NetApp appoints Premalakshmi Ramakrishnan to lead India

NetApp has appointed Premalakshmi Ramakrishnan as Area Vice President for India and the SAARC region, strengthening its leadership in a market the company views as central to its growth plans.

Ramakrishnan will lead NetApp's overall sales strategy across India and neighbouring South Asian markets. She will focus on developing customer relationships and expanding the company's partner network in the region.

The appointment comes as demand for data infrastructure and artificial intelligence workloads continues to grow among enterprises in India. Global technology vendors have expanded local leadership teams as cloud adoption and digital transformation programmes advance across sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and public services.

Regional focus

NetApp positions itself as an intelligent data infrastructure specialist with a focus on data management across on-premises and cloud environments. The company has identified India as a priority geography within Asia Pacific as organisations increase investment in AI-ready infrastructure and modern storage architectures.

Andrew Sotiropoulos, Senior Vice President & General Manager, APAC at NetApp, said the new leadership appointment reflected the strategic importance of the market. "As one of the world's fastest-growing economies, India's dynamic digital landscape and increasing demand for advanced data infrastructure make it a critical focus for NetApp's expansion and innovation strategies. With Premalakshmi's deep expertise in these fields, along with her proven leadership, NetApp will be positioned to deliver the data advantage and business outcomes that our customers and partners seek in today's intelligent era," said Andrew Sotiropoulos, Senior Vice President & General Manager, APAC at NetApp. "We are excited to welcome Premalakshmi to NetApp and look forward to her driving growth and success across India and the SAARC region."

The SAARC region, which includes countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan, has seen rising investment in cloud-based services and data centres. Vendors are competing to secure enterprise workloads as regulatory frameworks around data protection and localisation evolve.

Leadership experience

Ramakrishnan has more than two decades of experience in the technology sector. Her background spans go-to-market planning, sales leadership and business transformation across global IT companies.

She joins NetApp from Oracle, where she served as Vice President and Head of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Business for India. In that role she oversaw cloud infrastructure sales and customer engagement in one of Oracle's key growth markets.

Before Oracle, Ramakrishnan held senior roles at Accenture, Cisco and Schneider Electric's APC business. Her experience covers consulting, networking, and energy management solutions, along with exposure to large enterprise and mid-market customer segments.

Ramakrishnan said organisations in India faced rising expectations around the impact of digital projects. "By 2027, Indian business executives will demand at least a 70% success rate from their digital transformation and GenAI initiatives[1]. Achieving this will require a robust data strategy and infrastructure capable of managing large-scale AI workloads and deployments," said Premalakshmi. "With NetApp's long-standing legacy and advancements in data management and services, I believe we can enable customers to unlock the full potential of data, scaling agility and driving sustained business growth."

Data and AI trends

Industry analysts expect spending on AI in India to grow faster than overall digital technology investment over the next several years. Enterprises are consolidating data across hybrid environments and reassessing storage and data management strategies as they pilot and roll out generative AI applications.

NetApp describes its data platform as a unified foundation that supports data across multiple clouds and workloads. The platform is built on the company's ONTAP data management software and operating system. It incorporates automation tools and an AI-focused engine for observability and policy-based controls.

The company says its architecture separates storage, services and control layers, which allows customers to scale infrastructure and adjust deployment models without vendor lock-in. It also highlights integrations with large public cloud providers, which enable customers to run applications in different environments with consistent performance, governance and protection policies.

Security and resilience remain central concerns as data volumes increase and cyber threats evolve. Vendors in the storage and data management market are developing tools for threat detection, backup, recovery and compliance as part of their platforms.

NetApp states that its approach aims to keep data ready for AI workloads, threat defence and future digital services. The company has worked with large enterprises globally over more than three decades, initially in networked storage and more recently in hybrid cloud and AI-related data infrastructure.

"With NetApp's long-standing legacy and advancements in data management and services, I believe we can enable customers to unlock the full potential of data, scaling agility and driving sustained business growth," said Ramakrishnan.