Brad Anderson SVP and GM Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit, NetApp

NetApp, Inc. appointed Brad Anderson as the SVP and GM of the cloud infrastructure business unit.

It has a significant opportunity to help customers build next-generation data centers with the scale, QoS and rapid time-to-value that modern applications and software development paradigms require.

Reporting to NetApp CEO George Kurian, Anderson will drive the strategy and the execution that are necessary to give customers a framework for their cloud-architected data centers. These data centers can then deliver cloud services for applications in private and service-provider models.

The cloud infrastructure business unit focuses on a portfolio of offerings that help customers build cloud infrastructure, including converged infrastructure solutions like FlexPod, hyper converged infrastructure, SolidFire all-flash arrays, and StorageGRID object-based storage.

“Brad understands how to focus an organization to evolve rapidly in response to a dynamic market and has a track record of turning multiple emerging products into multi-million – and billion-dollar businesses,” said Kurian. “He brings the leadership experience that we need to both shape direction and lead the company-wide execution that is necessary to further expand our cloud infrastructure business.”

“Bringing Brad on board is further proof of our commitment to expanding our leadership talent and capabilities. It also demonstrates to the industry our serious commitment to establishing a leadership role in helping customers build their next-generation data centers with our best-in-class converged infrastructure and hyper converged infrastructure solutions,” he continued.

“I am excited to join NetApp, a market-leading company that’s well positioned to help customers accelerate their digital transformation and unleash the power of their data,” said Anderson. “NetApp’s unified portfolio of CI and HCI solutions addresses the needs of diverse customers as they build cloud-architected data centers for next-generation applications.”

For the past 20 years, Anderson has been a leader in the enterprise infrastructure market, managing and growing businesses. He was at HP Compaq for nine years as the SVP and GM of industry standard servers, leading the $8 billion x86 server business. He spent seven years as president and GM of Dell’s $12 billion enterprise solutions group, leading servers, storage, networking and software businesses. Most recently he was president and COO of Gravitant, a cloud service brokerage platform company.

He holds a BS degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.