US data infrastructure firm NetApp is looking to India as a proving ground for the next phase of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI), betting that the country’s scale, regulatory complexity and data growth will shape how AI systems are built and deployed globally.
“If I can make it work for customers in India, I can make it work for everybody in the world,” said Syam Nair, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at NetApp, speaking to BW Businessworld on the sidelines of the company’s INSIGHT Xtra event in Mumbai.
India, he said, is moving beyond experimentation into a phase where governments, public sector bodies and private enterprises are jointly shaping what an AI-driven economy will look like.
“A lot of the foundation models are being built out of the United States,” Nair said. “But the real value of AI is going to be driven by countries like India, where private, public sectors and the government are coming together and progressively thinking about where AI goes.”
NetApp, which provides storage, data management and cyber resilience technologies, is positioning itself not as an AI model builder but as an enabler of what it sees as a more fundamental constraint: data readiness.
“We are still in the real early phase of data infrastructure growth globally,” Nair said. “A lot of the last three years have been spent on capex on the compute side, everybody buying GPUs and building AI factories. But not many enterprises are actually getting value out of their AI investments.”
India Growth Momentum And Market Position
India has emerged as one of NetApp’s fastest-growing markets, largely supported by enterprise demand for private cloud, sovereign cloud and AI-ready data platforms, according to Premalakshmi Ramakrishnan, Area Vice President for India and SAARC, NetApp.
“Every enterprise organisation, irrespective of industry, is looking at how to bring enterprise AI at scale across their organisation,” Ramakrishnan said.
She pointed to growing demand from sectors such as banking, financial services, telecoms, healthcare and government, particularly as data residency rules tighten under Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act.
“What we are seeing is enterprises building policies around what data continues to remain in their data centres and what data can move to the cloud,” she said. “As India continues to mature with data residency policies, we see more and more data becoming an integral part of enterprise data centres.”
While declining to disclose company-specific revenue figures due to a quiet period, Ramakrishnan cited industry data to underline NetApp’s position.
“In India, we are already growing at a 29 per cent CAGR from an overall market standpoint, as reported by IDC,” Ramakrishnan said. “We are leaders in all-flash storage, and we have been number one in the overall storage market in the last two quarters.”
NetApp, she added, is deeply embedded in India’s private cloud ecosystem.
“Eight out of 10 top private cloud providers run their data infrastructure with NetApp,” Ramakrishnan said, citing partnerships with hyperscalers including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, as well as Indian IT services firms such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to build its private cloud.
In India, NetApp’s customers include Narayana Health and Mahindra & Mahindra, where more than 60 applications run on NetApp’s data infrastructure, helping the automaker to modernise its data systems and support AI workloads spanning inference and model development.
Enterprises Face AI Bottlenecks Beyond Compute
Despite growing investment in AI infrastructure, NetApp executives said many companies are struggling to translate spending into business outcomes, particularly as data volumes and formats multiply.
Indian enterprises, Ramakrishnan said, face four key challenges: multi-cloud complexity, rapid data growth, AI readiness and cyber resilience.
“Almost 70 to 75 per cent of Indian enterprises are in a hybrid or multi-cloud setup,” she said. “Data is getting fragmented across public cloud, private cloud and on-prem environments, and customers are finding it difficult to manage the cost and complexity.”
She warned that AI initiatives built on fragmented or poor-quality data risk delivering unpredictable outcomes.
“Any AI is only as good as the data foundation beneath,” Ramakrishnan said. “If the data is not of the right quality or not able to integrate and talk to each other, the outcomes become unpredictable.”
Cyber resilience has also moved up the agenda as ransomware and cyber threats increase.
“It’s not just about defending data,” she said. “It’s about building true resilience and managing who sees what, who has access to what, and being able to recover.”
Nair said these challenges were not unique to India but were amplified by its scale.
“Once you actually prepare the data and make it AI-ready and start delivering value, it creates a virtuous cycle,” he said. “That’s the opportunity.”
India Among APAC Leaders In AI Investment
From a regional perspective, India stands out as one of Asia-Pacific’s most aggressive investors in AI, according to Dhruv Dhumatkar, Senior Director and APAC Chief Technology Officer at NetApp.
“Everyone is talking about AI, but who is putting money on the table?” Dhumatkar said. “It’s Japan, Korea and India. And India is listed in the billions, versus some other countries in the millions or hundreds of millions.”
India’s advantage, he said, lies in the breadth of its AI use cases, spanning government, financial services, language technologies and population-scale systems.
However, Dhumatkar cautioned that the pace of adoption, particularly in emerging areas such as agent-based AI, could be constrained by energy availability and the high cost of GPUs.
“There will be some level of restriction on the pace, driven by energy needs and the ability to get your hands on GPUs,” he said. “To the masses, GPUs are expensive affairs.”
Still, NetApp expects India to remain central to its long-term strategy, both as a market and as a talent hub. The company’s largest technology teams in Asia-Pacific are based in India, supporting product development and enterprise deployments worldwide.
“Thought leadership, sharing use cases and building pragmatic roadmaps are critical,” Dhumatkar said. “The fact that these conversations are happening here speaks to India’s leadership in this space.” |
