From Strategy to Story: How Gabie Boko Engages Customers at NetApp

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. You know, it's my pleasure to introduce Gabie Boko to you.

Gabe is the Chief marketing officer at NetApp. You know, we've been having sort of a running conversation with some of our friends at NetApp now for the last couple months, but I'm really ha happy to have Gabe here to kind of tie a bow on things, but also just to, I al I'm always fascinated to hear people's stories and their journey and, and how they got here. And I know a lot of you out there aspiring folks early on in your careers you say, I want to be a C-level chief marketing officer, chief revenue, chief technology, what have you.

And here's someone who can give you some real life experience and, and tips, perhaps. Gabe, welcome to Text Drunk tv. It's great to have you on here.

Thank you so much for inviting me, Alan. Happy to be here. Thank you.

So Dave, I hope I didn't embarrass you or put too much on your shoulders right off the bat, but there are people out here, probably a little younger than me who say, man, I, you know, that's where I want to be one day. I wanna be a C-level exec at a public company or what have you. Um, give us a sense of your journey, how you came to be here today.

You know, I, uh, well, first thanks for the question. I, I think I actually said to you privately, I didn't know that anybody wanted to be a C-level. Um, and maybe that's, um, specific to my journey, right?

I don't think I started off saying, this is the role or the space or the suite that I wanted to be in. Um, I started off by, you know, deciding that I, I didn't like what I was thinking I wanted to do and I wanted to change. And technology at that time offered me a, a new future, and I just ran at it as hard as I could.

Um, and, and I think that that's, that really denotes my whole journey. It's, uh, a lot of tech companies, a lot of different kind of tech, a lot of software. Um, more recently in the last decade, maybe a lot of hardware.

Um, but at the core is really companies that are trying to do something different. Maybe they're, you know, longtime legacy companies. Maybe they have just bought a company.

There's always some level of transformation that I'm attracted to when I join a company, which is Harkins back to why I wanted to do tech anyway, which was I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a part of something that was interesting and, and potentially changing the world. And, you know, I think that if you can understand why you're doing something and you do it really well, then the, the chair follows, right?

The job follows. And, and I think that that's, that's probably the best description of my journey that I can give you. I love it.

You know, I had a similar experience. I actually went to law school during law. I became the word perfect guy in the office, the only lawyer who could do the word per 'cause.

Lawyers didn't use word. We used word perfect, correct. And, uh, and, um, and that, but tech just kind of grabbed me by the throat and, and this is what I wanted to do with my life.

And, and for much of the same reasons you said, in some ways changing the world, the excitement of new things, discovering new things, yeah. Bringing new things, you know, to market. And, um, it is, it it, and it's funny, you know, as much as things change, they say this, stay the same.

It's true. Here we are in this age of AI now, and it's that same excitement. What a great time to be alive, right?

Even though it may take your job, as some people say, I don't believe it will. I think it's going to create more opportunities for us all. I agree.

And, uh, I'm excited. I'm excited to see what tomorrow brings and yeah. And you know, as long as you have that curiosity and that passion, as you said, you don't aim for a particular chair, the chair follows you.

That's right. That's right. And I think that that's absolutely, that's, if you can hang on to that, then that keeps what you do next, authentic and real, and makes you the right kind of mentor and or collaborator in the chair.

So, um, yeah, I agree with you. I agree. Absolutely.

So let's talk NetApp a little bit. Okay. Before we jump into things.

As I said, uh, most of our audience is probably familiar with NetApp. We, I mean, and let me not blow my own horn, not because we're covering them. com days, right?

We were, yeah, what they call an a SP application service provider. Right? And, and we need it, you needed network attached storage.

But, um, NetApp's been around, people know it, it's, they think they know it, but of course, NetApp has reinvented itself a couple of times along the way. Mm-hmm. As you sit here today, right before Thanksgiving, what do you, how do you describe NetApp to people?

Ga Yeah. Uh, you know, I love this question because it's something that as a marketer, marketers sink their teeth into. But if you're a technical person, then, then what you're really looking for, do they still remember who I am and why I knew them?

And I think that that's the fine line that we've been walking and, and I think we're in a really interesting spot right now. If I look back on the 30 years, and by the way, it's been 30 years, what we have is a company who's been dedicated to not just storage, not just data management, not just cloud or hybrid cloud. Not just, not just, but we've been dedicated to data, um, and, and getting access to it, to storing it, to moving it.

