Core Insights - NetApp has been awarded the 2025 Americas Partner of the Year Software Development Company (SDC) Canada Award by Microsoft, recognizing its innovation and customer solutions using Microsoft technologies [1][2] - The award highlights NetApp's unique position as the only storage company natively embedded in Microsoft Azure as a first-party service, emphasizing the depth of collaboration between the two companies [2] - The recognition comes from a competitive pool of over 2,000 nominations, showcasing NetApp's outstanding solutions and services in the SDC category for the Canada region [2] Company Overview - NetApp has over three decades of experience in helping organizations navigate changes in enterprise storage and the intelligent era defined by data and AI [4] - The company's data platform serves as a unified, enterprise-grade foundation that connects, protects, and activates data across various environments, enhancing automation through AI [5][6] - The platform is designed to separate storage, services, and control, allowing enterprises to modernize faster and innovate without lock-in [6] Strategic Focus - NetApp aims to empower data-driven innovation by enabling mission-critical and AI workloads on a robust data foundation [8] - The company focuses on accelerating modernization on Azure, providing seamless services through its natively integrated enterprise file service [8] - Continuous innovation is a priority, with ongoing advancements in AI-optimized data services and Microsoft Fabric integrations to enhance productivity and insights [8] Collaboration with Microsoft - The long-standing collaboration between NetApp and Microsoft combines their strengths to deliver best-in-class solutions for mutual customers [3] - The partnership is geared towards helping customers modernize workloads at scale and architecting the foundation for the AI era [2][3] - The integration of services aims to provide organizations with the freedom to run any workload anywhere while ensuring consistent performance and governance [6]