Item 1. Business

Overview

NetApp, Inc. (NetApp, we, or us) is the data authority for 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 to accelerate digital transformation. Together with our partners, we empower global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation and optimize their operations. 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 tops the strategic agenda in most organizations. To be successful in their digital transformations, data must become the lifeblood of an organization, seamlessly flowing through it to optimize operations, create innovative business opportunities and enable new customer touchpoints through technology.

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. The Data Fabric is NetApp’s strategy for simplifying and integrating the orchestration of data services across a choice of hybrid, multicloud environments. Customers can build their unique Data Fabric from a catalog of consistent data services that provide data visibility and insights, data access and control, and data protection and security. 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 focus on customers’ top IT imperatives as they undertake digital transformations. NetApp’s unique approach to data services 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 hybrid multicloud will be the dominant model for enterprise IT. Customers are attracted by the speed and scale benefits of the public cloud but they 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 fuel business growth by delivering data-rich customer experiences through new application deployments that easily use data and services regardless of where they reside or in what form.

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for AWS

Cloud Volumes Service for AWS delivers fully managed file services for NFS, SMB, or dual protocol support. With consistently high performance, Cloud Volumes Service provides shared persistent storage with high throughput and low latency that meets the demands of large databases and HPC applications.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Cloud Volumes ONTAP delivers secure, proven storage management services for AWS and Azure cloud storage. Cloud Volumes ONTAP combines data control with enterprise-class storage features for various use cases, including file shares and block-level storage serving NAS and SAN protocols, disaster recovery, backup and archive, DevOps, databases, or any other enterprise workload.

NetApp Cloud Sync

Cloud Sync is NetApp’s service for rapid and secure data synchronization. Whether organizations need to transfer files between on-premises NFS or CIFS file shares, Amazon S3 object format, Azure Blob, IBM Cloud Object Storage, or the NetApp StorageGRID® appliance, Cloud Sync moves the files where they are needed quickly and securely.

NetApp Cloud Secure

Cloud Secure operates on both cloud and on-premises storage systems to give organizations real-time alerts of malicious user behavior. Cloud Secure uses advanced machine learning algorithms to automatically uncover unusual data activity. It automatically updates protection policies and permissions to restrict access, stopping actual threats before they become breaches.

NetApp Cloud Tiering

Based on NetApp FabricPool technology, Cloud Tiering identifies infrequently used data in on-premises storage and automatically and seamlessly moves that data to lower-cost object storage in the cloud, leaving frequently used data on the high-performant, data center storage system. When the infrequently used tiered data is needed again, the service will automatically and seamlessly move it back to the high-performance tier.

NetApp SaaS Backup

SaaS Backup service is a complete software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that enables organizations to protect Office 365 and Salesforce data against threats or accidental deletion with secure backup and restore.

NetApp Kubernetes Service

NetApp Kubernetes Service simplifies multicloud management by enabling organizations to create and manage production-ready Kubernetes clusters at scale with our universal Kubernetes control plane. Kubernetes clusters can be launched at any of the major cloud providers and managed from a single pane of glass.

NetApp Cloud Insights

NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives organizations visibility into their entire infrastructure. Cloud Insights advanced data collection and analytics capabilities, monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize cost across all resources including public clouds and private data centers.

Cloud Infrastructure

NetApp Cloud Infrastructure is a portfolio of offerings that helps customers build cloud-architected data centers to accelerate new services. To accelerate digital transformations, customers are developing next-generation cloud-architected infrastructures that manage data and services as one integrated resource supporting both public and private clouds.

FlexPod

FlexPod® is a portfolio of prevalidated 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.

NetApp HCI

NetApp HCI is designed to deliver a public cloud consumption experience with simplicity, dynamic scale, and operational efficiency to hybrid multiclouds. Organizations can move faster while reducing costs with NetApp HCI by managing and running multiple applications with the predictable performance that enterprises demand.

NetApp StorageGRID Object Storage Software

NetApp StorageGRID® is a software-defined object-based storage solution that provides intelligent policy-driven data management. StorageGRID supports industry-standard object APIs such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API and OpenStack Swift API. Organizations can optimize data availability, performance, geo-distribution, retention, protection, and storage cost with metadata-driven policies.

Storage Systems and Software

The NetApp 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 AFF systems help organizations meet enterprise storage requirements with high performance, flexibility, and best-in-class data management and cloud integration. Combined with the industry’s first end-to-end NVMe technologies and NetApp ONTAP data management software, AFF systems accelerate, manage, and protect business-critical data. AFF systems eliminate performance silos in the data center by seamlessly integrating into a cluster with hybrid FAS systems, enabling workloads to transparently move between high-performance tiers and low-cost capacity tiers.

NetApp SolidFire® all-flash storage systems are architected for rapidly transforming environments. As the foundation for private cloud infrastructure, SolidFire allows independent scaling, consistent performance, and automation integrations, giving private cloud infrastructure the flexibility and consistency to scale as a service provider. SolidFire enables organizations to get closer to the speed and simplicity of business in the cloud while exceeding the demands of keeping data on-premises.

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.

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 OnCommand Unified Manager, which is included with ONTAP, provides a comprehensive data management solution for NetApp AFF, FAS and ONTAP Select storage.

NetApp ONTAP Select

ONTAP Select converts a server’s internal SSDs or HDDs, as well as HCI and external array storage into an agile, flexible storage platform with many of the same dedicated storage system benefits based on NetApp ONTAP. ONTAP Select can be deployed on new servers or on existing server infrastructure for added flexibility.

