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

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A €“ George Kurian: I think with our cloud outlook, we’ve been cautious to address three topics, right? One is consumption services on the cloud are being impacted by customers reducing spend either by optimizing the performance level that they use or the total capacity they use in our cloud storage services. That will happen for a period of time and then we will see build back. We don’t see that yet in the outlook. I think with regard to project-based workloads, listen, there are lots of different customers with different projects. I think in this case; we saw a few large projects come off our environment. And we’ve been cautious about how many of those come back in terms of our outlook. It will take time for them to come back as new projects and new chip designs.

We are the only option in the public cloud for semiconductor chip design technologies to be verified as a cloud service. So, we expect, over time, more and more customers will use our cloud services but that will take time. And then I think in our CloudOps portfolio, as I said, we are pleased with the work that we’ve done so far. There’s still more work to be done. And so we’re being appropriately cautious about how fast that product portfolio, especially Cloud Insights grows in the second half of this year.

Mehdi Hosseini: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from David Vogt with UBS. Please go ahead.

David Vogt: Great. Thanks guys for taking my question. Hi George, hi Mike. Maybe just a big picture question on macro and linearity and how you thought about the quarter as it progressed because obviously, you did a good job of cutting costs, managing the business to the economic backdrop. But all-flash arrays were relatively weaker in the quarter, suggesting that obviously, you probably knew early in the quarter that customers were looking for more maybe cost conscious or cost-effective solutions. And you mentioned a lot of decisions were picked up to the CTO level or the CFO level. So, can you, kind of, discuss what you saw as the quarter progressed from a demand perspective? Was there a pivot point or was it just sort of a gradual bleed as we walk through each of the months? And how did it relate to, let’s say, 90 days ago when we had this conversation? Thanks.

George Kurian: I think it got progressively worse through the quarter. I think you see us being appropriately cautious in our guide as a result as well. I think that the rate increases getting compounded at a very fast clip certainly impacted customers’ business confidence, and that got the range of customers that were affected with their business confidence grew through the quarter and the depth of the impact on spending grew. I don’t think we saw any particularly meaningful shifts between product mix in the quarter. Hybrid flash has performed well for a few quarters now and all-flash has been — as a percentage of our total mix has been more steady than as a growing percentage of our mix. So, I think — I don’t think that our view of the product portfolio affected as much as the view of the total business opportunity available in customers. I’ll let Mike add any color.

Mike Berry: Yes. Thanks, George. So David. Per George’s comments, when we saw linearity in the quarter, month one was relatively consistent with what we’ve seen in, I’ll call it, non-Q4 quarters. What we really saw was month two push into month three. And typically, we will see, call it, mid 40% of transactions and invoices in month three. That pushed to almost 60% this quarter. So, what you saw was in the second month of the quarter really started to push into the third month. And that’s what we saw that really back-end linearity that I spoke about in my prepared remarks.

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