NetApp, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the NetApp first quarter of fiscal year 2026 earnings call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chris Newton, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. With me today are CEO George Kurian and CFO Wassam Javra. This call is being recorded live and will be available for replay on our website at NetApp.com. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements and projections with respect to our financial outlook and future prospects, including without limitation, our guidance for the second quarter and fiscal year 2026, our expectations regarding future revenue, profitability, and shareholder returns, and other growth initiatives and strategies. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to the documents we file from time to time with the FCC and on our website, including our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. We disclaim any obligation to update our forward-looking statements and projections. During the call, all financial measures presented will be non-GAAP unless otherwise indicated. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP estimates are available on our website. I'll now turn the call over to George.

Thanks, Chris. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We delivered a solid start to fiscal year 2026, achieving revenue of $1.56 billion above the midpoint of our guidance range. As anticipated, robust performance in the Americas enterprise offset year-over-year declines in U.S. public sector and EMEA. This success was fueled by strong demand for our all-flash offerings, first-party and marketplace cloud storage services, and AI solutions. By maintaining an unwavering focus on helping customers with their top priority, we are driving success in a dynamic market. While we continue to observe some macro-related spending caution, the emerging enterprise AI market is driving urgency among customers to modernize data infrastructure, advance cloud transformations, and bolster cyber resiliency. The data infrastructure demands of AI applications are complex and relentless, involving the need to unify, search, and organize Massive volumes of data scattered across multiple silos on premises and in the cloud. Legacy architectures are increasingly becoming bottlenecks, limiting the ability to scale and adapt to new requirements. Organizations are turning to NetApp for data solutions that deliver competitive advantage and operational efficiencies. Our unified data architecture, capable of handling any data type anywhere, empowers customers to break down silos, eliminate complexity, and accelerate their AI journeys. Customers seeking to build future-proof AI-ready infrastructure choose NetApp. In Q1, we secured a number of wins highlighting the unique benefits of our intelligent data infrastructure platform powered by ONTAP, as customers modernize their data infrastructure. For example, a leading global bank turned to NetApp to manage massive amounts of highly sensitive structured and unstructured data. The customer needed a centralized hybrid cloud data lake to be the foundational source for its AI initiatives with stringent requirements for cyber resiliency and data protection. Our ability to deliver a secure, high-performance, scalable platform with unified management, supporting all data types and spanning both cloud and on-premises environments made NAP the clear choice. In Q1, our all-flash-array revenue grew 6% year-over-year to $893 million, an annualized run rate of $3.6 billion. Exiting Q1, 45% of systems in our installed base under active support contracts are All-Flash. Healthy customer engagement and strong interest in our unified and block-optimized All-Flash storage portfolio have enabled us to display competitive All-Flash and hybrid Flash footprints. This strength propelled us to the number one position in the All-Flash array market for calendar Q1 2025 as reported by IDC. Let me share a couple of examples that highlight why customers are moving to NetApp. In Q1, an aerospace company selected us to replace a competitor's footprint. With ONTAP-based all-flash arrays, the customer gained cutting-edge security and performance for its defense initiatives with consistent data management across multiple data types and domains, streamlining operations, boosting productivity, and enhancing security data protection and resilience against cyber threats. Another example from Q1 is a UK-based financial services firm that replaced a competitor's storage infrastructure with our block-optimized all-flash array. The customer selected NetApp for our enterprise data management capabilities, which help them to secure, protect, and efficiently store sensitive client data. Our modern data infrastructure also help the customer achieve its sustainability requirements with better total cost of ownership through rack space consolidation and more efficient power and cooling. In Q1, we delivered enhancements to each of our first-party cloud storage services, increasing their value to customers and expanding our technology leadership. Our natively integrated services enable customers to discover, deploy, and manage storage seamlessly alongside other native services. This integration puts us in front of customers at the point of