NetApp MAX Data

Memory Accelerated Data (MAX Data) moves beyond caching to true memory tiering for next-generation Intel Optane DC persistent memory (Optane DC PMM)—providing application performance and enterprise data protection. With MAX Data software, companies can realize the promise of real-time data analytics to deliver orders-of-magnitude faster transactions for business applications, such as Oracle, and for NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB.

NetApp FlexArray Storage Virtualization Software

NetApp FlexArray® virtualization software lets organizations use EMC, HP, Hitachi, IBM, and NetApp E-Series arrays as storage capacity in an ONTAP environment 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 OnCommand API Services

NetApp OnCommand API Services help IT organizations address today’s complex IT management challenges. Using representational state transfer (REST) APIs, companies can integrate disparate software tools to simplify the management of on-premises and cloud storage. IT organizations gain a view of the entire infrastructure with a single tool and can continue using their vendor-provided tools as needed to troubleshoot issues with specific infrastructure components.

NetApp Active IQ

Active IQ® artificial intelligence and machine learning power predictive analytics and actionable insights to help optimize investments in NetApp. Active IQ offers continual insights from machine learning algorithms that compare workloads across similar systems to get smarter over time; simplifies and automates operations with predictive, self-healing care; and monitors and predicts capacity usage to stay a step ahead of users’ rapidly growing data demands.

NetApp Data Availability Services

NetApp Data Availability Services simplify the protection and management of NetApp ONTAP data from primary to secondary to cloud S3 storage. Simplified orchestration improves performance of backup workflows when protecting large numbers of volumes, thereby increasing productivity, reducing cost and providing rapid time to business insight.

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.

NetApp SANtricity Storage Operating System

NetApp E-Series and EF-Series storage arrays with SANtricity software offer industry-leading performance, reliability, and ease of use. These capabilities mean that storage administrators can make configuration changes, perform maintenance, and expand storage capacity without disrupting I/O to attached hosts.

NetApp Element Operating System

NetApp Element® software delivers agility through scale-out flexibility, predictable performance and automation integrations so organizations can build clouds to accelerate new services. Integrated into the NetApp Data Fabric, Element software enables innovative architectures with flexible scale for our customers’ private clouds.

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 transform with the right cloud strategy, design an IT-as-a-Service model, and move to an operational hybrid cloud. From discovery and insight to strategic planning, NetApp Consulting Services collaborate with our customers to shape winning strategies to transform IT and reach their digital goals.

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 help our customers deliver greater business value. NetApp seasoned experts manage, support, and optimize on-premises and hybrid-cloud workloads. The NetApp Services team optimizes data storage system utilization, efficiency, and consistency and delivers actionable intelligence for managing data with proactive and predictive technology. Our offerings include independent support services, support account managers, residency services, and managed services.

Sales, Principal Markets, and Distribution Channels

We market and sell our products in numerous countries throughout the world. To increase visibility of NetApp as the data authority in the hybrid cloud, 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 cloud data services, private cloud, 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, solutions 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 2019, sales through our indirect channels represented 76% 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 26, 2019, our worldwide sales and marketing functions consisted of approximately 5,000 managers, sales representatives and technical support personnel. We have field sales offices in approximately 43 countries. Sales to customers Arrow Electronics, Inc. and Tech Data Corporation, which are distributors, accounted for 24% and 20% of our net revenues, respectively, in fiscal 2019. 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 sequential 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 typically 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; Fremont, California; 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. We are also a partner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) program.

Research and Development

We conduct research and development activities in various locations throughout the world. Total research and development expenses were $827 million, $783 million and $779 million in fiscal 2019, 2018 and 2017, 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, solutions and services (full-stack vendors) and others offer a more limited set of storage and data management products, solutions or services.

Technology trends – for example, the emergence of hosted (or cloud) storage, SaaS, hyperconverged infrastructure, and flash storage – are driving significant changes in storage architectures and solution requirements. Cloud service providers provide customers storage as an operating expense which competes with more traditional storage offerings that customers acquire through capital expenditures. 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 customers and 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. However, it is often difficult to anticipate future regulations pertaining to environmental matters and to estimate their impacts on our operations. Based on current information, we believe that our primary risk related to climate change is the risk of increased energy costs. We are not currently subject to a cap and trade system or any other mitigation measures that could be material to our operations, nor are we aware of any such measures that will impact us 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 26, 2019, we had approximately 10,500 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, 2019, are as follows:

Name	Age	Position
George Kurian	52	Chief Executive Officer and President
Ronald J. Pasek	58	Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Henri Richard	61	Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field and Customer Operations
Joel D. Reich	60	Executive Vice President and General Manager, NetApp Storage Systems and Software Business Unit
Matthew K. Fawcett	51	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 BS 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 business units’ product and solutions portfolio, and for managing NetApp’s manufacturing operations. 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 BS degree from Lehigh University.

Matthew K. Fawcett joined the company in September 2010 as senior vice president, general counsel, secretary and chief compliance officer. He is responsible for all legal affairs worldwide, including corporate governance and securities law compliance, intellectual property matters, commercial contracts, mergers and acquisitions, and government relations. Prior to joining NetApp, from 1999 to August 2010, Mr. Fawcett served in various 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 serves on the board of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley and on various advisory boards. 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.