memory & storage · Industry Index 11 (rank #110) ·
price: as of 2026-10-29 index: as of 2026-10-29 fundamentals: latest filing 2026-09-02 Reports quarterly (10-Q XBRL)
U.S. enterprise data-storage company built on its ONTAP software, delivered on-premises and as first-party services in Azure and AWS.
Industry exposure 0.4 (Hyperscaler first-party cloud services and AI data-infrastructure demand drive a meaningful minority of NetApp's storage revenue.)
Delayed, end-of-day, aggregate per contract — not a live tape or trade-level flow. Buy/sell side is INFERRED from where each contract's last print sat in the bid/ask spread, not observed order flow. The company-wide side is withheld unless quoted contracts cover at least a quarter of the day's premium, so it can be blank while individual contracts below show a side. Call/put premium is measured across the chain we capture — the 6 nearest expiries within 45 days, not the full option chain — while the table below lists at most 20 flagged contracts, so summing those rows will not reproduce the percentage.
Why flagged:Consumer Price Index today
| Date | Contract | Score | Side (inferred)? | OI Δ? | Volume | Vol/OI | Flags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-16 | $170 CALL | 41 | — | 0 | 230 | 230.0× | |
| 2026-10-16 | $155 CALL | 25 | — | 0 | 80 | 80.0× | |
| 2026-10-16 | $145 CALL | 24 | — | 0 | 70 | 7.0× | |
| 2026-10-15 | $175 CALL | 45 | — | 0 | 840 | 420.0× | |
| 2026-10-15 | $170 CALL | 30 | — | 0 | 230 | 230.0× | |
| 2026-10-15 | $155 CALL | 25 | — | 0 | 80 | 80.0× | |
| 2026-10-15 | $145 CALL | 24 | — | 0 | 70 | 7.0× | |
| 2026-10-14 | $175 CALL | 33 | — | 0 | 840 | 420.0× | |
| 2026-10-14 | $170 CALL | 30 | — | 0 | 230 | 230.0× | |
| 2026-10-14 | $155 CALL | 25 | — | 0 | 80 | 80.0× | |
| 2026-10-14 | $145 CALL | 24 | — | 0 | 70 | 7.0× |
9 smaller flags (under $100000 premium) hidden.
latest session: 0.4× its 13-day baseline
50% calls / 50% puts (by premium)
Price momentum carried this call — it supplied almost the entire lean; the other voters nearly net out.
Most voters leaned one way; structural dissented. Directional agreement 0.41.
A clear bullish score; conviction 0.25 reflects how strongly the agents agree. Conviction is confidence, not a probability of the move.
NetApp sells storage hardware but the asset is ONTAP, the data-management software that has run its arrays for over three decades and now also runs inside the three largest public clouds as a first-party service. The FY2026 10-K organises the company into two segments, Hybrid Cloud (AFF and ASA all-flash arrays, AFX for AI workloads, FAS hybrid-flash, E/EF-Series, StorageGRID object storage) and Public Cloud (Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Cloud Volumes ONTAP), and states that both rest on the same ONTAP software. That is the whole argument: an enterprise that has standardised its snapshots, replication and multiprotocol access on ONTAP carries those habits with it when it moves workloads to a hyperscaler, and NetApp is paid on both sides of the move. The evidence that the lock has commercial value is the margin's steadiness: across the three years the FY2026 10-K reports, gross margin sat at 70.7%, 70.2% and 70.7% of revenue ($4,433M on $6,268M, $4,613M on $6,572M, $4,899M on $6,925M) while revenue grew, and the filing's own percentage-of-revenue table shows no mix shift doing that work - product and services held near 46% and 54% of revenue throughout. The limits are equally in the filing. NetApp is second, not first: IDC's 1Q26 tracker puts it behind Dell in external enterprise storage, and the 10-K's competition section concedes that cloud providers are simultaneously partners and rivals, that consumption models "may reduce overall demand for our traditional on-premises offerings sold through a capital expenditure (capex) model", and that alternative architectures "may reduce or eliminate demand for some of our offerings". Component exposure is real too: the filing discloses "inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins", and names NAND among the components whose supply can tighten. This is a durable second place built on software stickiness, not a structural monopoly.
Rating: narrow
The FY2026 10-K shows a real, durable lock but not an unassailable one. On the durable side: "Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings", and the same filing's income statement shows the company holding a gross margin near 71% across all three reported years - $4,433M on $6,268M in FY2024, $4,613M on $6,572M in FY2025 and $4,899M on $6,925M in FY2026 - while revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M and income from operations widened from 19% to 24% of net revenues. Holding that margin through the memory-cost shock the same filing discloses is the commercial evidence the lock is worth something. On the limiting side, the filing says competition "is intense", that in public cloud "customers may choose native cloud services that are consumed as operating expenses", and that "New competitors or alliances among existing competitors could emerge and quickly gain significant market share" - and IDC's 1Q26 external-storage tracker (Blocks & Files, 2026-06-16, cited on the AFF/ASA product row below) ranks NetApp second behind Dell, not first.
