NetApp Teams With Diskover Data to Unlock Data Value
The explosive growth of unstructured data is creating a new challenge for enterprises: storing data is no longer enough. The challenge seems acute in media and entertainment, semiconductor design, life sciences, and other industries built around massive file estates. To address it, Diskover Data and NetApp, Inc. NTAP joined forces, extending Diskover Platform's metadata discovery and governance capabilities to NetApp ONTAP and StorageGRID environments. The collaboration is likely to strengthen NetApp's value proposition in file-intensive industries while giving Diskover a powerful enterprise channel for expanding its data discovery platform.
NetApp has solidified its foothold in enterprise data infrastructure, with ONTAP and StorageGRID supporting organizations across on-premises, hybrid and cloud environments. However, as storage estates grow, customers can struggle to understand the enormous volumes of files residing across those environments. Diskover's DataDiscovery is designed to address that visibility gap. Using specialized scanners, the platform indexes metadata directly from ONTAP and StorageGRID.
For NetApp, the partnership strengthens the ecosystem around its storage infrastructure. Customers increasingly expect storage platforms to provide more than capacity and performance. By connecting Diskover's specialized discovery capabilities to ONTAP and StorageGRID, NetApp can potentially increase the strategic value of those platforms. The benefit is relevant as enterprises deal with explosive data growth driven by AI, high-resolution media, semiconductor design, scientific computing and cloud applications.
Furthermore, NetApp is positioning its unified data platform to activate enterprise data for AI without moving data. The company recorded more than 1,100 AI and data preparation wins in fiscal 2026 compared with roughly 400 in the prior year. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, it added about 350 AI and data lake modernization deals, with management noting larger deal sizes as prior pilots moved into production. DataPelago adds in-place data processing capabilities, while AFX and the AI Data Engine target high-performance AI workloads and governed data access. Management said AI is also driving broader modernization of databases and unstructured data environments, expanding the opportunity beyond dedicated AI infrastructure.
NTAP’s Competitive Terrain
Smith Micro Computer SMCI rides on expanding AI infrastructure demand, supported by rapid adoption of new GPU platforms, its modular Building Block architecture, liquid-cooling expertise and a broader DCBBS offering. Supermicro’s Open Storage Summit 2026, held in August, focused on the data infrastructure needed to deploy enterprise AI at scale. The event brought together Supermicro and ecosystem partners, including AMD, DDN, IBM, Intel, KIOXIA, MinIO, Nutanix, VAST Data and Western Digital, to discuss AI inference, agentic AI, hybrid-cloud storage, context memory and unstructured data management. The summit also highlighted Supermicro’s DCBBS architecture, which provides modular, validated AI infrastructure from servers and networking to rack and data-center-level solutions.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE is benefiting from a broader shift toward AI infrastructure, networking modernization and hybrid cloud, with Juniper expanding its addressable market and integration synergies supporting earnings growth. In September, HPE expanded its collaboration with Oracle to deploy HPE Juniper Networking across Oracle’s global AI data centers, supporting the company’s gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure expansion with networking services and financing capabilities. In June, it announced multiple AI infrastructure innovations, including a sovereign private AI cloud deployment for Siemens Energy, expanded self-driving networking capabilities and new AI Factory and Private Cloud AI solutions to help enterprises securely deploy and manage agentic AI workloads.
NTAP Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates
NetApp shares have gained 89.7% in the past year compared with the Computer-Storage Devices industry’s growth of 281.6%.
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Regarding the price/book ratio, NTAP is trading at 29.40, higher than the industry’s multiple of 15.95.
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The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NTAP’s earnings for fiscal 2027 has been revised upward over the past 60 days.
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NTAP currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
