecosystem of partners. We work with a wide range of partners for our customers, including technology partners, value-added resellers, system integrators, OEMs, service providers and distributors. During fiscal 2018, sales through our indirect channels represented 79% of our net revenues. Our global partner ecosystem is critical to NetApp’s growth and success. We are continually strengthening existing partnerships and investing in new ones to ensure we are meeting the evolving needs of our customers.

As of April 27, 2018, our worldwide sales and marketing functions consisted of approximately 5,100 managers, sales representatives and technical support personnel. We have field sales offices in approximately 47 countries. Sales to customers Arrow Electronics, Inc. and Tech Data Corporation, which are distributors, each accounted for 17% of our net revenues in fiscal 2018. Information about sales to and accounts receivables from our major customers, segment disclosures, foreign operations and net sales attributable to our geographic regions is included in Note 16 – Segment, Geographic, and Significant Customer Information of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements

Seasonality

We have historically experienced a decline in revenues in the first quarter of our fiscal year, as the sales organization spends time developing new business after higher close rates in the fourth quarter, and because sales to European customers are historically weaker during the summer months. During the second quarter of our fiscal year, we have historically experienced increased sales, driven by the government sector, concurrent with the end of the U.S. federal government’s fiscal year in September, as well as an increase in business from European markets. We derive a majority of our revenue in any given quarter from orders booked in the same quarter. Bookings and revenues typically follow intra-quarter seasonality patterns weighted toward the back end of the quarter.

Backlog

We manufacture products based on a combination of specific order requirements and forecasts of our customers’ demand. Orders are generally placed by customers on an as-needed basis. A substantial portion of our products is sold on the basis of standard purchase orders that are cancelable prior to shipment without penalty. In certain circumstances, purchase orders are subject to change with respect to quantity of product or timing of delivery resulting from changes in customer requirements. Our business is characterized by seasonal and intra-quarter variability in demand, as well as short lead times and product delivery schedules. Accordingly, backlog at any given time might not be a meaningful indicator of future revenue.

Manufacturing and Supply Chain

We have outsourced manufacturing operations to third parties located in Memphis, Tennessee; San Jose, California; San Antonio, Texas; Guadalajara, Mexico; Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands; Komarom and Tiszaujvaros, Hungary; Wuxi and Tianjin, China; Taoyuan City, Taiwan; and Singapore. These operations include materials procurement, commodity management, component engineering, test engineering, manufacturing engineering, product assembly, product assurance, quality control, final test, and global logistics. We rely on a limited number of suppliers for materials, as well as several key subcontractors for the production of certain subassemblies and finished systems. We use multiple vendors and have our products manufactured in a number of locations wherever possible to mitigate our supply chain risk. Our strategy has been to develop close relationships with our suppliers, maximizing the exchange of critical information and facilitating implementation of joint quality programs. We use contract manufacturers for the production of major subassemblies and final system configuration. This manufacturing strategy minimizes capital investments and overhead expenditures while creating flexibility for rapid expansion.

We are certified to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2008 and ISO 14001:2004 certification standards.

Research and Development

We conduct research and development activities in various locations throughout the world. Total research and development expenses were $783 million, $779 million and $861 million in fiscal 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively. These costs consist primarily of personnel and related costs incurred to conduct product development activities. Although we develop many of our products internally, we may acquire technology through business combinations or through licensing from third parties when appropriate. We believe that technical leadership is essential to our success, and we expect to continue to commit substantial resources to research and development.

Competition

We compete with many companies in the markets we serve, including established public companies, newly public companies with a strong flash focus, and new market entrants addressing the growing opportunity for hyper converged systems. Some offer a broad spectrum of IT products and services (full-stack vendors) and others offer a more limited set of storage and data management products or services.

Technology trends – for example, the emergence of hosted (or cloud) storage, SaaS and flash storage – are driving significant changes in storage architectures and solution requirements. Cloud service providers provide customers storage as an operating expense, rather than storage systems capital expenditures, for the customers’ data centers, which competes with more traditional storage offerings. While the short- and long-term impact of these evolving trends cannot be predicted, NetApp is confident that our customers recognize the value in our cloud and Data Fabric strategy. Our strategy includes integrating and building relationships with these new classes of providers, and to date, we have established relationships with more than 300 cloud service providers and hyperscaler providers, including AWS, Google, IBM SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure.

We compete against Dell Technologies/EMC Corporation, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Hitachi Vantara, and International Business Machines Corporation, as well as Pure Storage, Nutanix, and other smaller players. Our current and potential competitors may establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties, including some of our partners. It is possible that new competitors or alliances among competitors might emerge and rapidly acquire significant market share.

