Yesterday NetApp announced the acquisition of ionGrid, a privately held company based in Mountain View, California. The acquisition provides NetApp customers with a secure, simple to use solution for accessing enterprise file shares from mobile devices. This announcement was included with strong earnings and growth report for the 3rd quarter of the NetApp fiscal year 2013.
The marketplace has long recognized and selected NetApp as providing the best platform for enterprise NAS. With the acquisition we are extending datacenter NAS services to support access by a remote workforce via a secure, simple to use solution for mobile devices.
Some may question if NetApp is entering this market late, which is fair. In reality a market leader has yet to emerge. The lack of broad adoption for any existing solution is likely the result of gaps in providing enterprise class functionality. Challenges in areas like user authentication, secure data transport, infrastructure interoperability, etc. are critical for mass adoption. While I can’t share the NetApp product roadmap or release timeframe, the engineering team has committed to ‘WOW!’ our customers when the product is released to our field and partners.
Stay tuned, there’s more to come. In the mean time you should checkout ionGrid.
Very exciting stuff Vaughn. can’t wait to try this out. The challenges you listed off are indeed what I would also think of and represent many of the challenges I have faced with mobile device access to corporate information.
Dov