In this bonus episode, KB is joined by Pravjit Tiwana, NetApp’s Senior Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Storage Business Unit, Jeff Baxter, Vice President, Product Marketing, and Krish Vitaldevara, Senior Vice President, Shared Platform on the ground at NetApp Insight 2024. Together, they dive into the critical topics like cloud services, unifying customer data, and the future of intelligent data infrastructure.

The discussion delves into the importance of building strong relationships with hyperscalers, the impact of AI on enterprises, and the challenges of data governance. Join us as we explore strategies for integrating AI with data, addressing customer needs, and effectively managing data security and insights.

Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Storage Business Unit

Pravjit Tiwana is NetApp’s GM and SVP of Cloud Storage. In his role, Pravjit is responsible for continuing the acceleration of our market leading first-party services in all three public clouds.

Pravjit brings over 25 years of experience to the role, many of those in the cloud space. Most recently, he served as the CEO of Gemini APAC, leading a 1000 person team across engineering, product, program management, sales and Business Development functions. Prior to that, he held a variety of general manager roles at Amazon/AWS, leading the Productivity Applications business and then their Edge & Network Services business. Pravjit lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife and two teenage daughters (and his best friend, golden doodle Nemo). He is an avid golfer and marathon runner (when it isn’t raining in Seattle).

Jeff Baxter, Vice President, Product Marketing

Jeff Baxter is Vice President, Product Marketing at NetApp. In this role, Jeff leads the team responsible for core product & solutions marketing at NetApp. Previously, Jeff has held a variety of technical and strategy roles at NetApp, including serving Sr. Director of Product Management for ONTAP, Chief Evangelist for ONTAP, and Field Chief Technology Officer for the Americas at NetApp. Before joining NetApp, Jeff worked as an Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton advising multiple government clients and performing numerous in-depth storage assessments. Prior to Booz Allen, Jeff was Manager of Enterprise Systems at George Washington University, where he led a team of 15+ storage and systems administrators. He had responsibility for enterprise systems including collaboration and virtualization environments, as well as a complex storage system spanning multiple Data Centers. Jeff holds an MBA and BA from George Washington University. He is a NetApp Certified Data Management Administrator (NCDA). He has also has held VCP, SNIA, PMP, ITIL, and CISSP certifications.

Krish Vitaldevara, Senior Vice President, Shared Platform

Krish Vitaldevara is a passionate product leader and engineer with demonstrated success at building compelling multiyear strategies for large platform and product teams and delivering significant impact for large enterprises and billions of consumers. Krish is the SVP for Shared Platform at NetApp, responsible for unified storage platform, manageability platform, Customer eXperience Office (CXO), and Chief Design Office (CDO). His team enables delivery of various NetApp offerings across On-Premise, Hybrid Cloud, and Data Services. Prior to joining NetApp, Krish spent six+ years at Google in multiple roles, including leading product for Android and Plays Trust and Safety and Product for Google Maps. Krish joined Google after a long stint at Microsoft where he led product teams for O365 Foundations, Outlook.com, and Microsoft Consumer Trust and Safety teams. Early in his career, Krish worked at startups such as LoudCloud, started by Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreesen, and Brience, which enabled enterprises to customize customer experiences on mobile. Krish is also a proven innovator and hacker with more than 30 patents, primarily in distributed systems and spam-detection models, using graphs and networks for anomaly detection.