Will Expanded Partnerships Boost NetApp's Top-Line Growth?

NetApp, Inc. NTAP recently announced an enhanced partnership with Red Hat, a premium provider of open-source solutions, to transform enterprise application development and management within virtual environments. By combining NTAP’s expertise in intelligent data infrastructure with the Red Hat OpenShift platform, the initiative empowers businesses to effortlessly manage on-premises and hybrid multi-cloud environments.

Businesses today face mounting pressure to innovate quickly and develop applications that streamline operations and create better outcomes for their customers.  Red Hat OpenShift, built on Kubernetes, is widely adopted by major global organizations to streamline application lifecycles, enhance productivity and facilitate innovation in areas like artificial intelligence (AI). 

With this expanded collaboration, NTAP is improving its data infrastructure, making Red Hat OpenShift environments more cost-effective and flexible. This aids customers in better managing, securing and protecting Kubernetes container workloads and virtual applications.

Key Components of the Enhanced NetApp-Red Hat Integration

A key aspect of this collaboration is the integration of NetApp Trident, a Container Storage Interface driver, with Red Hat OpenShift. This integration allows Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization users to leverage NetApp ONTAP’s advanced storage capabilities, such as replication and disaster recovery. 

With Trident, Red Hat OpenShift operations teams and DevOps teams gain simplified access to high-performance, all-flash storage that maintains persistence, ensuring continuity even as virtual machines or containers are created, modified, or removed. The new version of Trident, available at no additional cost, brings integrated protection, migration and disaster recovery capabilities. Also, it now supports Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, providing more options for cloud storage.

Another significant enhancement is the release of validated designs for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift AI deployments on Cisco FlexPod, NetApp’s converged infrastructure solution. With these validated designs, enterprises have greater assurance that their virtualized and AI-driven workloads will run smoothly within a unified environment.

As part of this collaboration, the companies are delivering a new integration between Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. This integration provides Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated customers with a first-party storage option on Google Cloud. With Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, organizations can now use enterprise storage built on NetApp ONTAP directly in Google Cloud, offering a managed environment optimized for high availability and performance.

Strategic Alliances Driving NTAP’s Revenue Prospects

NTAP’s continuous efforts to strengthen its collaborations with leading names not only drive greater innovation within businesses but also unlock new revenue streams for the company. In October 2024, NTAP expanded its partnership with Google Cloud by integrating unified data storage and intelligent services into the Google Distributed Cloud architecture. Google Distributed Cloud harnesses the power of NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure, backed by ONTAP and StorageGRID solutions, to boost its services, including databases, AI and analytics.

In September 2024, the company announced an advancement in generative AI, combining its data management expertise with NVIDIA’s AI software and accelerated computing. The partnership aims to augment enterprise retrieval augmented generation, unlocking the power of next-gen agentic AI. Apart from these, NTAP has strengthened its collaboration with Amazon Web Services to improve customer experiences through accelerated generative AI initiatives, simplified processes and valuable CloudOps solutions.

NetApp is also gaining from continued strength in demand for flash portfolio. Driven by momentum across flash, block, AI and cloud storage solutions, management has raised its guidance for fiscal 2025. It now expects revenues in the range of $6.48–$6.68 billion compared with the previous band of $6.45–$6.65 billion. 

San Jose, CA-based-NTAP assists enterprises in managing multiple cloud environments, adopting next-generation technologies like AI, Kubernetes and contemporary databases, and navigating the complexity brought about by the quick development of data and cloud usage.

NTAP’s Zacks Rank & Stock Price Performance

NTAP currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Shares of the company have gained 58.9% in the past year compared with the  sub-industry's growth of 33.6%.

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Other Stocks to Consider

Some other top-ranked stocks from the broader technology space are Workday Inc. WDAY, Arista Networks, Inc. ANET and InterDigital, Inc. IDCC. IDCC & ANET presently sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), whereas WDAY carries a Zacks Rank #2. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

ANET provides cloud networking solutions for data centers and cloud computing environments. The company offers 10/25/40/50/100 gigabit Ethernet switches and routers optimized for next-generation data center networks. In the last reported quarter, it delivered an earnings surprise of 7.36%. 

IDCC is a pioneer in advanced mobile technologies that enable wireless communications and capabilities. The company engages in designing and developing a wide range of advanced technology solutions, which are used in digital cellular as well as wireless 3G, 4G and IEEE 802-related products and networks. It has a long-term growth expectation of 17.44%

WDAY is a leading provider of enterprise-level software solutions for financial management and human resource domains. The company’s cloud-based platform combines finance and HR in a single system, making it easier for organizations to provide analytical insights and decision support. In the last reported quarter, it delivered an earnings surprise of 7.36%.

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NetApp, Inc. (NTAP) : Free Stock Analysis Report

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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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