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Vendor lineage

NetApp

Named itself after exactly what it sold, which turned out to be most of the strategy.

Network Appliance was founded in Sunnyvale in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau and Michael Malcolm, on the observation that building file storage out of general-purpose servers was harder than it needed to be. The product was an appliance: a box that did one job, with an operating system - Data ONTAP - written for that job alone.

The name said what it was, which was an advantage in a market where everything else was assembled from parts. The first filer shipped in 1993, Sequoia funded the company in 1994, and it went public in 1995.

Its main competitor at the outset was Auspex Systems, where both Hitz and Malcolm had previously worked - which is the ordinary way storage companies begin, with people leaving one to build the thing it would not.

The dot-com years took NetApp past $1B in annual revenue. When the bubble burst, revenue fell to around $800M in fiscal 2002, and the recovery from there was slow and unglamorous rather than dramatic. It changed its legal name from Network Appliance to NetApp in 2008.

Two threads worth following from here. Michael Malcolm left the chief executive role in 1994 and founded CacheFlow in 1996, which became Blue Coat Systems - and in 2006 NetApp sold its NetCache product line to Blue Coat, so a company sold a business to the firm its own co-founder had built. Malcolm's earlier career had run through Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computers, both of which appear on this timeline having ended inside somebody else.

Hitz and Lau shared the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award in 2007. Hitz retired in 2019.

NetApp ↗
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