India’s AI infrastructure race is no longer being led by startups alone. Banks, telecom operators and government agencies are emerging as the biggest buyers of enterprise AI infrastructure, according to NetApp, which says demand is rising as organisations prepare their data for production-scale AI.
In an exclusive interview with AIM, Premalakshmi Ramakrishnan, Managing Director and Area Vice President, India and SAARC at NetApp, says the company’s plans are to build solutions to help enterprises unify fragmented data across on-premises, private cloud and public cloud environments so it can be used for AI workloads.
“We are a data intelligent infrastructure company, helping our customers turn their data into a catalyst for innovation, resilience and business growth,” She says.
Ramakrishnan notes NetApp’s ONTAP operating system remains the foundation of the company's storage platform and has evolved to support modern AI applications by integrating with open-source technologies while improving storage efficiency and performance.
“Customers building AI agents are able to leverage the performance and storage efficiency that come with ONTAP to deliver better AI outcomes,” she says.
According to NetApp, ONTAP manages file, block and object storage across on-premises and cloud environments while providing data protection, cyber resilience and workload optimisation.
Building on ONTAP, NetApp introduced its AI Data Engine last year to prepare enterprise data for AI applications. The platform automatically discovers, indexes and synchronises data across hybrid environments, creates AI-ready metadata and vector embeddings for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, and applies governance and security controls.
The company’s AI infrastructure portfolio also includes AFX, a disaggregated storage platform built for AI factories and large-scale GPU deployments, enabling storage to scale independently of compute.
NetApp also offers AFF (All Flash FAS) systems for enterprise workloads such as databases, virtual machines and AI applications that require high-performance, low-latency storage.
India remains a key growth market
Ramakrishnan said India continues to be one of NetApp’s important markets, with demand coming from banking, telecom, public sector and manufacturing.
According to IDC data cited by the company, NetApp holds a 29% share of the external storage OEM market and about 36% of the all-flash storage market in India.
She said banking remains the company’s largest vertical.
“Nine out of ten banks run on NetApp technology, whether for core workloads or tier-two and tier-three workloads. We continue to gain momentum with banking and financial services,” Ramakrishnan says.
Telecom is another major growth area for NetApp in India. Ramakrishnan says telecom operators rely on the company’s technology for many of their core workloads.
Besides that, neo-cloud players are also emerging as customers. “The whole market is expanding with AI, where neo clouds are becoming very popular and making huge investments to offer AI services to Indian customers,” she says.
Ramakrishnan says cloud providers, including Tata Communications, TCS, Airtel, ESDS, Reliance and CtrlS, use NetApp technology to power their data centres. These providers offer infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), data platform services and storage-as-a-service built on NetApp’s platform.
She says Tata Consultancy Services has been working with NetApp for nearly a decade, with its private cloud infrastructure powered by NetApp technologies.“We continue to partner with TCS on multiple initiatives across their private cloud and internal workloads,” she says.
Ramakrishnan says NetApp has expanded its presence in government projects, including data centre modernisation, surveillance and smart city work, and is seeing strong traction in state and central government bids due to its technical capabilities and solution optimisation.
She also points to deployments across IT services, manufacturing and healthcare as part of NetApp’s AI and data infrastructure strategy, citing Mahindra & Mahindra’s use of the platform to build a data lake that collects vehicle data for analytics and product improvement.
In healthcare, she said Narayana Health uses ONTAP services on Microsoft Azure to manage patient data securely while giving clinicians faster access to information.
“They have built a data lake that helps keep patient records confidential while providing doctors with timely information to make healthcare recommendations,” Ramakrishnan explains.
Competition and India Focus
NetApp competes with players such as Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, HPE, and IBM, all of which are vying for a larger share of the enterprise AI infrastructure market.
Ramakrishnan says NetApp stands out for its unified platform, which lets customers run applications and data across any environment and replicate data seamlessly. She adds that more than 100 Indian partners support deployment and management.
India plays a major role in NetApp’s product development.
The company employs more than 3,600 engineers in India, with around 160 engineers working specifically on the AFX platform and AI Data Engine. NetApp’s India business organisation comprises roughly 300-350 employees, she adds.
Ramakrishnan says the company’s Bengaluru research and development centre contributes to advancements in data management, cloud technologies and secure storage. “A lot of NetApp’s ONTAP innovation happens from our Bengaluru R&D centre,” she says.
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