NetApp to Acquire Spot, Drive Cost Optimization for Workloads

NetApp will acquire Spot, a privately held startup focusing on cloud infrastructure and compute management. The price tag for the purchase is reported at $450 million.

This is NetApp’s third acquisition in as many months. Other recent investments include Talon Storage and CloudJumper. NetApp also recently announced that Cesar Cernuda, from Microsoft, is joining the company as president.

NetApp’s Anthony Lye

“In today’s public clouds, speed is the new scale. However, waste in the public clouds driven by idle resources and overprovisioned resources is a significant and growing customer problem slowing down more public cloud adoptions,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager, public cloud services at NetApp. “The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object, and Spot’s compute platform, will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy. Optimized customers are happy customers and happy customers deploy more to the public clouds.

Spot’s vision is to revolutionize the way companies consume cloud infrastructure services, using analytics and automation. This gives reliable, high-performing and cost-efficient infrastructure for every workload on every cloud, the company said.

Spot’s Amiram Shachar

“We are entering into this partnership because we hold the same vision,” Amiram Shachar, Spot founder and CEO, wrote in a blog. “[That vision] is helping application owners embrace and take advantage of the full power of the cloud.”

Both NetApp and Spot talk about application driven infrastructure (ADI). ADI translates application workload patterns into infrastructure requirements that the infrastructure understands, and it intelligently and continuously adapts to drive the optimal price at the highest level of performance for both storage and compute, while maintaining contracted SLA and SLO.

Better Together

Together, the companies will establish an ADI to enable customers to deploy more applications to the public cloud faster. Spot offers an as-a-service platform for the continuous optimization of both compute and storage for both traditional IT buyers with enterprise applications, cloud-native workloads and data lakes.

Lye contends that post-acquisition, Spot and NetApp will deliver savings of up to 90% on compute and storage, which account for more than 70% of the public cloud cost; also, optimized APIs for storage and compute on the public cloud users choose.

What does the acquisition mean to partners?

When the acquisition closes, NetApp’s Cloud First channel partners will be able to sell Spot. This gives NetApp partners a wider portfolio of products and a more expansive bench of existing customers.

“Channel partners can sell value in the form of savings of up to 70% of the cloud cost, increasing annual recurring revenue and added value services. We charge a percentage of these savings which we share with the partner,” Lye told Channel Futures.

Spot’s reseller and MSP partners will continue to offer and fully support Spot products as part of NetApp.

“Joining forces will help propel Spot and NetApp to the forefront in the minds of customers as they consider the software solutions that they need to be successful in the cloud,” Lye said.

Post-acquisition, NetApp will add Spot’s partners to its existing partner program. This gives all partners a broader portfolio of services to offer customers. Currently, NetApp and Spot share a small number of partners.

“The good news is NetApp brings enterprise apps to Spot partners and Spot brings cloud-native apps to NetApp,” said Lye.