NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Q €“ Sidney Ho: Great. Thank you very much.

Operator: Our next question will come from Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Q €“ Victor Chiu: This is Victor Chiu in for Simon Leopold. You noted several customers that concluded several large projects and then drove capacity reductions. Can you help clarify what changed versus your expectations exactly because the way that you kind of described at the conclusions were kind of natural and then so we assumed it would have been somewhat expected. So, either did they conclude earlier? I think you mentioned there was some chip design kind of timing-related issues. Can you just help us clarify why this dynamic was not expected?

George Kurian: Listen, I think we have seen in the past projects get concluded in a quarter and other projects get started up within the same quarter or by other customers within the quarter. This time, we saw some particularly large projects that concluded in the quarter where the start of the next project is beyond the finish of the quarter and further out than we would like. So, I think that was the nature of what happened in the quarter. I think the — would honestly want to get better visibility. We are working on that. I think this is when we have another partner selling the service to the end customer. Our sales teams are working to get better visibility into the end customers kind of priorities and spending time lines. So that’s on us. We can do better on that, and I promise that.

Victor Chiu: Okay. And then just quickly, regarding your commentary on macro headwinds, are you observing explicit behavioral trends or having explicit discussions with customers that makes you confident that the slowing is specific to the macro environment versus a more secular shift like accelerating workload migrations to the public cloud?

George Kurian: I think we are closely engaged with a large number of the enterprise customers through our direct sales force in the midsized enterprise market, as you know, we go to market with the channel providers. In terms of the customer behavior we saw in the quarter, it is very reflective of a typical macro cycle, more approvals for deals, smaller deal sizes, projects being broken up into phases rather than one large purchase and some deals moving out of the quarter. That did not mean that other customers did not start projects with us and move them forward. We know that those projects are — that we did not lose share to somebody else because we are in ongoing dialogue around the other phases of the projects that are yet to come online.

Victor Chiu: Got it. That’s helpful. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Meta Marshall: Great. Thanks. I just wanted to get a sense of whether we could get what the size of Hi-tech and service provider is as a percentage of the cloud revenue or just kind of any vertical concentration that we should be mindful of? And then maybe last quarter, you had given kind of the storage services as a percentage of cloud ARR. If we could just have an update there, that would be helpful as well. Thanks,

George Kurian: Yes. Listen, Meta, we’re not going to break out specific verticals. I would just say that we saw a broad-based — hi-tech is quite a broad segment, and we saw a fairly conservative posture across that segment. Service provider could — is also broadly defined. It could be telco. It could be hosting provider. It could be some form of cloud providers. So, these are broader categories than a very specific definition. And we saw a fairly conservative postures across most of those customers.

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