Type: switching costs
The FY2026 10-K makes the source of the advantage explicit and it is the cost of leaving the data-management layer, not a network or a patent estate. The same ONTAP software runs the on-premises arrays and the cloud services ("Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings"), and the AFF family "allows customers to connect to clouds for more data services, data tiering, caching, and disaster recovery". A customer's volume layout, snapshot and replication workflow and operating tools therefore carry from the array into Azure, AWS and Google rather than being abandoned at the cloud boundary — the filing describes NetApp as "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers", so the usual moment of escape is instead the moment the relationship renews.
Leadership: co leader
IDC's 1Q26 external enterprise storage systems tracker, as reported by Blocks & Files on 2026-06-16 (cited in full on the AFF/ASA product row below), ranks NetApp second worldwide behind Dell and ahead of Everpure, Huawei and HPE, attributing the placing to "its growing all-flash business and cloud-integrated data management". Second of five ranked vendors, in a market whose leader is someone else, is a shared front rank rather than an owned one - and the distinct claim NetApp makes in the FY2026 10-K is positional rather than volumetric: being "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers".
Pricing power: moderate
It holds price rather than raising it. On the figures filed with the FY2026 10-K, gross margin was 70.7% of revenue in FY2024 ($4,433M on $6,268M), 70.2% in FY2025 ($4,613M on $6,572M) and 70.7% in FY2026 ($4,899M on $6,925M) - flat across three years in which revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M - and it held that level while absorbing a component-cost shock. It is no stronger than that because the filing's own risk factor lists "competitive pricing, customer price sensitivity" and "pricing and discounting pressures" among the drivers of gross margin, and discloses that the company "experienced inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins" - a cost shock it is absorbing rather than fully passing on.
Curated moat judgment grounded in the cited source. source: sec.gov
Layer: memory & storage
NetApp sits between the memory supply and the enterprise data centre. Upstream, the FY2026 10-K says "Third-party component costs make up a significant portion of our product costs" and singles out NAND as hard to manage "if supplies of certain components, including NAND, become limited relative to demand". Downstream, the hyperscalers are channel, partner and rival at once: the filing states "We both partner with and compete against cloud service providers through our cloud-based software and services offerings", while Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes are delivered as those clouds' own natively embedded services. Distribution is a mix of direct sales and "an ecosystem of partners, including the leading cloud providers".
Derived from this company's mapped supply-chain edges and its industry layer.
The moat prior voted +0.13 on the long (~6-month) horizon at weight 0.20 — the swarm call there is neutral (score 0.32, conviction 16).
Editorial prior — subjective, not backtested. It is bounded (±0.6), low-confidence, and never votes on short/medium. See exactly how it voted →
Products & services with an editorial market-share band and technical barrier band — qualitative judgments tied to a cited basis, never invented figures.
| Product | Market share | Technical barrier |
|---|---|---|
| AFF and ASA all-flash storage arrays · On-premises all-flash enterprise storage ONTAP-powered scale-out arrays: AFF A-Series and C-Series for unified file/block workloads, ASA A-Series and C-Series optimised for SAN, all with cloud tiering, caching and disaster recovery back into NetApp's cloud services. | Top 3 IDC's 1Q26 external enterprise storage systems tracker, as reported here, ranked NetApp second worldwide behind Dell and ahead of Everpure, Huawei and HPE, and the report attributes that second place to NetApp's "growing all-flash business and cloud-integrated data management" — a front-rank position in the array market, but not the top one. | Moderate Four other vendors are ranked in the same tracker and the market grew 22.7% year over year in the quarter, which pulls entrants in rather than keeping them out; what protects the line is the ONTAP software the arrays run rather than the flash hardware itself, and NetApp's own FY2026 10-K calls competition in these markets intense. |
| Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP · First-party cloud file storage (AWS) AWS-operated shared file storage built on ONTAP, reachable from Linux, Windows and macOS instances over NFS, SMB, iSCSI and NVMe, with automatic tiering to lower-cost capacity pool storage. | Leader AWS's own service documentation presents it as "a fully managed service that provides highly reliable, scalable, high-performing, and feature-rich file storage built on NetApp's popular ONTAP file system", combining NetApp's capabilities "with the agility, scalability, and simplicity of a fully managed AWS service" — NetApp holds the ONTAP position inside AWS's own managed-file lineup rather than selling against it. | Deep The documentation lists NetApp-specific features AWS operates on NetApp's behalf — SnapMirror replication, FlexCache on-premises caching, and management through "NetApp ONTAP CLI, REST API, and NetApp Console" alongside the AWS console and SDKs. AWS also names the on-premises ONTAP estate as the entry path ("For customers who use NetApp ONTAP on-premises, FSx for ONTAP is an ideal solution to migrate, back up, or burst your file-based applications from on-premises to AWS without the need to change your application code"), so the barrier is the customer's existing ONTAP practice, which no competitor can substitute into. |