And, and what that means is, is that we've been responsive to a market and to people who would buy us and use us, wanting their data not to be just one place, but wanting it to be many, wanting it not to be passive, but wanting it to create the power for them to drive change. So when I got into this chair a little over two years ago now, um, we wanted to go back to what it was that people would've known us for. We, and still give them the sense of who we were and, and who we continue to want to be.

And that's when we really thought about that. We came up with something that we call the intelligent data infrastructure, and that we're the intelligent data infrastructure company. Um, and when you think about what that is, data still in between those three words is still at the core.

And when you think about infrastructure, it says, we still pay attention to data storage because it is where it lives. But when you think about infrastructure, you're also thinking about where it moves, how it moves with data management. And then if you bolt on then the opportunity that you opened up with about AI by saying intelligent, we really wanted to connect both of those legacy kind of components that we'd brought with data to the future of where we thought data was going.

Um, we believe that it's, it's not just about, uh, where your data lives, obviously. Um, we believe we're with this storyline thinking about how data's evolving and how it's gonna be that proven foundation for the future, which is an AI future as we already know, um, how important everything choice we've made in the past 30 years. Cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, data storage, data management, all data fabric, all of it factors in.

Because what that means is that we believe into that NetApp is a proven foundation, a proven foundation for, um, not just those aspects, but the future aspects because it's intelligent at every layer layer. It is connected by design to all the public clouds. It is got security and resilience built in, not bolted on.

And that's, we like to say that, but ultimately it's a foundation that, that really unlocks human potential and business potential. And, and we like to think of intelligent data infrastructure as something that when we can help make your data intelligent, then something bigger is gonna happen and it's gonna happen with you driving. So that's a little bit of the NetApp journey over 30 years.

That's how we're thinking about where we've been and how we're trying to embrace the future, um, and how we're doing it as truly technical people with an eye to, um, to building markets and, and making something interesting for the next generation of people who will want to know NetApp. Absolutely. If you don't mind, I wanna, you know, the AI thing is, it, it of course ate all of our conversations.

I wanna just focus in though on marketing and you, you're, you're a chief marketing officer, you're a marketing expert. If we look at, you know, the low hanging fruit where AI is disrupting almost immediately, marketing is one of those areas. I think I see it here.

Um, how, from your point of view, as a master marketer, and I don't mean to embarrass you, but as a master marketer, how is it reshaping, right? How we tell our stories, how we reach our audience, how we know who our audience even is? How do we measure success, failure, good, bad, or what have you?

How, how has it changed how you look at your job and your, your function, and not just you, but the whole team there? Yeah. You know, thanks for the question.

Mostly because everything I just said about how we're thinking about the company holds true for how even marketers in my day-to-day job thinks about it. Um, I believe that AI is a powerful enabler, just like we talked about it up in how we've crafted what our brand statement was. I believe personally that it's here to assist and not replace.

I know that there's a lot of aspects that it will replace, but it's not a replace, it's almost like a net new, right? Maybe we don't need to do it the same way AI can help us do that better and give us the opportunity to go be creative or, um, spectacular in other areas. So, um, I think that it really helps marketing teams, uh, work smarter, obviously, make decisions faster.

Um, it clearly offer, you know, offers new dynamic levels of creativity because what AI does, I believe is feeds off of data, right? Uh, that's just at the core. Um, we know that it, it processes models in, in an amount of time that no human could have ever done that, which is why it's such a great tool.

Um, what you feed it is important, right? So especially from a marketing perspective, when you're looking at what data you want to, you know, have AI contribute on a marketing level, you are giving it the ability to help crunch numbers, to find, uh, net new markets in a faster way, to try to find trends, to find opportunities so that you can go be creative and then feed that back into the same model and say, all right, you're telling me it's this, if I add this in, what does it do? And, and, and that's really why I think AI is a help, right?

Sure. I think that AI can't replace human instinct. It can't, definitely can't replace empathy today.

I'm, I'm pretty sure it won't tomorrow either. I think marketers need to continue to show up with curiosity and creativity and thinking about what connections they are looking to drive, and then to use AI to help them tell those stories, to reach those new audiences. Like you were talking up at the beginning, right?

