So You Want To Be Successful In The Tech Industry?

NetApp’s vice president of sales tells you how.

- Lango Deen

Neil McGowan drives revenue with NetApp technologies into the top 50 headquarter accounts in the United States. These range from banks to life science companies to tech companies.

In so doing, he must facilitate transactions with companies that service their own needs, and at the same time, address the needs of NetApp, which created the world’s first networked storage appliance.

NetApp builds software and hardware, data storage, and data infrastructure systems that enable its customers to store, organize, access, retrieve, and share information. NetApp technology used by their customers and partners helps their businesses transform to meet the demands of B2B. Those demands include getting their applications and services to their customers through data centers onsite at the customer and in the cloud.

“These transactions are complicated and require everything from legal powers to accounting powers to financial powers to engineering technology powers,” McGowan said. “My role is to make sure I have a vantage understanding of the entire business that NetApp conducts and how different functions relate to each other and mean to transactions that I put into play.”

As a Silicon Valley veteran, McGowan says it is important for young and upwardly mobile professionals to understand the industry and not just the technical side of the business.