We consider innovation, cloud integration, and our technology partnerships key to our competitive differentiation. We believe our competitive advantage also includes the nature of the relationships we form with our customers and partners worldwide. We strive to deliver an outstanding experience in every interaction we have with our customers and partners through our product, service, and support offerings, which enable us to provide our customers with a full range of expertise before, during and after their purchase.

Proprietary Rights

NetApp generally relies on patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret and contract laws to establish and maintain our proprietary rights in our technology and products. While our intellectual property rights are important to our success, we believe that our business is not materially dependent on any particular patent, trademark, copyright, license or other intellectual property right. We have been granted or own by assignment well over a thousand U.S. patents, hundreds of pending U.S. patent applications, and many

corresponding patents and patent applications in other countries. Our primary trademarks are NetApp and the NetApp design logo, which are registered trademarks in the U.S. and in many other countries. In addition, we have numerous trademarks and trademark registrations in the U.S. and other countries covering our various product names.

We generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, resellers, customers, and suppliers. In addition, through various licensing arrangements, we receive certain rights to intellectual property of others. We expect to maintain current licensing arrangements and to secure licensing arrangements in the future, as needed and to the extent available on reasonable terms and conditions, to support continued development and sales of our products and services. Some of these licensing arrangements require or might require royalty payments and other licensing fees. The amount of these payments and fees might depend on various factors, including but not limited to the structure of royalty payments; offsetting considerations, if any; and the degree of use of the licensed technology.

The industry in which we compete is characterized by rapidly changing technology, a large number of patents, and frequent claims and related litigation regarding intellectual property rights, and we may be exposed to various risks related to such claims or legal proceedings. If we are unable to protect our intellectual property, we might be subject to increased competition that could materially and adversely affect our operating results.

Environmental Disclosure

We are committed to the success of our customers and partners, to delivering value to our stockholders, and to positively affecting the communities where our employees work and live. We firmly believe that we can accomplish these objectives concurrently with our commitment to sustainability. We are committed to the prevention of pollution; efficient use of natural resources; and minimizing, relative to the growth of the company, the environmental impacts from our operations, products, and services, as well as complying with laws and regulations related to these areas. Our environmental management system provides the framework for setting, monitoring, and continuously improving our environmental goals and objectives.

We are voluntarily measuring, monitoring, and publicly reporting our scope 1 and scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions and participate in the CDP, which is a global standardized mechanism by which companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to institutional investors. We promote alternative transportation programs through education and awareness campaigns, and we continuously seek to optimize the energy efficiency of our buildings, labs, and data centers. At both the global and regional/state levels, various laws and regulations have been implemented or are under consideration to mitigate the effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental laws are complex, change frequently, and have tended to become more stringent over time. It is often difficult to estimate the future impact of environmental matters. Based on current information, we believe that our primary risk related to climate change is the risk of increased energy costs. We are not subject to a cap and trade system or any other mitigation measures that could be material to our operations in the near future. Additionally, we have implemented disaster recovery and business resiliency measures to mitigate the physical risks our facilities, business, and supply chain might face as a consequence of severe weather-/climate-related phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, and other such natural occurrences.

We are also subject to other federal, state, and local regulations regarding workplace safety and protection of the environment. Various international, federal, state, and local provisions regulate the use and discharge of certain hazardous materials used in the manufacture of our products. Failure to comply with environmental regulations in the future could cause us to incur substantial costs or subject us to business interruptions. We believe we are substantially compliant with all applicable environmental laws. All of our products meet the requirements of the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH); Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE); Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS); and China RoHS directives. We have maintained an environmental management system since December 2004. As part of ISO 14001 requirements, we set local environmental performance goals such as reducing energy use per square foot and minimizing waste generated on site, that are aligned with our overall corporate strategy. We also conduct periodic reviews and are subject to third-party audits of our operations, and we monitor environmental legislation and requirements to help make sure we are taking necessary measures to remain in compliance with applicable laws, not only in our operations but also for our products.

Employees

As of April 27, 2018, we had approximately 10,300 employees worldwide. None of our employees are represented by a labor union and we consider relations with our employees to be good. Competition for technical personnel in the industry in which we compete is intense. We believe that our future success depends in part on our continued ability to hire, assimilate, and retain qualified personnel. To date, we believe that we have been successful in recruiting qualified employees, but there is no assurance that we will continue to be successful in the future.