| Azure NetApp Files · First-party cloud file storage (Microsoft Azure) Enterprise file storage delivered inside Azure as a Microsoft-operated service, running ONTAP on bare metal in Azure regions and serving SMB, NFS, dual-protocol and S3-style object REST clients. | Leader Microsoft's own product documentation describes it as "an Azure native, first-party, enterprise-class, high-performance file storage service" with "Native Azure integration" across "the Azure portal, REST, CLI, billing, monitoring, and security" and "Azure native billing" — NetApp occupies the first-party enterprise-file slot inside Azure itself rather than competing for it from outside the platform. | Deep The same documentation says the service runs on "a fault-tolerant bare-metal fleet powered by ONTAP" and carries its own Microsoft high-availability SLA with automatic failover. A rival would need Microsoft to build, operate and underwrite an equivalent fleet inside Azure, which is a far higher bar than shipping a competing appliance. |
| NetApp AFX and AI Data Engine · AI data infrastructure Disaggregated scale-out ONTAP storage for AI-powered enterprises, paired with the AI Data Engine software that handles data discovery, curation, policy guardrails and real-time vectorization for RAG and agentic AI pipelines. | Challenger The FY2026 10-K introduces AFX as a new line and describes the surrounding market as newly contested: "The emergence of artificial intelligence workloads has introduced additional competitive dynamics, particularly in areas related to data readiness, performance, scalability, and integration with compute and cloud ecosystems. In these markets, competition includes both established infrastructure vendors and newer entrants focused on AI-oriented use cases and architectures." NetApp claims no established position here, only entry. | Moderate What it carries in is ONTAP — AFX is "built on ONTAP, benefiting from over three decades of world-class software and hardware engineering with enterprise-proven data management and security" — plus "validated reference architectures with partners like NVIDIA". What it cannot fence off is architecture: the same filing warns of "competition from alternative architectures or approaches that may reduce or eliminate demand for some of our offerings", and AI storage is exactly where those alternatives are appearing. |
| NetApp Keystone · Storage-as-a-Service Subscription storage-as-a-service that delivers the NetApp portfolio as a flexible on-premises and cloud service under a unified console for provisioning, monitoring and spend management. | Challenger The FY2026 10-K describes Keystone as one of several evolving consumption models rather than an established position, and flags the commercial risk directly: "As these business models continue to evolve, we may face challenges in competing effectively, generating significant revenues, or maintaining the profitability of our consumption-based offerings." A company does not write that about a line it leads. | Moderate Keystone is a commercial wrapper over the same ONTAP portfolio, so it inherits that stickiness, but the filing warns the model can cannibalise rather than defend: "the growing prevalence of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery models offered by us and our competitors may reduce overall demand for our traditional on-premises offerings sold through a capital expenditure (capex) model". |
| NetApp StorageGRID · Object storage Scalable object storage for large archives, media repositories and web data stores, sold both as a NetApp-branded appliance and as software on third-party hardware. | Niche The FY2026 10-K gives StorageGRID a single paragraph against the multi-page ONTAP portfolio and positions it for "large archives, media repositories, and web data stores" — a defined workload rather than the company's centre of gravity. The same filing notes that in public cloud "customers may choose native cloud services that are consumed as operating expenses", which is the direct substitute for object capacity. | Low By design it speaks "industry-standard object APIs like the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)" and is offered "as a software-defined solution on third-party hardware". Standard interfaces and commodity hardware are what make it adoptable, and they are also what make the data portable away again — there is no ONTAP-style workflow lock holding the customer. |
These charts plot NetApp's reported income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet from its SEC filings through 2026-09-02. Every figure is as-filed XBRL — none of it is an estimate.
Over the reported window, net income at $1.3B in FY2026.