So, um, for me, AI helps. It doesn't hurt us. Absolutely.

You know, I, I wrote an article a couple weeks ago and to paraphrase, Billy Joe, AI can't start the fire, the human sparks. It does. Right?

But the ai, you're absolutely right. The AI is a great tool. I wanna come back though to what you were, we were talking about just before, about sort of this rebrand, if you, not a rebrand a, an evolution to the branding of NetApp becoming an intelligent data infrastructure company.

Yeah. And I, I think part of it is the realization, hey, stupid, it's all about the data, right? For a long time, we seemed to almost forgot we were so busy about the app and app and app security and running the app and making the app mobile Yeah.

And making the app. But we forgot it's about the data. The date is the, the, the crown jewels the date is what we we're going for.

As part of this rebrand or a brand evolution as I called it, you had to kinda reset people's vision or, or expectation when they heard NetApp Yeah. Hardware company. Yep.

Storage company. What were the lessons learned? What were the, what were the gotchas, what was it on your bingo card, right?

When, when, as this thing played out? Yeah. I'll be honest, my first, I think my first six months of listening, people were like, you're not in the cloud.

You're a storage company, so you know mm-hmm. Try to remember who you are. Um, and I, I took that in and it, like, part of you is like, yeah, but cloud is what makes everything that we do for you on-prem unique.

Um, but that wasn't, wasn't landing in the way we wanted it to. In addition, I think as with all things marketing, right? When sometimes when you do it by committee, you end up with what I call a list of commas, right?

You literally have a, a long list of offerings and words that you're trying to jam in so that you are, are meeting every audience. And what ends up happening is you end up meeting no audience. Um, so people, if they don't see themselves in that big long list, start to question, you know, like, I don't see myself there, so I don't know who you are anymore.

Yep. So those are some of the challenges that I think I walked into. Um, I think the, the goal was to simplify all that to say, we gotta be one thing.

Um, we've gotta think about it. We've gotta go back to why we made decisions in the first place. That's how we got back to putting data at the center.

Um, we have to remember, it isn't just about the place, right? Where data lives, it's, we've done a whole lot of other things that are super important to our brand. On top is, is absolutely critical as, um, software for how we manage and do data management in the, in the cloud and on-prem.

So we, we weren't paying enough attention to that. Um, so I, I think it was about how do we talk about those things really realistically? And then how do we, how do we use those words to then tell a story that's compelling, right?

As I said, it wasn't just about where data lives, but how data moves and how it creates human possibility. Well, then that allows us to kind of go back into maybe not just talking about the cloud as some of those locations or data management as those of those locations, but maybe it's about our partner partnerships, our, our alliances, our sponsorships, um, all of those make our brand more relatable, make 'em more visible. And I think the last thing is, you know, we wanted to make it real, right?

So we wanted our customers to be able to feel this. One of my favorite videos we, we released at Insight, our user conference just a month ago was this, uh, European Space Agency video, and it's mm-hmm. It's, it's like, plays like an Oscar movie for me, because it's, they're talking about petabytes of data and the digital storage place of the universe, and, but they're still talking about, listen, I haven't lost a file.

I am, I am thinking about my data infrastructure, my intelligent data infrastructure every day, because I want to make, you know, astronauts and engineers. And I think what that really brings back to me is that we didn't wanna escape our legacy. We wanted to position it as a foundation of trust for customers like ESA who had been talking and using us for 20 years and had never had a problem.

So that history, I think that's what gave us the confidence to evolve and experiment with where the story was going and, and really lead this, this new chapter for us in a, in a bold way and in a really focused way. Again, coming back to the core, we're a data company and that's, that's why we talk this way. So reinvention, it's still ongoing, but I think we're in a much better place than we were two years ago when I took this on It.

Well, no, any, anybody who tells you that their reinvention is done is done. That's right. Stick.

Forget them. But, you know, you're talking about Cool. Uh, well, so I'm, I'm, you know, of my age, nothing's cooler than the space program, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's as cool as it gets for me. Yeah.

I went to that Kennedy, I live in Florida. I took the kids years, years ago to the, that's, yeah, awesome. I went to the Kennedy Space Center, they were bored.