Executive Officers

Our executive officers and their ages as of June 1, 2018, are as follows:

Name	Age	Position
George Kurian	51	Chief Executive Officer and President
Ronald J. Pasek	57	Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Henri Richard	60	Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field and Customer Operations
Joel D. Reich	59	Executive Vice President and General Manager, NetApp Storage Systems and Software Business Unit
Matthew K. Fawcett	50	Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary

George Kurian was appointed chief executive officer on June 1, 2015 and president on May 20, 2016. He joined our board of directors in June 2015. From September 2013 to May 2015, he was executive vice president of product operations, overseeing all aspects of technology strategy, product and solutions development across our product portfolio. Mr. Kurian joined NetApp in April 2011 as the senior vice president of the storage solutions group and was appointed to senior vice president of the Data ONTAP group in December 2011. Prior to NetApp, from 2002 to 2011, Mr. Kurian held several positions at Cisco Systems, including most recently vice president and general manager of the application networking and switching technology group. From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Kurian was the vice president of product management and strategy at Akamai Technologies. Prior to that, he was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and led software engineering and product management teams at Oracle Corporation. Mr. Kurian holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and an MBA degree from Stanford University.

Ronald J. Pasek joined NetApp in April 2016 as executive vice president and chief financial officer, overseeing the finance, customer leasing, workplace resources, internal audit, and IT functions. Mr. Pasek served as senior vice president, finance and chief financial officer of Altera Corporation, a worldwide provider of programmable logic devices, from December 2009 until its acquisition by Intel in December 2015. Mr. Pasek was previously employed by Sun Microsystems, where he most recently served as vice president and corporate treasurer. In his 19 years at Sun Microsystems, he also held a variety of other positions in finance, including vice president of worldwide field finance, worldwide manufacturing, and U.S. field finance. Mr. Pasek is the chairman of the board of directors of Spectra7 Microsystems Inc., a Canadian publicly traded consumer connectivity company. Mr. Pasek holds a BS degree from San Jose State University and an MBA degree from Santa Clara University.

Henri Richard joined NetApp in May 2016 as executive vice president of worldwide field and customer operations, leading NetApp’s global field and customer success operations, which support the company’s ecosystem of channel, alliance, and service partners and perform customer-facing functions. Before joining NetApp, from April 2013 to May 2016, he was senior vice president of worldwide sales and support at SanDisk Corporation. Prior to SanDisk, Mr. Richard served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Freescale Semiconductor from September 2007 to April 2013. Mr. Richard brings 30-years of experience serving in global executive roles at companies including Seagate, IBM, WebGain and AMD. He started his career in IT with Informatique Haute Performance in Paris, France, a company he founded. Mr. Richard was a member of the board of directors of Ultratech Inc., a formerly publicly traded advance packaging and laser processing company, until its acquisition by Veeco Instruments, Inc. in May 2017. Mr. Richard holds a bachelor of science degree from the Ecole Nationale de Radiotechnique et d’Electronique Appliquee in Asnieres, France.

Joel D. Reich joined NetApp in 2002 and was appointed executive vice president of product operations in June 2015. He is currently executive vice president and general manager of the NetApp Storage Systems and Software business unit. He is responsible for overseeing the strategy and development of the NetApp product and solutions portfolio. He is responsible for overseeing the strategy, development and manufacturing operations of the NetApp product and solutions portfolio. From April 2011 to June 2015, Mr. Reich served as NetApp’s senior vice president of the Hyperscale Storage Group. Before that time, he served in various NetApp Data ONTAP engineering leadership roles. Before joining NetApp, he was vice president of marketing and product operations for HighGround Systems, Inc. He also held the position of director of product management at Data General Corporation and EMC Corporation and was director of sales and marketing for Conner Peripherals Storage Systems Group. Mr. Reich holds a bachelor’s degree from Lehigh University.

Matthew K. Fawcett joined the company in September 2010 as senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary. Prior to joining NetApp, from 1999 to August 2010, Mr. Fawcett served in various legal positions at JDS Uniphase Corporation, an optical components company, including as senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary. Prior to joining JDSU, Mr. Fawcett was counsel at Fujitsu and worked in private practice at Morrison & Foerster LLP. Mr. Fawcett is a member of the boards of the Association of Corporate Counsel and the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. Mr. Fawcett holds a BA degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD degree from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Additional Information

Our internet address is www.netapp.com. We make available through our internet website our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, amendments to those reports and other documents filed or furnished pursuant to the Exchange Act of 1934, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such materials with, or furnish them to, the SEC.

The SEC maintains an internet site (www.sec.gov) that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. The public also may read and copy these filings at the SEC’s Public Reference Room at 100 F Street N.E., Washington, DC 20549. Information about this Public Reference Room is available by calling (800) SEC-0330.