workload design, ties to hyperscaler committed spend, benefits from hyperscaler seller incentives, and reduces procurement and operational friction. In addition to a seamless customer experience, our cloud storage services deliver the performance, cost efficiency, data protection, cybersecurity, multi-protocol support, and hybrid multi-cloud capabilities of ONTAP. Our native integration and advantages over other cloud storage services are driving strong win rates in enterprise-critical workloads. Our highly differentiated first-party and marketplace cloud storage services continued to deliver rapid growth, increasing 33% from Q1 a year ago. In the first quarter, public cloud services again served as a strong engine for new customer acquisition. A leading energy company migrated from its on-premises VMware environment to VMware Cloud on AWS and FSX for NetApp ONTAP. After experiencing ONTAP's rich feature set, this first-time NetApp customer decided to expand its use of FSxN for AI and other workloads. A global technology provider migrated from a competitor's on-premises environment to NetApp block storage in the cloud for its database environment. The customer chose NetApp for our ability to seamlessly move data across multiple clouds, as well as our robust data protection capabilities. NetApp helped enhance the customer's data security, disaster recovery posture, and operational efficiency. We are already in discussions to expand their usage of our cloud services into new areas. Just as we've empowered enterprises to harness public and hybrid cloud environments, we are now helping them achieve faster time to value in their AI journeys. Enterprises are beginning to explore and deploy inferencing workloads, shifting demand from proof of concept to transformational initiatives, which require comprehensive analysis of datasets across the enterprise. Achieving business outcomes from AI investments is our customers' and our priority. Unlike training environments, successful enterprise AI deployments require more than just performance and scale. They demand unified data management, enterprise-grade data protection, production-scale reliability, hybrid multi-cloud integration, and the ability to consolidate data without compromising privacy or security. Our AI solutions are designed to truly unify enterprise data, delivering outstanding performance and scale, while also seamlessly meeting all these critical requirements. This positions us exceptionally well to address the evolving needs of our customers. In Q1, we closed approximately 125 AI infrastructure and data lake modernization deals across various geographies industries, and use cases. We further expanded our AI ecosystem in Q1. We introduced the AI pod mini with Intel to address the cost and complexity of deploying AI at the department and team level. Additionally, we completed the NetApp reference architecture for NVIDIA cloud partners, providing ultra-high performance with the richness of NetApp's hyperscale-approved data management. This collaboration allows AI service providers to deliver scalable, high-performance, enterprise-grade data services by combining ONTAP's advanced data management with NVIDIA's computer networking platform, delivering consistent governance, multi-tenancy, and security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Our conversations with customers about AI infrastructure have intensified, with organizations recognizing the critical role that data plays. Notable AI wins in Q1 included a leading automaker that chose NetApp to efficiently manage the massive data volumes essential for training advanced AI models and for building an autonomous vehicle software stack. NetApp's data governance, security, and auto-tearing capabilities were key factors in this customer, selecting us as the data infrastructure for their NVIDIA SuperPOD deployment. Another example showcases our capabilities for service providers. A large sovereign cloud provider selected NetApp for their AI as a service platform to support large LLM providers and AI development companies. Critical factors in this win included our certification with NVIDIA Cloud Partners, confirming compatibility and performance for AI workloads, and our secure multi-tenancy, delivering storage and data isolation with assured high-performance SLAs for each tenant in a shared environment. Looking ahead, we remain committed to executing our innovation roadmap and are building on a position of strength. We've taken the number one position in the all-flash market by helping customers modernize with cutting-edge data infrastructure and industry-leading cyber resilience for storage. Our highly differentiated cloud services enable hybrid and multi-cloud transformations, and we are well-positioned and growing in the emerging area of enterprise AI. I'm excited about the advantages we bring to customers in these critical areas. Our commitment to delivering customer value with the industry's best products and cloud services is unwavering. Our focus strategy is delivering shared gains, and our teams are energized and executing the discipline. I hope to see you all this October at our NetApp Insight Customer Conference, where we will unveil more pioneering innovation for the era of data and intelligence. I'll now turn it over to Vasant.