Item 1. Business

Overview

NetApp, Inc. (NetApp, we, or us) is a leader in hybrid cloud data services. In a world of increasing complexity, we simplify. We help our customers ensure their data and applications are in the right place at the right time with the right characteristics and capabilities to enable new insights and accelerate innovation. We do this by helping customers build their data fabrics. Together with our partners, we empower 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 successfully transform, data must become the lifeblood of an organization, accelerating efforts to optimize operations, create innovative business opportunities and enable new customer touchpoints. This puts IT leaders under tremendous pressure to harness today’s wealth of data and leverage technology to create new value across the entire organization - all with limited time, resources and budget. Digital transformation requires IT transformation. This is no small undertaking. Organizations are innovating on their choice of clouds, building private clouds to gain speed and agility, and modernizing and simplifying IT to accelerate critical business applications - sometimes all at the same time.

NetApp helps customers move from building data centers to building data fabrics. A data fabric simplifies the integration and orchestration of data services across clouds and on-premises to accelerate digital transformation. It delivers consistent and integrated hybrid cloud data services for data visibility and insights, data access and control and data protection and security. Data fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a choice of endpoints spanning on-premises and multiple cloud environments. Only NetApp can deliver the full range of capabilities organizations need for their data fabrics: the power to discover resources, integrate disparate data services, automate operations, optimize, and protect and secure data everywhere.

For customers looking to transform with cloud, only NetApp offers data services across the world’s biggest clouds: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform. Customers can choose the cloud resources that are best for their workloads and reduce the complexities of managing data across multiple clouds and on premises.

For customers looking to grow by adding new capabilities, speed and agility to their current environment, NetApp provides leading private cloud capabilities. This enables customers to deliver new applications and services faster and run existing workloads more efficiently. Customers enjoy performance, at scale, on premises, all with a single experience that unifies on-premises and public cloud.

For customers looking to run their current application environment more efficiently, NetApp provides high-performing, cloud-integrated technologies and converged and hyper-converged infrastructures. This includes a highly differentiated portfolio of all-flash and hybrid array offerings. Customers get better results with simplicity, speed and automation across core, edge, and cloud.

Product, Solutions and Services Portfolio

NetApp helps organizations unleash the power of their data to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge. 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 modernize and simplify IT, build private clouds for speed and agility, and fuel data-driven innovation on any cloud.

NetApp Keystone

During fiscal year 2020, NetApp introduced Keystone - our group of programs, offerings and services that simplify the business of hybrid cloud data services. It provides flexible cloud consumption models that make it easy to buy, easy to consume and easy to operate NetApp capabilities, whether it's on premises or in the public cloud. With Keystone companies can lessen the complexities associated with IT infrastructure and lifecycle management. Keystone gives IT buyers a clear, easy-to-understand path forward for managing IT, providing employees time to focus on more important business.

For IT organizations that want to take advantage of NetApp capabilities available on all the public clouds with cloud native, fully integrated and managed data and storage services paid for as a true utility, Keystone starts with NetApp cloud data services. For IT organizations that want cloud-like experiences in their own data center, NetApp Keystone subscription services offer a public cloud-like experience based on performance tier and storage service type – block, file, or object, available as customer-managed or NetApp-managed. For IT organizations that want to continue to buy capital infrastructure and capital equipment, Keystone offers a radically simplified experience. Our unique combination of efficiency, performance and availability guarantees helps IT organizations protect their storage investment. NetApp Active IQ AI-driven insights optimize the health of systems while predicting capacity and performance bottlenecks from an easy-to-use dashboard.

Cloud Data Services

NetApp Cloud Data Services is a portfolio of enterprise-class solutions that enable customers to fully control and manage storage systems in the cloud, consume high-performance storage services for primary workloads, and optimize cloud environments for cost and efficiency – available on all the biggest clouds.

NetApp delivers cloud storage as a software or service, enabling customers to choose whether to fully control and manage their own storage system in the cloud or simply choose their performance levels, service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs). Customers benefit from the ability to migrate data to the cloud with ease, securely, and efficiently with built-in data transport features and services for existing NetApp or third-party storage and can choose where to deploy primary workloads, without having to re-architect the applications or databases. Products include: Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, and Cloud Volumes Service for AWS.

NetApp cloud storage offers data management capabilities previously unavailable in public clouds, with services that deliver protection, orchestration, and optimization, as well as security and compliance.

NetApp Cloud Sync

Cloud Sync delivers simple, rapid, and continuous data migration and synchronization service for file systems with any cloud or on-premises target.

NetApp Cloud Tiering

NetApp’s Cloud Tiering service allows customers to retain on-premises, high-performance All Flash FAS (AFF) and FAS Solid-State Disk (SSD) storage and combine it with the benefits of cloud economics, leveraging the low costs of Azure Blob and Amazon S3 object storage.

