Unlocking the potential of partners

At the heart of modern enterprise technology is a simple truth: data must be accessible, resilient, performant, and ubiquitous. NetApp occupies a foundational role in this world, delivering unified storage, data management, and cloud-native services to global enterprise customers.

But as data ecosystems have shifted toward hybrid cloud and complex partner networks, the challenge became less about what NetApp’s technology could do and more about how it could be expressed, adopted, and activated across audiences, partners, and strategic alliances.

We partnered with NetApp to help articulate that system—giving shape, strategy, and structure to one of the world’s most critical data infrastructure portfolios.

The Context

Infrastructure Without a Unified Narrative

NetApp’s technology power is unquestioned: industry-leading unified storage, cloud data services, and hybrid data fabrics that help enterprises deliver performance and reliability across on-premises, cloud, and multicloud environments.

Yet the ecosystem around this power includes:

• Global brand and enterprise sales organizations
  
• Developers building on modern hybrid cloud stacks
  
• Strategic alliances with cloud partners like IBM
  
• Complex product portfolios spanning storage, software, and services
  
  

The problem wasn’t capability. It was clarity—across internal teams, strategic partners, and enterprise buyers.

The Role We Played

Architects of Coherence. Translators of Capability.

We worked as a strategic partner to NetApp’s Global Brand Marketing, Enterprise Sales, Digital Experience, Creative Studio, and GSI enablement organizations—including close alignment with the IBM + NetApp partnership teams.

Our mission: design frameworks that elevated technical nuance into market leverage, built narratives that empowered enterprise adoption, and created structures that enabled product teams to speak with unified purpose.

What We Built Together

From Product Complexity to Strategic Narrative

Across a broad range of work, we helped NetApp unify how it presents its technology, partnerships, and platform capabilities across audiences and geographies:

• Brand & Messaging Architecture
  We reframed NetApp’s core value propositions to reflect the realities of hybrid cloud, multicloud data management, and partner orchestration.
  
  
• Strategic Product Positioning
  We articulated how NetApp’s unified storage and hybrid cloud fabric give customers the agility they need without compromising governance, sovereignty, or performance.
  
  
• Developer & Partner Storytelling
  We helped shape how NetApp communicates to developers and partners via the NetApp Developer site, ensuring clarity around APIs, tooling, and ecosystem enablement.
  (developer.netapp.com)
  
  
• Partnership Narrative Structures
  In particular, we streamlined how NetApp communicates its strategic collaboration with IBM Cloud, helping position joint solutions around hybrid cloud and enterprise transformation use cases.
  
  
• Enterprise-Ready Marketing Frameworks
  For global sales and creative studios, we provided repeatable architectures that help NetApp’s internal teams align product marketing, value storytelling, and global campaigns.
  

These structures weren’t decorative. They were foundational: allowing teams across NetApp’s organization to move with aligned purpose and amplified impact.

From Capabilities to Activated Advantage

The Shift

NetApp’s strength has always been in the engineering.
What changed was the audience perception—from seeing NetApp as a powerful infrastructure provider to understanding it as a strategic enabler of hybrid cloud transformation, developer platforms, and partner solutions.

By bridging technical value with market clarity, we turned deep capability into strategic advantage.

The Outcome

Momentum You Can See and Use

The work we helped shape enabled NetApp to:

• Provide unified narratives that travel across sales, marketing, partners, and product teams
  
• Align strategic partnerships (notably with IBM) under a shared language of hybrid cloud value and enterprise readiness
  
• Empower product and developer teams with focused messaging that supports adoption and ecosystem growth
  
• Strengthen global brand coherence without sacrificing technical legitimacy
  

Across every touchpoint—from executive pitch decks to developer portals to partner enablement frameworks—NetApp’s story became clearer, stronger, and more strategically aligned.

The Takeaway

Infrastructure isn’t just built. It’s understood.

In a world where data strategy is business strategy, clarity becomes competitive advantage.

Design and narrative aren’t extras.
They are the frameworks that make complex systems usable, credible, and powerful.