"The Advanced Technology Group is kind of NetApp's front line, a speculative execution on storage technologies, an idea factory if you will. We work on stuff that is beyond the immediate roadmap concerns for our product group and try to keep them informed of technology coming down the pipeline so that NetApp is ready for it when it gets to us." Past innovations included writing the first NFS version 4 server and client code, the Trident Storage Provisioner, early work on Persistent Memory, NVME and non-volatile DIMMs, and Active IQ. "It is a free-range academic kind of environment," said Klosterman. "We do have some product needs pushed on to us when product groups have more immediate needs." NetApp this week filed financial results for Q1 ended 31 July 2020 that showed a 5 per cent lift in revenues to $1.3bn but a dip in profit to $77m versus $103m a year earlier. ®