I was in my glory. But anyway, but you have some other really great relationships that do up, we do you guys do some sports? Kind of, uh, we do relationships with the Niners and the Sharks, you know, west Coast stuff.

Look Super Bowl's coming to, uh, Levi Stadium in, in Santa Clara this year. Yeah. My team won't be there, but it's okay.

Um, but that's a really cool, another cool aspect of of doing marketing is you get to not just play with the astronauts and the European Space Agency, but sports leagues too. That, that pretty much sums up my world. Um, how, how, how does that message resonate to the techies out there and to the old line manufacturers and the, you know, the kind of the nuts and bolts, the, the block and tackle clients?

Yeah, right. You know, I, I think again, it's about telling that customer story and, and the, the reason that we partnered with the 49 ERs and with the NFL is because they're customers, right? There's no story there.

If you're not a customer, um, Aston Martin, uh, big F1 customer is, is actually a hundred percent on NetApp storage. So it, it was, it was compelling to us because these were customers who were doing phenomenal things. Let's just take the NFL and focus right there.

When they go in and create a moment inside a stadium for Monday night football, Thursday night football, Sunday night football, an international game, which we're a massive sponsor of, they turn that entire stadium as one of the NFL CIOs says into basically a chi, a gigantic data center, right? You've got data from your fans, you've got data from the, the television broadcasters. You've got data coming off of the sensors of the players.

You've got data on the sidelines. You've got calls to the data in the cloud on-prem. When you are able to tell that story, and when it's CIO to CIO or data storage specialist to data storage specialist or cloud specialist to cloud specialists, what they can do is they can see their issue inside of another story.

It's not us telling the story. It's us giving them an opportunity to see beyond their own and to make additional connections. And I think sports in and of itself provides such a global stage.

I mean, it's, it's the biggest Switzerland of, of all customers, right? Of all technical environments, because everybody somehow engages with sports. And, and I think that those things, a, allow us to, again, back to that evolving human experiences, whether you're a fan, whether you're an athlete, whether you're a student, whether you are an IT and doing the job, whether you are servicing somebody, we wanna make sure that our message is accessible to you, um, and that it is somehow making an impact to what you do daily.

Or maybe you get really inspired by it. Absolutely. I knew we were gonna, Debbie, I knew we were gonna run outta time, but I got one more question for you.

Okay. If you have a couple minutes. I do.

Okay. You know, everything we've spoken about at this point to this point has been about understanding what NetApp does. You know, understanding the supremacy of data, understanding ai, understanding technology.

But I think especially from a marketing person, we can never lose sight that it's about the human right. It, it's always about the human. We can't take the human out of this equation.

AI will never replace US machines. I don't think we'll replace us either. AI and machines, maybe.

I'm only kidding. You know, it's about the human. Yeah.

And so how do you, again, as a master marketing person, a, a chief marketing officer, how do you make sure we don't lose sight of keeping the human dimension, of keeping humanity involved, of, of putting the human in the middle, the human in the, in the chain, if you'll, Yeah. Yeah. You know what?

I just come back to what we were talking about up at the top. Data isn't just technical. It's, it's really, it's what we use to create possibility and, and fueling that humanity.

Um, you know, marketing as a chief market, chief marketing officer, whatever I am, I, my job is to unify my function for the company and to do as much as possible so that my stories, company stories, the stories of my partners and my customers, of my sponsors and my alliances, that all of those are able to kind of move together and demonstrate this ecosystem of possibility. And that's, and that's really, I think, um, the most important part of being human and having marketing to help technology become human and make data human. It's listening to what we do first.

And, and I'm really proud of intelligent data infrastructure because I think it does that it is specific without being, um, too, too specific. It's, uh, unique without being overly, um, unique. It's about how you interpret it.

And I think that once you create that foundation, then, then that opens up the door to human possibility, regardless of where your data is. Um, you know, NetApp is here to, to be a partner to you, to bring that forward and, and bring that, bring your possibility forward. I love it.

Gabe, thanks for being human and coming on here. Thank you for asking. I appreciate.

Well, what else can you be Anyway, but thank you. It's been our pleasure to have you on here. Gabie Boko, chief Marketing Officer at NetApp, I on Tech Drunk tv.

Hope you enjoy it on our pre-Thanksgiving show, and we will, uh, be right back with more. Thank you.