NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the leader in cloud data services, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Spot, a leader in compute management and cost optimization on the public clouds, to establish leadership in Application Driven Infrastructure.

Digital transformation initiatives have accelerated and remain the top business priority, especially in today’s environment, and the public clouds offer the speed and flexibility needed to navigate this new normal as companies find to new ways to work, interact and do business. However, unoptimized clouds can be costly and slow down the business transformation. To address this challenge, an Application Driven Infrastructure translates the application’s workload patterns and drives the best possible level of performance and cost for storage and compute, all done while maintaining the contracted service-level agreement (SLA) and service-level objective (SLO). Together, NetApp and Spot’s Application Driven Infrastructure for continuous optimization will help customers save up to 90 percent of their compute and storage cloud expenses, which typically make up 70 percent of total cloud spending, and will help accelerate public cloud adoption.

“In today’s public clouds, speed is the new scale. However, waste in the public clouds driven by idle resources and overprovisioned resources is a significant and a growing customer problem slowing down more public cloud adoption,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager, Public Cloud Services, NetApp. “The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object and Spot’s compute platform will deliver a

We look forward to joining the NetApp family and building together the future of Application Driven Infrastructure and helping customers to deploy more workloads in the cloud

leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy. Optimized customers are happy customers and happy customers deploy more to the public clouds.”

Spot provides a combination of tools for visibility and automation, that drive continuous optimization of workloads in a single platform while maintaining both SLA and SLO. This relieves DevOps, CloudOps, and FinOps teams from the burden and complexity of managing, scaling, tuning and optimizing cloud resources so that they can focus on business innovation under acceptable budget controls.

“Spot was founded with a vision to revolutionize the way companies consume cloud infrastructure services, using analytics and automation to deliver the most reliable, best performing and most cost-efficient infrastructure for every workload on every cloud,” said Amiram Shachar, Founder and CEO, Spot. “We look forward to joining the NetApp family and building together the future of Application Driven Infrastructure and helping customers to deploy more workloads in the cloud.”

Together, NetApp and Spot will establish an Application Driven Infrastructure to enable customers to deploy more applications to public clouds faster with Spot’s “as-a-service" platform for the continuous optimization of both compute and storage for both traditional IT buyers with enterprise applications, cloud-native workloads and data lakes.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of NetApp’s fiscal year and is subject to the satisfaction of certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.