Analyst consensus — third-party estimates from Yahoo Finance, as of 2026-10-26. Not SEC filings and not a TradingPilot forecast. source: finance.yahoo.com
| Period | EPS (est.) | Revenue (est.) | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q/E Oct 2026 | USD 2.60 (USD 2.47–USD 2.72) · 18 | USD 2.1B (USD 2.1B–USD 2.2B) · 16 | +23% |
| FY 2027 | USD 10.01 (USD 9.84–USD 11.00) · 19 | USD 8.2B (USD 8.1B–USD 8.6B) · 17 | +18% |
Each figure shows the consensus mean, its (low–high) range where available, and · the number of analysts behind that estimate.
Next report ~2026-12-01.
Our model leans Bullish on the stock over the medium horizon — a market-direction call, not an earnings forecast. See the Signal tab.
Comparing against peers…
| Institution | Shares | Value | Δ shares QoQ | % of 13F | % shares out |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BlackRock Passive / index | 18,901,321 | $2.9B | -1,006,506 | 0.0% | 9.62% |
| State Street Passive / index | 9,921,533 | $1.5B | -101,940 | 0.0% | 5.05% |
| FMR (Fidelity) Passive / index | 758,897 | $117.4M | -525,321 | 0.0% | 0.39% |
| Renaissance Technologies Guru | 122,832 | $19.0M | 122,832 | 0.0% | 0.06% |
| Bridgewater Associates (Ray Dalio (founder)) Guru | 19,260 | $3.0M | -92,231 | 0.0% | 0.01% |
TradingPilot-computed columns (% of 13F, % shares out) are derived from as-filed 13F values; only name, shares and value are as-filed.
SEC EDGAR (8-K Exhibit 99.1) · 2026-09-02 · earnings
NetApp reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 results: record quarterly net revenues of $2.03 billion, up 30% year over year; GAAP EPS of $1.88 and record non-GAAP EPS of $2.58; and significantly raised fiscal 2027 revenue and EPS guidance. Figures quoted from the company's 8-K exhibit.
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · How AI Coverage At NetApp (NTAP) Has Changed Its Investment Story
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · NetApp (NTAP) Exceeds Market Returns: Some Facts to Consider
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · What Did NetApp Do That HP Did Not?
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · Earnings Preview: What to Expect From NetApp’s Report
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: HPE · NetApp Pricing Gains: Can Higher Prices Support Revenue Growth?
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · Would You Have Held NetApp Stock All The Way Up?
2026-10-27 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · NetApp (NTAP) stock is up, what you need to know
2026-10-20 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · NetApp (NTAP) Rises Higher Than Market: Key Facts
2026-10-14 Yahoo Finance: NTAP · NetApp (NTAP) Registers a Bigger Fall Than the Market: Important Facts to Note
2026-10-13 Yahoo Finance: SAP · Is NetApp’s (NTAP) AI-Optimized Storage Push Quietly Redefining Its Role in Enterprise Data Infrastructure?
2026-10-13 Yahoo Finance: SMCI · NetApp (NTAP) Deepens Its Push Into Enterprise AI Infrastructure
2026-10-13 Yahoo Finance: P · Will NetApp's Strong Balance Sheet Support Its AI Expansion Strategy?
2026-10-13 Business Wire AI · Arrow Electronics recognized as NetApp North America Distributor of the Year for 2026
2026-10-13 Yahoo Finance: LNVGY · Are Computer and Technology Stocks Lagging NetApp (NTAP) This Year?
2026-10-08 Yahoo Finance: STX · NetApp Up 147% in the Past 6 Months: Time to Buy the Stock?
2026-10-08 Yahoo Finance: SMCI · NetApp (NTAP) Wins An Analyst Upgrade, Is It 19% Overvalued?
2026-10-06 Yahoo Finance: SMCI · NetApp Teams With Diskover Data to Unlock Data Value
2026-10-05 Yahoo Finance: HPE · Zacks Investment Ideas feature highlights: Hewlett, PBF Energy and NetApp
2026-10-05 Yahoo Finance: SMCI · NetApp (NTAP) Moves 5.2% Higher: Will This Strength Last?
2026-10-03 Yahoo Finance: SMCI · Why Is NetApp (NTAP) Stock Rocketing Higher Today
Impact = company-prominence tier (High/Medium auto-assigned by graph centrality/size; Low only on curated minor events), not a magnitude forecast.
| Date | Type | Event | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-12-02 | earnings | NetApp earnings (estimated) — Date not yet announced — estimated from EDGAR filing cadence (last periodic filing + 91/365 days); confirm via IR. estimated | Medium |
| Date | Event | Impact | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-02 | NetApp earnings confirmed | Medium | EPS beat · +2.6% |
| 2026-05-28 | NetApp earnings confirmed | Medium | EPS beat · +22.4% |