NetApp Global File Cache

NetApp Global File Cache is a software-based solution that delivers fast and secure access to data for users by caching ‘active data’ sets to distributed offices globally.

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 Cloud Manager

Cloud Manager provides IT experts and cloud architects with a centralized control plane to manage, monitor and automate data in hybrid-cloud environments, providing an integrated experience of NetApp’s Cloud Data Services.

NetApp Fabric Orchestrator

NetApp Fabric Orchestrator discovers data, applications, and services by securely connecting to public, private, and on-premises providers. All assets discovered sit behind a unified Data Fabric API and a single user interface.

NetApp Cloud Insights

NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives organizations visibility into their entire infrastructure with the ability to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize cost across all resources including public clouds and private data centers.

Hybrid Cloud Solutions

NetApp Hybrid Cloud Solutions is a portfolio of offerings that deliver hybrid multicloud data services and a simplified customer experience. These solutions enable customers to modernize their IT architectures with cloud-connected flash to free the resources necessary to fund transformation, as well as simplify and automate virtualized workloads, accelerate the DevOps journey, build service provider-like infrastructure, and optimize unstructured data.

NetApp ONTAP Storage Operating System

With ONTAP 9, customers can build a hybrid cloud that is the foundation of a Data Fabric, spanning disk, flash, and cloud. 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 - while unifying data management across all of them, as well as SAN and

NAS environments. With ONTAP, customers get a comprehensive, industry-leading portfolio of storage efficiency capabilities. Inline data compression, deduplication, and compaction work together to reduce storage costs and maximize the data stored. Customers can multiply savings with space-efficient NetApp Snapshot™ copies, thin provisioning, replication, and cloning technologies.

NetApp AFF A-series

NetApp AFF A-Series all-flash arrays combine industry-leading performance, efficiency, and data management with seamless cloud connectivity. Powered by ONTAP, AFF A-series systems accelerate, manage, and protect business-critical data while eliminating performance silos 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 AFF C190

The NetApp AFF C190 storage system, powered by ONTAP software, offers a simple, smart, and secure enterprise-class flash system for an affordable price. Designed for IT generalists, it helps meet new business requirements with a modern all-flash array that provides comprehensive data services, integrated data protection, seamless scalability, new levels of performance, and cloud integration.

NetApp FAS Series

NetApp FAS arrays, powered by ONTAP software, are optimized for easy deployment and operation while also having the flexibility to handle future growth and cloud integration. The FAS family’s range of capabilities for SAN and NAS workloads make it an ideal solution for general-purpose business applications as well as backup and retention.

FlexPod

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. Customers and partners can choose from more than 100 validated application and infrastructure designs to confidently power AI, multicloud, and modern enterprise applications.

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 Data Availability Services

NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS) 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 designed to deliver high performance backup and recovery for database and application workloads hosted on ONTAP storage. This software simplifies backup, restore, and clone lifecycle management with a unified, scalable platform for application-consistent data protection and 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, replicating data at high speeds across the Data Fabric. 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 SnapLock Data Compliance Software

NetApp SnapLock® software delivers high-performance disk-based data permanence for HDD and 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 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 like the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API. Organizations can optimize data availability, performance, geo-distribution, retention, protection, and storage cost with metadata-driven policies.

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.

NetApp SolidFire

NetApp SolidFire all-flash storage systems, powered by Element software, are architected for rapidly transforming environments. As the foundation for private cloud infrastructure, SolidFire allows independent scaling, consistent performance, and automation integrations. 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 HCI

NetApp’s disaggregated HCI, powered by Element software, allows independent scaling of compute and storage, adapting to workloads with consistent performance. Organizations can consolidate workloads and reduce costs with unified data orchestration and integration across public, private, and on-premises environments.

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 EF-Series

NetApp EF-Series all-flash arrays, powered by SANtricity software, 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.

NetApp E-Series

NetApp E-series Hybrid Flash systems, powered by SANtricity software, are built for dedicated, high-bandwidth applications like data analytics, video surveillance, and disk-based backup that need simple, fast, reliable SAN storage.

NetApp Active IQ Predictive Analytics and Support

Active IQ® Predictive Analytics and Support continuously assesses telemetry data, drawing on trillions of real-time and historical diagnostic records and known risk signatures to spot potential problems before they have business impact. Active IQ can also look across the community to identify trends and suggest ways to enhance infrastructure security and efficiency.

NetApp OnCommand Insight

NetApp OnCommand Insight helps IT organizations monitor and troubleshoot across multivendor on-premises systems and cloud resources to meet SLAs. IT can optimize infrastructure to ensure applications are running on the right tier, as well as identify and reclaim unused resources to reduce cost.

NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation

NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation delivers on the Data Fabric vision, providing automation and integration to meet the demands of today’s evolving IT organization. Storage architects or administrators can define workflows based on policies and service-

level objectives to align them with organizational and NetApp best practices, as well as maintain control over development and maintenance of the automated workflows to align with changing business requirements.

Professional and Support Services

Professional services teams from NetApp and our partners offer assessment, design, and implementation services that help customers optimize their cloud and IT environments. These experts help customers deploy new capabilities with confidence. Our highly responsive NetApp Global Support organization supplies systems, processes, and people wherever they are needed to provide continuous operation in complex and critical environments. Our services offer IT organizations the right expertise to envision, deploy, and operate data management solutions, to accelerate innovation, and to increase lifetime solution value.

Using a company’s specific business goals as our benchmark, NetApp Services delivers the expertise to tailor a data fabric strategy for our customers. By designing, deploying, and integrating foundational strategies to accelerate the digital transformation journey, customers gain greater data accessibility and flexibility, reduced IT complexity and cost, and the enhanced IT agility needed to harness technology innovation faster in a hybrid multicloud world. Our proven methodologies, validated designs, and best practices are geared to ensure desired business and technical 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. Our marketing is focused on building our brand reputation and market awareness, communicating product advantages and demand generation for our sales force and channel partners. Our marketing efforts consist primarily of product, field, channel, solutions, and digital marketing and public relations. Marketing provides the focus and market advantage for NetApp to be customer-focused at every touch point, drive demand, and acquire new buyers and customers. This is critical to accelerate NetApp’s profitable and sustainable growth.

We form lasting partnerships with the industry’s best cloud, infrastructure, consulting, application, and reseller partners with one goal in mind: the success of our customers. Global enterprises, local businesses, and government installations look to NetApp and our ecosystem of partners to help maximize the business value of their IT investments.

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, hybrid 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 2020, 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 24, 2020, 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 43 countries. Sales to customers Arrow Electronics, Inc. and Tech Data Corporation, which are distributors, accounted for 25% and 21% of our net revenues, respectively, in fiscal 2020. 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 strive to have multiple suppliers qualified to provide critical components where possible and have our products manufactured in a number of locations 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

Our research and development delivers innovation to help customers modernize their IT environment and harness the power of private and public clouds. Our R&D structure allows us to align and accelerate the execution of our strategies and roadmaps across product groups. We leverage our shared IP for cloud and hybrid cloud solutions and talents to remain agile to changing market conditions. Our R&D priorities are to help customers harness the power of public and multi-cloud solutions, enabling modern data management applications and services, and to enable simple cloud-like experiences on-premises

We conduct research and development activities in various locations throughout the world. Total research and development expenses were $847 million, $827 million and $783 million in fiscal 2020, 2019 and 2018, 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.

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. Customer storage needs may also be addressed by cloud service providers. 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 strategies. Our strategy includes integrating and building relationships with leading cloud providers.

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, products and services. 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 trademarks and trademark registrations in the U.S. and other countries covering our various product or service names.

We generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, resellers, distributors, 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 24, 2020, we had approximately 10,800 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

Henri Richard retired from his position as the Company’s Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field and Customer Operations on June 5, 2020. Cesar Cernuda is expected to join the Company as President in July 2020. Therefore, our four executive officers and their ages as of June 10, 2020, were as follows:

Name	Age	Position
George Kurian	53	Chief Executive Officer and President
Michael Berry	57	Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Brad Anderson	61	Executive Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Group
Matthew K. Fawcett	52	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.

Michael J. Berry joined NetApp in March 2020 as executive vice president and chief financial officer, overseeing the worldwide finance, investor relations, workplace resources and IT organizations. Mr. Berry has served as a chief financial officer for 15 years in both public and private companies including McAfee, FireEye, Informatica, and SolarWinds. Most recently he was executive vice president and chief financial officer at McAfee where he was responsible for all aspects of finance, including financial planning, accounting, tax and treasury, as well as operations and shared services. Mr. Berry is a board member of Rapid7 and FinancialForce, holding the chairman of the audit committee position at each company. Mr. Berry holds a BS degree in finance from Augsburg University and an MBA degree in finance from the University of St. Thomas.

Brad Anderson joined NetApp in January 2018 and is the executive vice president and general manager (GM) of the hybrid cloud group, with responsibility for driving the strategy and development of NetApp’s hybrid cloud solutions portfolio. Prior to NetApp Mr. Anderson spent nine years as senior vice president and GM of HP Compaq’s servers business and seven years as president and GM of Dell's enterprise solution group. Immediately prior to joining NetApp, Mr. Anderson served as president and chief operating officer of Gravitant, a cloud service brokerage platform company. Mr. Anderson holds a BS degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School.

Matthew K. Fawcett joined NetApp 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.