If you caught my keynote at NetApp INSIGHT, you heard me say it loud and clear: NetApp’s data platform is the only hyperscaler-neutral, hypervisor-neutral data platform in the world. That’s not just a tagline — it’s a foundational advantage with data, clouds, and the future of Intelligent Data Infrastructure delivering AI transformation.

Why data portability matters across the Cloud

Let’s start with the basics. Most enterprises today are multi-cloud, whether by design or necessity. You might have workloads in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises, all at once. But here’s the catch: most data platforms force you to pick a side. They’re optimized for one cloud, or they require bolt-on gateways and appliances to “sort of” work across clouds. That’s not real neutrality. That’s a compromise. The reality is that data has gravity — at scale, it’s time-consuming and expensive to move. You need a platform that works seamlessly with the data, without moving it.

NetApp’s data platform is different. It’s the only first-party native offering that runs seamlessly in all three of the world’s largest clouds — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — without external appliances, synthetic file systems, or hidden costs. By first-party native offering, I mean that each of these hyperscaler cloud innovators has integrated ONTAP into their own offerings, a native offering integrated with the native cloud platform and services. This means your data platform is treated as a core service by the cloud provider. You get the same reliability, scalability, and support as any other native cloud service.

Anaplan, a leading business-planner software company, switched to NetApp by leveraging ONTAP both on-prem with AFF C-Series and FAS storagesystems and in the cloud with AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Adam Thier, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Anaplan, put it even better than I could when he said, “NetApp offers a unique ability to show all of Anaplan’s storage all around the world, both in the cloud and in data centers, with a single point of visibility to everything. That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s huge. None of NetApp’s competitors can do that.”

Extending neutrality to hypervisors

But hyperscaler neutrality is only half the story. The other half is hypervisor neutrality.

Many enterprises have built their data centers around an enterprise hypervisor to allow for significant cost savings and the flexibility that virtualization provides. And for the last several decades, VMware has had the lion’s share of the market and for good reason — it’s robust, familiar, and deeply integrated into their operations. But today, as market dynamics change and organizations look for flexibility in their on-prem operations as they have in the cloud, they are exploring multi-hypervisor arrangements as well.

In today’s hybrid environments, many enterprises continue to run VMware but seek greater flexibility and control over their hypervisor strategy. The challenge, of course, is keeping a common data platform regardless of hypervisor.

That’s where NetApp Shift Toolkit comes in. NetApp Shift Toolkit is designed to help you easily migrate between VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM-based virtualization (including Red Hat OpenShift, Oracle Linux VM, and Proxmox). We allow our customers to migrate between each without having to actually copy data. Using advanced ONTAP cloning technology, we never need to copy the data. We can take a near-instantaneous clone, rapidly convert the virtual disk format for a different hypervisor, automate reconfiguration, and, as a result, have each virtual machine migrated in minutes. It leverages the hyperscaler-neutral, hypervisor-neutral foundation of the NetApp data platform to give you true freedom of choice and let you literally “shift” your workloads on demand.

NetApp data platform: The foundation for AI and innovation

All of this is possible because of the NetApp data platform. Beyond just virtualization, this platform brings together any types of data — files, blocks, and objects — into a single, unified data model. It supports traditional data formats, metadata operations, and GenAI-driven retrieval operations on embeddings and tokenized data formats. It’s not just about where your data sits — it’s about how it moves, how it’s secured, governed, optimized, and activated to drive outcomes that matter

With distributed data operations, a federated active metadata fabric, and high-performance, secure, compliant storage and retrieval across the hybrid cloud, NetApp’s platform massively simplifies operations. It enables automation, visibility, policy, protection, and AI readiness everywhere.

For example, Agilent helps power great science across the world, and their global teams can access the same datasets everywhere, without copying data, using NetApp’s integrated FlexCache technology to create a true global namespace.

Extending this technology to AI has allowed our customers to make all their on-prem data transparently available to the latest AI tools across the major clouds — without having to copy those files first. With the NetApp Data Platform powering your AI, you get a global namespace aligned with your data communities, federated controls powered by intelligent data agents, and a knowledge graph that helps you discover hidden patterns and relationships in your data.

Unleashing genius through intelligent data infrastructure

At the end of the day, intelligent data infrastructure isn’t just about technology — it’s about unlocking what organizations can achieve when data becomes intelligent. Outcomes don’t come from systems alone; they come from teams pushing what’s possible every day. NetApp’s legacy is built on earned trust, delivering modernization, efficiency, and resilience at scale through every era of change.

So, as you consider your next move — whether it’s cloud migration, virtualization modernization, or AI adoption — remember this: the NetApp data platform gives you the freedom to choose, the power to innovate, and the confidence to unleash genius.

Learn more about our virtualization solutions and cloud solutions on NetApp.com.