NetApp has appointed Cesar Cernuda as President of NetApp, reporting to CEO George Kurian, effective in July 2020. He will lead the company’s global go-to-market operations spanning sales, marketing, services, and support. Cernuda joins NetApp from Microsoft, where he was president of Microsoft Latin America and corporate vice president of Microsoft Corporation.
He brings with him extensive experience in leading business transformation, building diverse, high-performing teams, and driving a successful cloud business. In his role as president, Cernuda will continue to evolve the NetApp go-to-market strategy and organization to accelerate growth by transforming how we approach the changing customer landscape and capture new growth opportunities, particularly in cloud.
Today’s technologies and the rapid pace of digital innovation have created new opportunities for organizations to engage with and serve their customers. To capture these opportunities, NetApp’s marketing, sales, and services and support organizations will be combined under Cernuda to create an integrated, global go-to-market organization. Cernuda’s experience in leading global enterprise sales and transforming business will enable him to foster tighter alignment between the teams, helping NetApp to quickly capture new growth opportunities in enterprise storage systems and cloud data services.
“As we look to accelerate our cloud and software strategy, Cesar’s experience in successfully transforming large global organizations will strengthen NetApp’s position as a leader in cloud data services and drive value for our shareholders,” said George Kurian, chief executive officer. “I’m excited to welcome a leader of his caliber. I look forward to him bringing to the team his passion for strong results, his commitment to building diverse, high-performing teams, and his experience in business transformation as we continue to evolve our go-to-market strategy to reflect the changing customer landscape.”
“As the adoption of cloud and data services continues to grow in the EMEA region, NetApp is well positioned to help customers and partners navigate this digital transformation,” said Cernuda. “The key hyperscale public cloud vendors have bet on NetApp technology to support them with their customer offerings, and I believe this is one of the best examples of how NetApp has been transforming to become a cloud-first organization. I am thrilled with the opportunity to help and support customers and partners manage and protect one of their most important assets— their data.”
Before joining NetApp, Cernuda served as president of Microsoft Latin America and corporate vice president of Microsoft Corporation, where he was responsible for all of Microsoft’s products, services, and support offerings across Latin America, and for accelerating the company’s transformation for the mobile-first, cloud-first era.
Before that, Cernuda was president of Microsoft Asia Pacific, where he led the company’s commercial and consumer products and service and support offerings. He also served as the worldwide vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions sales and field operations. He oversaw the Microsoft ERP and CRM go-to-market business worldwide. Earlier, he was vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions International, where he was responsible for sales, presales, channel, marketing, product, support, and services.
Cernuda earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing from ESIC University in Spain and completed a management development program (PDD) from IESE Business School at the University of Navarra in Spain. In 2012, he completed the “Leadership for Senior Executives” program offered by Harvard Business School. Cernuda is an independent board member of GESTAMP, a multinational company that specializes in the design, development, and manufacture of highly engineered metal components for the automotive industry.
